Markus Asper
As a concept, explicit knowledge emerged by contrast, when Polanyi discovered and described what he called “tacit knowing”.1 At least since the Socratic question whether something is didakton (teachable), and thus explicable, explicit knowledge tends to be over-privileged in philosophical, sociological, and historical discourse. Therefore, Polanyi’s shift towards implicit forms of knowledge had a great deal of attraction. Nonetheless, it might be incautious to take for granted the very explicitness of explicit knowledge or the forms it can assume. Storing and transmitting knowledge is a challenge for all societies, ancient or modern, but they have found different ways to deal with it. This article will present an outline of the fields and forms of explicit knowledge in Greek literature, as having a specific context in place and time.
Mycenaean court administration had, by the twelfth century BCE, developed effective means of storing data in writing, as the extant corpus of Linear-B texts shows.2 Beyond these collections of mere numbers, places and personal names, however, explicit knowledge does not appear anywhere in these texts. The earliest extant didactic poems, by Hesiod, belong in the eighth century. Therefore, as is the case with epic, we need to assume an oral prehistory for didactic poetry. Since both epic and most of didactic poetry are hexametric, the two genres might have had considerable overlap, certainly with respect to language, to some extent also with regard to content (a ps.-Hesiodic poem, The Shield of Heracles, and fragments of a Hesiodic song about seers, the Melampodia, bridge the two genres). Naturally, the genre’s emergence is impossible to determine with respect to time and place; in its Hesiodic form it shows a mixture of epichoric and diachronic linguistic varieties similar to Homeric epic. Hesiod himself is associated with Euboea and Boeotia. Formally, this genre of didactic poetry is exclusively Greek, but it must have, in its earlier stages of development, just as mainstream Greek culture of the time, been open to acculturation from the East, which is proven by a great number of parallels, especially with the moral teachings of so-called wisdom literature.3
The two didactic poems by Hesiod, the Theogony and the Works and Days, present knowledge as answering to the two most fundamental questions: “Where do we come from/Where do we belong?” and “What do we have to do, and why?” The first is addressed by way of genealogy and in a continuous basic narrative, the second by assorted advice, arranged according to a rather loose structure and fitted into a pseudo-biographical frame. Both modes are flexible enough to assimilate short narrative digressions (e.g. the myth of Prometheus in Theogony or of the five ages in Works).
The genealogical mode starts with cosmology, understood as procreation of somehow anthropomorphic entities (Chaos brings forth Night, Night gives birth to Day, etc.), proceeds in time, and ends with the heroic ancestors of Hesiod’s audience. Hesiod covered this stretch with his Theogony, which ends with the just reign of Zeus established and defended, carried forth by his poems on the genealogies of heroes, arranged according to their female ancestors (thus titled “Catalogue of Women”). The poet, just like the poet of heroic epic, relies on the Muses as daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (personified memory) who guarantee that his knowledge is authoritative. Not least due to its stringent narrative structure, the genealogical mode provides the basic framework for cosmology for a long time to come.4
The advisory mode’s paradigm is Hesiod’s Works and Days, motivated by a biographical setting: when Hesiod and his brother Perses went to court over their father’s inheritance, Perses bribed the judges and therefore got the better part. With his didactic poem, Hesiod wants to show both him and the judges what is right. Just like Near Eastern parallels,5 the advisory mode provides merely a unifying perspective that can bring together rather heterogeneous forms of explicit knowledge such as aetiological myth (the myth of the ages), fable (the fable of the hawk and the nightingale), moral exhortation and advice on agriculture (what to do when). Far from being a dry list of agricultural knowledge, Hesiod’s Works and Days attempts to sketch out a mortal world, as opposed to Zeus’s reign as it was depicted in the Theogony. Taken together, both didactic poems ambitiously give a diptych-like outline of the whole cosmos (Clay 2003).
