Science Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Abstract

Poetry was a powerful means of communicating in the ancient Greco-Roman world; poetry was often sung, as well as recited and read. Th e earliest surviving Greek works are poems, recognisable through certain formal structures, most notably metre. In ancient Greece, poetry was usually understood as being 'in metre' (emmetros), while discourse 'without metre' (aneu metrou) is prose (see, e.g., Plato Phaedrus 252b6; 258d10-11).

What Makes Writing Academic

“…One way of approaching a history of English academic writing is to locate it within the history of how universities have historically communicated knowledge. Unfortunately this lies far beyond the scope of this book, but, luckily, I can defer instead to historians of scientific and other academic writings, such as Bazerman (1988), Doody et al (2012) and Taub (2017), who have painstakingly documented and analysed an impressive catalogue of written academic genres. These include the ancient world's tradition of communicating science via poems, letters, encyclopaedias, commentaries and biographies, to name a few and via modern-day understandings of 'essay' .…”

“…Several important academic literary and scientific genres re-emerged during this period, including the Chronicle, the Dialogue and the Letters (Bazerman, 1988;Eisenstein, 1983;Taub, 2017). Chronicles were used to record the travels of explorers because this format lent itself to being written on the move and to recording un-analysed geographic, anthropologic and botanical observations.…”

Philosophical engagements with distant sciences

“…However, as Rochberg observes, there were notable continuities throughout the long tradition, such as: 'the focus on signs in heaven and on earth, the prediction of the phenomena valued as signs, observation of cyclical celestial phenomena, response to untoward omens, and increasing attention to interpretation of words used in divinatory contexts ' (2016, 35). Rochberg shows how the divinatory reading of celestial signs went along with other 8 On the diverse and often alien genres of ancient scientific works, see Asper (2007); Taub (2017). ominous activities of the learned scribes, notably extispicy, predictions based on inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals.…”