fine article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on this subject. In Smith's
Dictionary are the Lives and works of the most noted masters. Müller's
Ancient Art alludes to the leading masterpieces. Montfauçon's Antiquité
Expliquée en Figures; Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, by the Society of
Dilettanti, London, 1809; Ancient Marbles of the British Museum, by
Taylor Combe; Millin, Introduction à l'Étude des Monuments Antiques;
Monuments Inédits d'Antiquité figurée, recuellis et publiés par
Raoul-Rochette; Gerhard's Archäologische Zeitung; David's Essai sur le
Classement Chronologique des Sculpteurs Grecs les plus célèbres.
In Painting, see Müller's Ancient Art; Fuseli's Lectures; Sir Joshua
Reynolds's Lectures; Lanzi's History of Painting in Italy (translated by
Roscoe); and the Article on "Painting," Encyclopaedia Britannica, and
Article "Pictura," Smith's Dictionary, both of which last mentioned
refer to numerous German, French, and other authorities, should the
reader care to pursue the subject. Vitruvius (on Architecture,
translated by Gwilt) writes at some length on ancient wall-paintings.
The finest specimens of ancient paintings are found in catacombs, the
baths, and the ruins of Pompeii. On this subject Winckelmann is the
great authority.
ANCIENT SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE.
ASTRONOMY, GEOGRAPHY, ETC.
2000-100 B.C.
It would be absurd to claim for the ancients any great attainments in
science, such as they made in the field of letters or the realm of art.
It is in science, especially when applied to practical life, that the
moderns show their great superiority to the most enlightened nations of
antiquity. In this great department of human inquiry modern genius
shines with the lustre of the sun. It is this which most strikingly
attests the advance of civilization. It is this which has distinguished
and elevated the races of Europe, and carried them in the line of
progress beyond the attainments of the Greeks and Romans. With the
magnificent discoveries and inventions of the last three hundred years
in almost every department of science, especially in the explorations of
distant seas and continents, in the analysis of chemical compounds, in
the wonders of steam and electricity, in mechanical appliances to
abridge human labor, in astronomical researches, in the explanation of
the phenomena of the heavens, in the miracles which inventive genius has
wrought,--seen in our ships, our manufactories, our printing-presses,
our observatories, our fortifications, our laboratories, our mills, our
machines to cultivate the earth, to make our clothes, to build our
houses, to multiply our means of offence and defence, to make weak
children do the work of Titans, to measure our time with the accuracy of
the planetary orbits, to use the sun itself in perpetuating our
likenesses to distant generations, to cause a needle to guide the
mariner with assurance on the darkest night, to propel a heavy ship
against wind and tide without oars or sails, to make carriages ascend
mountains without horses at the rate of thirty miles an hour, to convey
intelligence with the speed of lightning from continent to continent and
under oceans that ancient navigators never dared to cross,--these and
other wonders attest an ingenuity and audacity of intellect which would
have overwhelmed with amazement the most adventurous of Greeks and the
most potent of Romans.
But the great discoveries and inventions to which we owe this marked
superiority are either accidental or the result of generations of
experiment, assisted by an immense array of ascertained facts from which
safe inductions can be made. It is not, probably, the superiority of
the European races over the Greeks and Romans to which we may ascribe
the wonderful advance of modern society, but the particular direction
which genius was made to take. Had the Greeks given the energy of their
minds to mechanical forces as they did to artistic creations, they might
have made wonderful inventions. But it was not so ordered by Providence.
At that time the world was not in the stage of development when this
particular direction of intellect could have been favored. The
development of the physical sciences, with their infinite multiplicity
and complexity, required more centuries of observation, collection and
collation of facts, deductions from known phenomena, than the ancients
had had to work with; while the more ethereal realms of philosophy,
ethics, aesthetics, and religion, though needing keen study of Nature
and of man, depended more upon inner spiritual forces, and less upon
accumulated detail of external knowledge. Yet as there were some
subjects which the Greeks and Romans seemed to exhaust, some fields of
labor and thought in which they never have been and perhaps never will
be surpassed, so some future age may direct its energies into channels
that are as unknown to us as clocks and steam-engines were to the
Greeks. This is the age of mechanism and of science; and mechanism and
science sweep everything before them, and will probably be carried to
their utmost capacity and development. After that the human mind may
seek some new department, some new scope for its energies, and an age of
new wonders may arise,--perhaps after the present dominant races shall
have become intoxicated with the greatness of their triumphs and have
shared the fate of the old monarchies of the East. But I would not
speculate on the destinies of the European nations, whether they are to
make indefinite advances until they occupy and rule the whole world, or
are destined to be succeeded by nations as yet undeveloped,--savages, as
their fathers were when Rome was in the fulness of material wealth
and grandeur.