Similar to Homeric epic, Hesiodic didactic poetry is, to us, the tip of an iceberg of lost didactic texts. There was more wisdom poetry (attested is a ps.-Hesiodic Counsel of Cheiron), and perhaps star lore (Astronomia). Early sages such as Thales and Pythagoras, although they, according to some, intentionally avoided committing anything to writing, were nonetheless credited with didactic–poetic texts, probably spurious. There must have been several Orphic theogonies, the scarce remaining fragments of which point to a post-Hesiodic date (e.g., a remarkable parody in Aristophanes’ Birds).6 For mnemonic reasons, geographical knowledge might have led to early poetic periplus texts, perhaps iambic, which described nautical routes by providing lists of what the traveler would have seen on the shore, augmented by information about harbors, distances, etc. These texts are attested from the sixth century onwards (Scylax of Caryanda, Hanno the Carthaginian),7 but it seems that the geographical concept of text organization is already implicit in the Iliadic catalogue of ships.
Didactic poetry did not vanish with the rise of prose in the sixth century. Some of the Presocratic philosophers preferred didactic poetry well until the latter part of the fifth century (Parmenides, Empedocles, see Section 2.2 “Philosophy”). Not only did poetry come with a certain built-in authority, granted by supernatural sources of inspiration: one could also perform it to a big audience, presumably in public competitions, and it was much easier to commit to memory. The latter features must have been advantageous in a culture which had no institutionalized book-trade. Even when that had happened, early Hellenistic culture developed a sort of second-grade didactic poetry (Aratus, Nicander; see Section 2.3 “Hellenistic and later Didactic Poetry”) of which late Republican Roman poets and audiences were so fond that Roman didactic poetry (Lucretius, Vergil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses) referred to these Hellenistic poems as their starting-points, not to Hesiod. In pharmacology, iambic didactic poems were, for purely practical reasons, still written in the first century CE (see Section 2.3).
In Greek oral society, there was, beside the two obvious options of didactic poetry composed and performed by professionals and oral instruction of varying forms (apprenticeship), a third way of transmitting explicit knowledge: short prescriptions of a traditional, proverb-like status, such as “Know thyself!” or gnomic statements such as “The middle is best.” Such pre-theoretic traditional lore was ascribed to a group of half-fictitious men in seventh-century Greece, the so-called “Seven Sages,” although both the group and the body of sayings ascribed to it are probably younger than at least the core of the sayings transmitted.8 Somehow affiliated are traditions of fable, that is, sketches that lead up to prescriptive statements, a sort of popular “ethics,” which goes under the name of Aesop (Kurke 2011, esp. 241–4). Apart from such ethical lore, prose becomes visible to us at first in contexts of monumental writing, most notably of law and dedication (Asper 2007a , 75–84). When visualization comes into play, prose is without alternative. With some probability, there must have been a form of more or less ephemeral prose in connection with explicit technical knowledge, especially when numbers and diagrams were concerned, that is, in early large-scale architecture. Probably, the earliest attested literary prose (Pherecydes of Syrus, Anaximander, and Hecataeus of Miletus) emerges around 500 BCE together with schematized visualizations of space, that is, maps and models. Another genre that depends on prose as its vehicle is the commentary, attested in Greek literature since at least the late fourth century by the famous specimen of a philosophical commentary to an Orphic cosmogony (the so-called Derveni Papyrus).9 During the fifth century, new forms of knowledge-transmitting prose develop rapidly: by the end of the century at the latest, expert knowledge has developed specific forms of prose writing in almost all fields, most significantly in medicine and mathematics.
Large bodies of explicit knowledge need material and conventional forms of storage and retrieval (see on this also Fögen, ch. 17 in this volume). Such textual conventions emerge in expert cultures, often in contexts of professional knowledge transfer.10 Didactic poetry, while traditionally apt for some fields of knowledge,11 did not provide convenient structures for others. Between c. 500 and 400 BCE, some expert cultures in Greece, e.g. medicine and mathematics, proceeded from oral instruction and, perhaps, live performance, to written accounts of explicit knowledge. Two hundred years later, by 200 BCE, this is true for nearly all expert cultures, professional or not. Across the range of knowledge concerned, the unifying feature of these accounts is “systematicity,” i.e., a desire to identify conceptual structures and patterns in the body of knowledge concerned and to use these patterns in order to provide texts that formally mirror the knowledge which they are meant to convey. Lacking ancient terms that cover the whole range of these texts, one might call them simply “systematic treatises.”12 (In what follows I concentrate first on medicine, mathematics, and the so-called sophists. Philosophy will be discussed below.)
