Noted scholar's brilliant recapitulation of an especially fertile period for Greek astronomy, physics, mathematics, other sciences. Also illuminating discussions of art, religion, literature, more. "A wonderful book." ? Scientific American.

The development of science in the modern world is often held to depend on such institutions as universities, peer-reviewed journals, and democracy. How, then, did new science emerge in the pre-modern culture of the Hellenistic Egyptian monarchy? Berrey argues that the court society formed around the Ptolemaic pharaohs Ptolemy III and IV (reigned successively 246-205/4 BCE) provided an audience for cross-disciplinary, learned knowledge, as physicians, mathematicians, and mechanicians clothed themselves in the virtues of courtiers attendant on the kings. The multicultural Greco-Egyptian court society prized entertainment that drew on earlier literature, mixed genres and cultures, and highlighted motion and sound. New cross-disciplinary science in the Hellenistic period gained its social currency and subsequent scientific success through its entertainment value as court science. Ancient court science sheds light on the long history of scientific interdisciplinarity.

No more published. Bibliographical footnotes. Bibliography: v. 1, p. [615]; v. 2, p. 528. [1] Ancient science through the Golden Age of Greece.--[2] Hellenistic science and culture in the last three centuries B.C.

The period from the late fourth to the late second century B. C. witnessed, in Greek-speaking countries, an explosion of objective knowledge about the external world. WhileGreek culture had reached great heights in art, literature and philosophyalreadyin the earlier classical era, it is in the so-called Hellenistic period that we see for the ?rst time — anywhere in the world — the appearance of science as we understand it now: not an accumulation of facts or philosophically based speculations, but an or- nized effort to model nature and apply such models, or scienti?ctheories in a sense we will make precise, to the solution of practical problems and to a growing understanding of nature. We owe this new approach to scientists such as Archimedes, Euclid, Eratosthenes and many others less familiar todaybut no less remarkable. Yet, not long after this golden period, much of this extraordinary dev- opment had been reversed. Rome borrowed what it was capable of from the Greeks and kept it for a little while yet, but created very little science of its own. Europe was soon smothered in theobscurantism and stasis that blocked most avenues of intellectual development for a thousand years — until, as is well known, the rediscovery of ancient culture in its fullness paved the way to the modern age.

This is the first comprehensive study of what remains of the writings of Aristotle's student Eudemus of Rhodes on the history of the exact sciences. These fragments are crucial to our understanding of the content, form, and goal of the Peripatetic historiography of science. The first part of the book presents an analysis of those trends in Presocratic, Sophistic and Platonic thought that contributed to the development of the history of science. The second part provides a detailed study of Eudemus' writings in their relationship with the scientific literature of his time, Aristotelian philosophy and the other historiographic genres practiced at the Lyceum: biography, medical and natural-philosophical doxography. Although Peripatetic historiography of science failed in establishing itself as a continuous genre, it greatly contributed both to the birth of the Arabic medieval historiography of science and to the development of this genre in Europe in the 16th-18th centuries.