I have shown that in the field of artistic excellence, in literary
composition, in the arts of government and legislation, and even in the
realm of philosophical speculation, the ancients were our
school-masters, and that among them were some men of most marvellous
genius, who have had no superiors among us. But we do not see among them
the exhibition of genius in what we call science, at least in its
application to practical life. It would be difficult to show any
department of science which the ancients carried to any considerable
degree of perfection. Nevertheless, there were departments in which they
made noble attempts, and in which they showed large capacity, even if
they were unsuccessful in great practical results.
Astronomy was one of these. In this science such men as Eratosthenes,
Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy were great lights of whom humanity
may be proud; and had they been assisted by our modern inventions, they
might have earned a fame scarcely eclipsed by that of Kepler and Newton.
The old astronomers did little to place this science on a true
foundation, but they showed great ingenuity, and discovered some truths
which no succeeding age has repudiated. They determined the
circumference of the earth by a method identical with that which would
be employed by modern astronomers; they ascertained the position of the
stars by right ascension and declination; they knew the obliquity of the
ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its
mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove
that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had
an approximate knowledge of parallax; they could calculate eclipses of
the moon, and use them for the correction of their lunar tables. They
understood spherical trigonometry, and determined the motions of the sun
and moon, involving an accurate definition of the year and a method of
predicting eclipses; they ascertained that the earth was a sphere, and
reduced the phenomena of the heavenly bodies to uniform movements of
circular orbits. We have settled by physical geography the exact form
of the earth, but the ancients arrived at their knowledge by
astronomical reasoning. Says Whewell:--
"The reduction of the motions of the sun, moon, and five planets to
circular orbits, as was done by Hipparchus, implies deep concentrated
thought and scientific abstraction. The theories of eccentrics and
epicycles accomplished the end of explaining all the known phenomena.
The resolution of the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies into an
assemblage of circular motions was a great triumph of genius, and was
equivalent to the most recent and improved processes by which modern
astronomers deal with such motions."
Astronomy was probably born in Chaldaea as early as the time of Abraham.
The glories of the firmament were impressed upon the minds of the rude
primitive races with an intensity which we do not feel, with all the
triumphs of modern science. The Chaldaean shepherds, as they watched
their flocks by night, noted the movements of the planets, and gave
names to the more brilliant constellations. Before religious rituals
were established, before great superstitions arose, before poetry was
sung, before musical instruments were invented, before artists
sculptured marble or melted bronze, before coins were stamped, before
temples arose, before diseases were healed by the arts of medicine,
before commerce was known, those Oriental shepherds counted the anxious
hours by the position of certain constellations. Astronomy is therefore
the oldest of the ancient sciences, although it remained imperfect for
more than four thousand years. The old Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks
made but few discoveries which are valued by modern astronomers, but
they laid the foundation of the science, and ever regarded it as one of
the noblest subjects that could stimulate the faculties of man. It was
invested with all that was religious and poetical.
The spacious level and unclouded horizon of Chaldaea afforded peculiar
facilities of observation; and its pastoral and contemplative
inhabitants, uncontaminated by the vices and superstitions of subsequent
ages, active-minded and fresh, discovered after a long observation of
eclipses--some say extending over nineteen centuries--the cycle of two
hundred and twenty-three lunations, which brings back the eclipses in
the same order. Having once established their cycle, they laid the
foundation for the most sublime of all the sciences. Callisthenes
transmitted from Babylon to Aristotle a collection of observations of
all the eclipses that preceded the conquests of Alexander, together with
the definite knowledge which the Chaldaeans had collected about the
motions of the heavenly bodies. Such knowledge was rude and simple, and
amounted to little beyond the fact that there were spherical
revolutions about an inclined axis, and that the poles pointed always to
particular stars. The Egyptians also recorded their observations, from
which it would appear that they observed eclipses at least sixteen
hundred years before the beginning of our era,--which is not improbable,
if the speculations of modern philosophers respecting the age of the
world are entitled to credit. The Egyptians discovered by the rising of
Sirius that the year consists of three hundred and sixty-five and
one-quarter days; and this was their sacred year, in distinction from
the civil, which consisted of three hundred and sixty-five days. They
also had observed the courses of the planets, and could explain the
phenomena of the stations and retrogradations; and it is asserted too
that they regarded Mercury and Venus as satellites of the sun. Some have
maintained that the obelisks which the Egyptians erected served the
purpose of gnomons for determining the obliquity of the ecliptic, the
altitude of the pole, and the length of the tropical year. It is thought
even that the Pyramids, by the position of their sides toward the
cardinal points, attest Egyptian acquaintance with a meridional line.