Since the earliest times, medical experts were visible in Greek intellectual culture (cf. Machaon in the Iliad and Odyssey 4.228–32 on experts).13 In medicine, the number of extant fifth- and fourth-century texts is highest, traditionally associated with Hippocrates of Cos and a medical institution on that island. The so-called Hippocratic Corpus contains about 50 texts of varying length, covering almost every aspect of ancient medicine. Some of them contain textual conventions that are even older, especially in what is called “nosology” (e.g., De morbis II, De mulierum affectibus). At this earlier, pre-Hippocratic, stage medical writing apparently consisted of long lists of standardized paragraphs, collecting, e.g., diseases or recipes. In the most famous of the later fifth-century Hippocratic texts (such as De morbo sacro, De aere aquis et locis, On Ancient Medicine, and Epidemics I and III) explicit knowledge comes as description of medical phenomena along the lines of traditional patterns (e.g., de capite ad calcem, case histories), speculative explanation of these phenomena, and polemics against competing individuals, schools, or even fields. Throughout these texts, authors are more interested in understanding the phenomena discussed than in how to treat them. Those texts that are written with a perspective on theory, such as the case histories in Epidemics, do not even mention a treating authority at all. Where the focus of the text is explanation, it often assumes a deductive form, that is, observed data is explained by speculative derivation from assumedly self-evident assumptions, such as the axiomatically constructed four elements “wet, dry, cold, hot” or the four humors. As theorists of nature (physis), medical theorists both adopted the theories of Presocratic speculation and contributed to it (e.g. the Pythagorean physicist Alcmaeon of Croton). That there were more such medical systems than we know of, is guaranteed by doxographical accounts of medical theories otherwise lost (e.g. in the Anonymus Londiniensis). Among the many different forms medical writing can assume (van der Eijk 1997), perhaps most remarkable is the so-called epideixis, a personal, often polemical, essay, apparently publicly delivered, that argues in the face of strong opponents for a daring thesis. That is, the epideixis is the foremost textual vehicle of competition. This format, typical examples of which are De morbo sacro or De flatibus, is very close to sophistic practice, and possibly points to an overlap of the two fields. Since Hippocratic medicine became canonical early on, probably in Hellenistic times, its basic assumptions and procedures (humoral pathology, speculative deductive explanation, a focus on anatomy, a personal, competitive voice, strong polemics) became the hallmark of Greek “rational” medicine until Roman imperial times, most notably in the huge oeuvre of Galen (second century CE) who managed, by the overwhelming quantity, explanative quality, and range of his production, to eclipse almost all medical writing before and after himself except for “Hippocrates” and late antique digests of earlier medical literature (see Dubischar, ch. 28 in this volume). Galen was read and used in universities in Europe until the nineteenth century, which explains why Greek “rational” medicine exerted such a strong influence upon modern medical and scientific method and discourse.
Besides “rational medicine,” the Greek invention that most heavily influenced modern presentation of explicit knowledge is Greek axiomatic mathematics, which soon became the hallmark of theoretical rigor. Greek theoretical mathematics presents theorems in propositional form, which are then proven by deduction from axiomatic truths and definitions. Euclid’s Elements and Archimedes’ treatises, both dating from the early third century BCE, provide paradigms of the genre (in Euclid’s work, earlier mathematics is somehow digested). Mathematical argument in this vein proceeds in thoroughly standardized forms of terminology, syntax, and even proof-structure. Unlike most other forms of Greek theoretical discourse, mathematical text is completely impersonal (apart from the occasional introductory letter). Thus, mathematical argument stands out in comparison to mathematical traditions of other cultures. Nonetheless, it must have emerged from a background of practitioners’ knowledge by the end of the fifth century BCE (Asper 2009). Traditionally, the emergence is ascribed to foundational figures such as Thales of Miletus (c. 580 BCE) or Pythagoras of Samos (c. 530 BCE), to both of whom late antique mathematical doxographers such as Proclus and Eutocius assign the discovery of important theorems. Recently, historians of mathematics have been more reserved (e.g., Netz 1999, 272–4). The earliest person to whom we can attach the production of such texts with some certainty is Hippocrates of Chios (c. 420 BCE), who, first among many others, tried to solve the problem of how to “square” the circle, probably in Athens.14 The pre-Euclidean history of the discourse is difficult to reconstruct; at least, Eudemus of Rhodes’ History of Geometry, which treated the field down to his own time, the late fourth century BCE, in Peripatetic manner, survives in abridgements (Zhmud 2006, 166–213). Based on him, Proclus gives a list of whom he saw as predecessors of Euclid with respect to unifying theoretical geometry.
