What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking

The author, a professor of classics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, examines the Romans’ view of nature from the first century bc to the second century ad.

He considers works by Cicero, Seneca, Galen, Ptolemy, Lucretius, Plutarch and others and concludes, in effect, that they did the best that they could. They lived in a different world, so different from ours that it is hard for us to understand it. For instance, the assertion that the magnetism of a piece of iron could be eliminated by rubbing it with garlic was taken as true, I suppose because in the Roman world of the time the idea of doing an experiment was sufficiently alien that it occurred to no one.

The book is not for the general reader. Though the author writes with more verve than the typical scholar, the book is heavy with the technical terms of classics and philosophy (his conclusion is that he is an “epistemological coherentist”). He translates all his Latin and Greek quotations, which is helpful, but starting with the first paragraph on page 194, the next nine sentences have 80, 40, 40, 41, 55, 50, 52, 42, and 46 words, which is not. Those with suitable backgrounds will no doubt gain from reading what is one of the few books on Roman “science” of the period.

Ask a mathematician about Roman mathematics and the response is likely to be “What Roman mathematics?” The book does nothing to change that view because it contains zero mathematics. It is an estimable book, but its audience is not members of the MAA.

The book is well produced and edited, but I have no idea what “an chippy entomologist” (p. 215) is.

Among Woody Dudley’s many lacks is a classical education. Though he retired in 2004 and has had plenty of time to acquire one, he hasn’t. Nobody’s perfect.