The Chinese boast of having noticed and recorded a series of eclipses
extending over a period of thirty-eight hundred and fifty-eight years;
and it is probable that they anticipated the Greeks two thousand years
in the discovery of the Metonic cycle,--or the cycle of nineteen years,
at the end of which time the new moons fall on the same days of the
year. The Chinese also determined the obliquity of the ecliptic eleven
hundred years before our era. The Hindus at a remote antiquity
represented celestial phenomena with considerable exactness, and
constructed tables by which the longitude of the sun and moon were
determined, and dials to measure time. Bailly thinks that thirty-one
hundred and two years before Christ astronomy was cultivated in Siam
which hardly yields in accuracy to that which modern science has built
on the theory of universal gravitation.
But the Greeks after all were the only people of antiquity who elevated
astronomy to the dignity of a science. They however confessed that they
derived their earliest knowledge from the Babylonian and Egyptian
priests, while the priests of Thebes claimed to be the originators of
exact astronomical observations. Diodorus asserts that the Chaldaeans
used the Temple of Belus, in the centre of Babylon, for their survey of
the heavens. But whether the Babylonians or the Egyptians were the
earliest astronomers is of little consequence, although the pedants make
it a grave matter of investigation. All we know is that astronomy was
cultivated by both Babylonians and Egyptians, and that they made but
very limited attainments. They approximated to the truth in reference
to the solar year, by observing the equinoxes and solstices and the
heliacal rising of particular stars.
The early Greek philosophers who visited Egypt and the East in search of
knowledge, found very little to reward their curiosity or industry,--not
much beyond preposterous claims to a high antiquity, and to an esoteric
wisdom which has not yet been revealed. Plato and Eudoxus spent thirteen
years in Heliopolis for the purpose of extracting the scientific
knowledge of the Egyptian priests, yet they learned but little beyond
the fact that the solar year was a trifle beyond three hundred and
sixty-five days. No great names have come down to us from the priests of
Babylon or Egypt; no one gained an individual reputation. The Chaldaean
and Egyptian priests may have furnished the raw material of observation
to the Greeks, but the latter alone possessed the scientific genius by
which undigested facts were converted into a symmetrical system. The
East never gave valuable knowledge to the West; it gave the tendency to
religious mysticism, which in its turn tended to superstition. Instead
of astronomy, it gave astrology; instead of science, it gave magic,
incantations, and dreams. The Eastern astronomers connected their
astronomy with divination from the stars, and made their antiquity reach
back to two hundred and seventy thousand years. There were soothsayers
in the time of Daniel, and magicians, exorcists, and interpreters of
signs. They were not men of scientific research, seeking truth; it was
power they sought, by perverting the intellect of the people. The
astrology of the East was founded on the principle that a star or
constellation presided over the birth of an individual, and that it
either portended his fate, or shed a good or bad influence upon his
future life. The star which looked upon a child at the hour of his birth
was called the "horoscopus," and the peculiar influence of each planet
was determined by the astrologers. The superstitions of Egypt and
Chaldaea unfortunately spread among both the Greeks and Romans, and
these were about all that the Western nations learned from the boastful
priests of occult Oriental science. Whatever was known of real value
among the ancients is due to the earnest inquiries of the Greeks.
And yet their researches were very unsatisfactory until the time of
Hipparchus. The primitive knowledge was almost nothing. The Homeric
poems regarded the earth as a circular plain bounded by the heaven,
which was a solid vault or hemisphere, with its concavity turned
downward. This absurdity was believed until the time of Herodotus, five
centuries after; nor was it exploded fully in the time of Aristotle. The
sun, moon, and stars were supposed to move upon or with the inner
surface of the heavenly hemisphere, and the ocean was thought to gird
the earth around as a great belt, into which the heavenly bodies sank at
night. Homer believed that the sun arose out of the ocean, ascended the
heaven, and again plunged into the ocean, passing under the earth, and
producing darkness. The Greeks even personified the sun as a divine
charioteer driving his fiery steeds over the steep of heaven, until he
bathed them at evening in the western waves. Apollo became the god of
the sun, as Diana was the goddess of the moon. But the early Greek
inquirers did not attempt to explain how the sun found his way from the
west back again to the east; they merely took note of the diurnal
course, the alternation of day and night, the number of the seasons, and
their regular successions. They found the points of the compass by
determining the recurrence of the equinoxes and solstices; but they had
no conception of the ecliptic,--of that great circle in the heaven
formed by the sun's annual course,--and of its obliquity when compared
with our equator. Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Greeks
ascertained the length of the year to be three hundred and sixty-five
days; but perfect accuracy was lacking, for want of scientific
instruments and of recorded observations of the heavenly bodies. The
Greeks had not even a common chronological era for the designation of
years. Herodotus informs us that the Trojan War preceded his time by
eight hundred years: he merely states the interval between the event in
question and his own time; he had certain data for distant periods. The
Greeks reckoned dates from the Trojan War, and the Romans from the
building of their city. The Greeks also divided the year into twelve
months, and introduced the intercalary circle of eight years, although
the Romans disused it afterward, until the calendar was reformed by
Julius Caesar. Thus there was no scientific astronomical knowledge worth
mentioning among the primitive Greeks.