At some point in fourth-century Athens, Greek theoretical mathematics came in close contact with Plato’s group who, perhaps under contemporary Pythagorean influence (Archytas of Tarentum), emphatically claimed axiomatic–deductive mathematics as paradigmatic knowledge. Later doxographical accounts of early Greek mathematics operate, thus, almost always under Platonic–Aristotelian influence; that is, they attempt to cleanse theoretical mathematics from all practical concerns.15 As far as one can gather from Hellenistic mathematics, from which survive, besides Euclid and Archimedes, mainly Apollonius of Perga’s books on conic sections, Greek theoretical mathematics insisted right from the beginning on being fundamentally different from all application (see the remarks on Archimedes in Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus 14.8), perhaps in an attempt to appear to the reader as socially superior to professional calculators and surveyors.
Apart from the apparent focus on geometry that characterizes most of Greek theoretical mathematics (the major exception being the third-century CE algebraist Diophantus of Alexandria), the notions of logical rigor, defined entities, axioms, deductive argument, and evident truth are essentially the same in today’s mathematics; in addition, the lettered diagram and the proposition serve as the primary units of mathematical argument, then as now.
As with medicine, mathematics became canonized in later Hellenistic times. What survive today are the classics, and then doxographical accounts, either from Pappus’s Collection, a mathematical encyclopedia of the fourth century CE, or doxography embedded in commentaries upon either Euclid (by Proclus, fourth century CE) or Archimedes (by Eutocius, seventh century CE). In terms of knowledge-presentation, Euclid-style mathematics appears as “super-explicit.” It is clearly the ambition of mathematical writers in this tradition to spell out, define, and guarantee as true all knowledge the proof depends upon. Only mathematical logic itself is taken for granted and thus remains implicit. Therefore, mathematical discourse has found ways to guarantee the truth of its results, thereby becoming a paradigm of truth-focused argument until today (see on philosophy below, pp. 407–8), a dynamics that actually unfolded without real input by the mathematicians themselves who kept clear of philosophical and, especially, epistemological or ontological discussion.16
While these two discourses remained almost exclusive to their respective groups of experts and thus formed fields vaguely similar to modern disciplines, with the so-called “Sophistic movement” discussion of explicit knowledge reached a new intensity, the repercussions of which are still ubiquitous in the Socratics and later fourth-century philosophy. Part of the sophists’ challenge of established expert culture was apparently the claim that knowledge by itself is something that structurally transcends disciplinary or professional boundaries and is, thus, by itself a rewarding object of study. The Socratic question whether excellence (arētē, often translated as “virtue”) is didakton (“teachable”) mentioned above,17 deeply concerned Sophistic practice. Besides their focus on successful rhetoric and self-representation, the major sophists also developed new tools or made systematic enquiry into existing ones with respect to language and logic.18 They also developed at least three new literary formats in order to store and communicate explicit knowledge: the “problem,” the doxographical “collection” (synagōgē) meant for internal use (reference), and the tekhnē (“art,” handbook, systematic treatise) for external use. The first collects answers to notorious questions (Ps.-Aristotle’s or Alexander of Aphrodisias’s Problēmata provide good examples), both given in standardized, syllogism-focused form. The second one, the invention of which is credited to Hippias, probably collected sayings or opinions of great writers of the past, arranged according to topics. The third one gives a systematic abridgement of a field of knowledge, with a focus on its conceptual structure (notions, definitions, basic argument). The collection became a standard text format, beginning in the fourth-century Peripatos, then down to late antiquity that produced a great number of such “collections.” It is tempting to assume that also the main Peripatetic genre of lasting impact, the pragmateia, with its subtle rhetoric and its favored structures (doxography, definition, interplay of induction and deduction) is somehow influenced by Sophistic texts.19
These different forms of systematic treatises spread the concept of “systematicity” as a general feature of explicit, decontextualized knowledge and as an approved way of transmission. In the fourth and third centuries BCE, more and more fields of knowledge became explicit in such written form, e.g., to indicate the range of such differentiation, horsemanship (Simon’s Hippikē), knowledge about machines (Ps.-Aristotle’s Problēmata mēchanika), architecture (Philon and Ctesibius, early Hellenistic engineers quoted by Vitruvius), and grammar (Dionysius Thrax). In imperial times, the systematic treatise provided, besides the commentary, the standard form of treating fundamental subjects within the philosophical and rhetorical schools, especially introductions and full-blown monographs. “Systematicity,” perhaps a Sophistic discovery, transformed the way in which knowledge could become explicit.
It may have become clear by now that the modern way to conceptualize ancient fields of knowledge as strictly separated disciplines often leads into anachronism. The three groups discussed above must certainly have had some overlap: there was probably a sophistic strain within Hippocratic medicine, some sophists attempted to set themselves up as mathematicians (notoriously Hippias),20 etc. The same is true for “philosophy”: since philosophy is a category invented and applied retrospectively in Aristotle’s Metaphysics A to his predecessors back to Thales for certain reasons (Frede 2008), one should not expect to find any specific way of knowledge being or becoming explicit in what we would nowadays call “philosophy.” Three phenomena need to be addressed, I think: first, the occasional option of didactic poetry; second, the impact of mathematics on philosophy; third, the dialogue.
Didactic poetry has a rather strange history in Greek literature, which may or may not correspond to its taxonomical shifts:21 after it had made a strong early appearance with Hesiod and ps.-Hesiod in archaic times, it seemingly vanished more or less until it was re-animated in the third century BCE as part of what one might call a “Hesiodic turn.” The only exceptions are two famous didactic–poetic texts by the Presocratic philosopher–poets Parmenides of Elea (first half of fifth century BCE) and Empedocles of Acragas (mid-fifth century BCE). Perhaps they were preceded by Xenophanes (second half of sixth century BCE), a wandering rhapsode who, besides many more traditional topics, also produced hexametric verses about nature’s material essence (according to him, earth and water), the material of the stars, and theology. While Milesian and Heraclitean philosophy in the East developed the new genre of the speculative prose treatise, these three Westerners favored old-style epic-didactic meter, for unclear reasons. To some extent, they might have seen some overlap with Hesiod (e.g., divine authority, or the didactic persona as presented in the Work and Days, or the overarching narrative temporality of coming-to-be as in the Theogony). Perhaps, channels of distribution and opportunities of performance also had a certain impact: in early fifth-century culture, didactic poetry, presumably performed in public competitions, would have reached a much greater audience than prose that depended on written communication.22
Parmenides chose to present his two-fold argument as the speech of a goddess to whose realm the first-person narrator mystically ascends. The goddess announces that she will teach the “well-rounded immovable heart of truth” and the mortals’ opinions in which there is no true reliability (F 288.30–32 KRS). He seems to say that we can only discern what is real; what is not, cannot be discerned. Thus, being (real) and discerning are the same (DK 28 B 6.1). The goddess now elucidates this claim which implies that motion, change, coming-to-be and passing-away, and time do not exist, although we perceive them. After that, she then seems to give a cosmogonic treatment of what mortals think exists (doxai broteiai, B 8.50 ff.): consisting of the two primal elements, light and night, it begins from the stars and, perhaps, ends with embryology, in typical Milesian fashion. The latter might be the best approximation to how one can explain the physical world, by including our perception; the former indicates what is logically, and thus completely, reliable (but non-empirical) – which, however, does not permit any explanation of the world around us. Therefore, both “ways” are to be taken seriously. Their relation is, however, one of epistemic status: the first is certain, the second short of certainty, but reasonable; the first criticizes rigorously what his predecessors and competitors have done; the second does precisely the same, but better. Even these few fragments of Parmenides show how already in late archaic culture explicit knowledge is the product of criticism of former opinions and deductive reasoning that, largely independent of conventional language, can rise to extreme abstraction. Parmenides’ strange and beautiful poem typically represents Greek explicit knowledge of nature in that it not only aims at explaining reality, but even discusses the epistemic status of such explanation.