Immense research and learning have been expended by modern critics to
show the state of scientific astronomy among the Greeks. I am amazed
equally at the amount of research and its comparative worthlessness; for
what addition to science can be made by an enumeration of the
puerilities and errors of the Greeks, and how wasted and pedantic the
learning which ransacks all antiquity to prove that the Greeks adopted
this or that absurdity![1]
[Footnote 1: The style of modern historical criticism is well
exemplified in the discussions of the Germans whether the Arx on the
Capitoline Hill occupied the northeastern or southwestern corner, which
take up nearly one half of the learned article on the Capitoline in
Smith's Dictionary.]
The earliest historic name associated with astronomy in Greece was
Thales, the founder of the Ionic school of philosophers. He is reported
to have made a visit to Egypt, to have fixed the year at three hundred
and sixty-five days, to have determined the course of the sun from
solstice to solstice, and to have calculated eclipses. He attributed an
eclipse of the moon to the interposition of the earth between the sun
and moon, and an eclipse of the sun to the interposition of the moon
between the sun and earth,--and thus taught the rotundity of the earth,
sun, and moon. He also determined the ratio of the sun's diameter to its
apparent orbit. As he first solved the problem of inscribing a
right-angled triangle in a circle, he is the founder of geometrical
science in Greece. He left, however, nothing to writing; hence all
accounts of him are confused,--some doubting even if he made the
discoveries attributed to him. His philosophical speculations, which
science rejects,--such as that water is the principle of all
things,--are irrelevant to a description of the progress of astronomy.
That he was a great light no one questions, considering the ignorance
with which he was surrounded.
Anaximander, who followed Thales in philosophy, held to puerile
doctrines concerning the motions and nature of the stars, which it is
useless to repeat. His addition to science, if he made any, was in
treating the magnitudes and distances of the planets. He constructed
geographical charts, and attempted to delineate the celestial sphere,
and to measure time with a gnomon, or time-pillar, by the motion of its
shadow upon a dial.[2]
[Footnote 2: Dr. E.H. Knight, in his "American Mechanical Dictionary"
(i. 692), cites the Scriptural account of the beautiful altar seen by
King Ahaz of Jerusalem, in Damascus, when he went thither to greet
Tiglath-Pileser, the Assyrian who had helped him against his Samarian
enemy. Ahaz erected a similar altar at Jerusalem, and also a _sun-dial,_
the same one mentioned in the account of the miraculous cure of his son
Hezekiah. "This," says Dr. Knight, "was probably the first dial on
record, and is one hundred and forty years before Thales, and nearly
four hundred before Plato and Aristotle, and just a little previous to
the lunar eclipses observed at Babylon, as recorded by Ptolemy.... The
Hebrew word [for this dial] is said by Colonel White of the Bengal army
to signify a _staircase_, which much strengthens the inference that it
was like the equinoctial dial of the Indian nations and of Mesopotamia,
from whence its pattern is assumed to have been derived."]
Anaximenes of Miletus taught, like his predecessors, crude notions of
the sun and stars, and speculated on the nature of the moon, but did
nothing to advance his science on true grounds, except by the
construction of sun-dials. The same may be said of Heraclitus,
Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras: they were great men, but they
gave to the world mere speculations, some of which are very puerile.
They all held to the idea that the heavenly bodies revolved around the
earth, and that the earth was a plain; but they explained eclipses, and
supposed that the moon derived its light from the sun. Some of them
knew the difference between the planets and the fixed stars. Anaxagoras
scouted the notion that the sun was a god, and supposed it to be a mass
of ignited stone,--for which he was called an atheist.
Socrates, who belonged to another school, avoided all barren
speculations concerning the universe, and confined himself to human
actions and interests. He looked even upon geometry in a very practical
way, valuing it only so far as it could be made serviceable to
land-measuring. As for the stars and planets, he supposed it was
impossible to arrive at a true knowledge of them, and regarded
speculations upon them as useless.