Compared to Parmenides, Empedocles’ two didactic poems (Purifications and On Nature) were more traditional in character: Purifications discussed the incarnations of a narrator’s soul and the principle of reincarnation in general, presumably close to “Orphic” teachings with some Pythagorean impact. The mode of discourse is reminiscent, to us, of the myth of Er which concludes Plato’s Republic. On Nature provided a cosmology based on four elements and the two principles of mixture (“love”) and separation (“strife”), the ever-shifting relation of which determines cosmological narrative history. The latter poem has unfairly been criticized by Aristotle;23 modern appreciation, however, has conceded that Empedocles is a masterful composer of, e.g., metaphor and simile. He probably adapts these tools that were so well known from epic and lyric tradition to the newly emerging speculative discourse on nature. In addition, he occasionally attempts to quantify the ratio of the elements in “chemical” compounds, thus trying to be as precise as possible (F 374 KRS). Although the surviving fragments seem to be wildly poetic in many ways, Empedocles’ intention would qualify for the label “scientific”: e.g., he discusses the workings of our sensory organs and even provides us, within the frame of his cosmological narrative, with a pre-Darwinian account of how functional animals emerged (F 375 f. KRS). Both Parmenides and Empedocles provide vivid examples for how knowledge on nature or philosophical argument in general became explicit. Nonetheless, they did not have followers in that respect (Parmenides’ defenders, most famously Zeno of Elea, chose the prose treatise as their medium and attempted to free their presentations from poetic elements as far as they could).
Even before theoretical mathematics emerged, practical mathematical knowledge24 had a certain impact on philosophical knowledge becoming explicit, largely by the cognitive function of numbers, already in Anaximander.25 In the competitive climate of Archaic and Classical upper-class culture, monumental writing became a vehicle of authority and representation quite early.26 A similar desire fueled the intention to be right on controversial issues, be it competitive oratory in various political institutions or writing texts that were meant to last, whether history or nature’s explanation was their focus. The vivid polemics the reader encounters in some early writers, most notably in Hecataeus and Heraclitus, does not point to an author’s cantankerous character, but to the competitiveness of the field. In such a climate, logical procedures that made one’s own logos invincible must have been adopted eagerly, which is true also for medicine. Deductive argument that proceeds in truth-preserving ways from premises generally agreed upon, in order to then reach a clear conclusion, appears as such a procedure.
Mathematics did not invent such argumentative structures, which must have been used, in a non-formalized way, in many situations of debate (for example, modus tollens and reductio ad absurdum). Once axiomatic-deductive mathematics existed in a formalized way, however, it naturally provided a model of epistemological certainty to the philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle, who adapted the method and its implications to fit their own purposes, down to Galen.27 Already in late fifth-century texts, however, one can see how thinkers play with adapting the model of mathematical argument to other fields, notably medicine and speculative physics.28 The lettered diagram as a device that helps to make arguments and texts function across distances of time and space is one of the tools of mathematics that perhaps has had, until today, the greatest career in theory and science. This career starts, as far as we can see, with Aristotle’s fondness of diagrammatical argument in many areas, most conspicuously in his analysis of logic. It is also Aristotle who provides the first consistent theory of how explicit knowledge should be gained and epistemologically guaranteed (Second Analytics) and how its arguments should be structured (Prior Analytics), in both areas starting from and generalizing mathematical arguments of his day.29
I conclude my account with dialogue (cf. Hose ch. 15, pp. 244–9 in this volume): Plato’s extant works are enigmatic on so many counts that I almost hesitate to add them here as an instance of explicit philosophical knowledge. Throughout Plato’s dialogues, however, runs a discourse on the different epistemological forms of knowledge.30 Mimetic dialogue in Platonic style (Sōkratikoi logoi) is, nonetheless, one of the farthest-reaching literary inventions among Greek philosophers, with both a theoretical and a practical reception that begins with Aristotle (cf. Poet. on Platonic dialogue, his own dialogues) and continues to our day. The form emerged among Socrates’ early followers quite soon after his death.31 Interlocutors with differing degrees of authority discuss general questions, often concerned with forms of knowledge and practical virtue. Usually, one of the interlocutors is Socrates, who demonstrates to the internal audience of the dialogue that both conventional wisdom and the self-proclaimed authority of experts are ill-founded.32 Many dialogues give, at least in certain stretches, a realistic account of Socrates’ dialectic method and of knowledge-focused dialogue in general. Plato has taken pains to hide his own intentions in adopting this multifaceted genre; certainly, however, the form eases the reader’s transition from being unaware of any problem to awareness, by identification with the interlocutors. Thus, the form has been adopted not only in almost all areas, schools and topics of ancient philosophy, it also has, in a stripped-down form, become a very popular form of presenting technical explicit knowledge in later antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times until the twenty-first century.33
After Empedocles, didactic poetry did not die out, as one might have expected: instead, it completely changed its character in the early third century BCE,34 turning from a knowledge-focused first-order discourse into something else that integrated tradition-focused second-order discourse, early Hellenistic aesthetics, prose sources, and a certain pleasure in describing nature through intermediary texts. Paradigms are Aratus’ Phaenomena (early third century BCE), a stoically tinted poem on the order of the universe, mostly on astronomy and weather-signs, and Nicander’s two intricate poems on poisonous animals (late third century BCE). Both rely on prose sources for what they have to say, and have, to a degree unknown in earlier didactic poetry, spent much energy on the aesthetic side of knowledge-presentation, that is, on philological research. Both are exponents of third-century Alexandrian aesthetics and, thus, became wildly popular among Roman intellectuals in the late republic and early empire: e.g., Lucretius, Cicero, Vergil, and Ovid, all of whom produced, in different ways, didactic poetry in this Alexandrian manner, that is, self-referential, saturated with philological knowledge, projecting an elusive poetic voice, on the verge of being court-poetry, difficult and beautiful.35 On the Greek side, this tradition leads to fantastic poems such as Oppian’s On Fishing (Halieutika); on the Latin side, a strong tradition emerges that, like Plato-inspired dialogue, was still written in modern times, e.g. de Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius (1744). Besides these highbrow poets, there existed also “real” didactic poetry, that is, poems devoted to primary knowledge-transmission, mostly in iambs, devoid of purely literary ambition: from Hellenistic times, the most important was Apollodorus of Athens’ Chronica, a chronology of Greek history and famous persons.36 The only complete work still extant is the geographical periplus-poem by Ps.-Scymnus, written in Hellenistic times.37 Unlikely as it may seem to us, didactic poetry was firmly established in pharmacology, because meter made it easier to control the correct transmission of numbers and measures: preserved by Galen, Servilius Damocrates’ iambic pharmacology survives in about 1600 verses.38
Explicit knowledge of a shared past, even if it results from construction, is crucial for any sense of community.39 Thus, one finds knowledge of the past to be an essential ingredient of many ancient Greek genres: among others, epic, epinician poetry, elegy, tragedy, epideictic oratory, against all of which the new genre of historiography had to compete.40 Nonetheless, historiography turned out to be the most popular field to engage in as a writer of non-fiction: from Hecataeus of Miletus to sixth-century CE writers such as Procopius of Caesarea, more than 1,000 authors are attested. Less than one-fortieth remains.41 As a consequence, I can only hint at some basic notions here that are typical for Greek historical discourse (see Tsakmakis ch. 14 in this volume).
Genealogy is the mode which communicates explicit knowledge of the past that affects the present directly (heroic epic, on the other hand, treats a past that affects the present only indirectly or even implicitly), by legitimating certain claims to autochthony or political power in a certain region, by providing aetiological explanation to identity-related concerns, and by bridging the gap from historical times to the present. Presumably, genealogical lore that focused on names and successions was part of the oral history42 of all communities and major clans (compare, e.g., the exchange of Glaucon and Diomedes in Iliad book 6). Besides the fragmentary poems by Hesiod, however, such knowledge has not been preserved from early times. Historiography proper apparently began by systematizing and decontextualizing conventional local genealogy.
This beginning is associated with Hecataeus of Miletus’s Genealogiai (FGrHist 1) in the late sixth century BCE. He was the first to define historiography as a realm of truth as opposed to mere mythoi (“stories”), a boundary that is invoked again and again by historiographers and that may thus be taken to constitute historiography. Most historiographers present themselves as avid seekers of truth, very often by comparing different versions of oral history or by rationalist criticism of commonly accepted accounts of the past.43 Sources in the modern sense (inscriptions, archives, etc.) play a surprisingly small role. Similar to early philosophy and medicine, second-order discourse, including polemics against competitors, makes up for a large part of the historian’s toolbox.44
Explicit knowledge about the past comes in the form of narrative that contains fictitious elements. Such narrative often consists of a chronological and a causal perspective, the two of which often intersect or coalesce. The search for causes motivates the narrative on several levels and often overrides sheer chronology. As in heroic epic, an overarching narrative often contains second-level narratives, e.g., the so-called “short stories” in Herodotus, many of which provide comments upon the meaning of the overarching narrative.45 Also as in epic, verbatim speeches are a standard device in historiography, which thus crosses over into the realms of fiction.
At prominent points in his work, the historiographer usually declares certain intentions: to save impressive deeds for eternal memory (Herodotus of Halicarnassus), to discern patterns in history that will or may repeat in the reader’s future (Thucydides of Athens), to provide moral instruction by reading of great men’s lives (Polybius of Apamea). Unlike the rhetoric of modern historiography à la Ranke, the historiographer thus acknowledges the past’s impact on his own times. Even in “objective” historiography (an anachronistic label designed for Thucydides), the historiographical narrative still has a certain agenda, which is not taken to compromise the historian’s task. Fourth-century dramatic and rhetorical historiography add aesthetic concerns.46 In the third century BCE the emerging genre of biography further blends facts and fiction, occasionally crossing the line to the novel.47
In principle, Christian explicit knowledge adopts all existing pagan forms (see Stenger ch. 8 in this volume). Christian writers produce works transmitting Christian knowledge in the forms of didactic poetry, the systematic treatise, even mathematics-driven logic (Monarchians).48 Most influential are the Pagan tools that Christian institutionalized teaching inherits from imperial pagan institutions, foremost, a broad range of commentary. Philological and interpretive tools are largely similar to what Alexandrians applied to Homer and other classics. From a purely formal point of view, as being based on the exegesis of a canonic text, Christian intellectual culture neatly fitted into pagan cultures of canonized traditions.49
Perhaps most remarkable in Greek practices of exchanging and transmitting explicit knowledge by way of texts is the great range of forms and devices based on writing that emerged in the process. Many of these are still in use, e.g., the lexicon, the commentary, systematic treatises, the letter, the edition, mathematical text as a mixture of language and diagram, the recipe. Some have had their successes but are now rarely adopted, e.g., literary dialogue as a means of scientific discussion. Others, such as visualization by diagram, are still in full swing.
Across the board, there is a clear desire to produce knowledge-transmitting texts that respond to certain standards that are not only cognitive–epistemic, but also aesthetic: all Socratics and many Peripatetics have produced mimetic dialogue, for example, even when the topics covered were quite distant from even a highbrow colloquial register.50 Mathematicians have forced their creativity into the straightjacket of impersonal Euclid-type discourse, generalizing expression as far as possible. Nonetheless, Archimedes finds a way to provoke and surprise his readers even under such formal constraints.51 Medical writing has, almost from the beginning, featured a strong rhetorical component, perhaps due to severe competition among practitioners. Medical rhetoric reaches its most versatile state with Galen who, far from being the “blatherskite” Wilamowitz held him to be,52 frequently mixes in little parodic sketches, philological acumen, autobiographical constructions, anecdotes and case narratives, beautiful metaphors, and sometimes even Doyle-like detective stories.53
Even the “scientific I,” that is, the persona-like center of authority in a given text who presents explicit knowledge and with whom the reader can either identify or rebel against, has, in all its different varieties,54 been outlined by ancient Greek rational-practice writers, philosophical, medical, and mathematical. Objectivity as a concept itself can be ascribed to the texts of Greek science, and certainly its rhetorical employment.55 As modern writers of explicit knowledge, no matter in what discipline, it is still very difficult for us not to be indebted to ancient Greek theorists.
Lloyd 2009a gives a great overview of Greek “science” and philosophy. For mathematics, an introduction is provided by Lloyd 2009b. For an accessible discussion of Greek mathematics in toto, see Cuomo’s excellent Ancient Mathematics (2001). The two monographs by Netz (1999, 2010) provide stimulating analyses of the field. On Greek technology, see Cuomo 2007. Philosophical writing is the object of Kahn 2003. For medicine, there is Nutton’s introduction (Nutton 2004). The novel reader interested in historiography will find up-to-date introductory essays to the major ancient Greek historiographers in Feldherr and Hardy 2011, esp. 97–243.