Overview

What did the Romans know about their world? Quite a lot, as Daryn Lehoux makes clear in this fascinating and much-needed contribution to the history and philosophy of ancient science. Lehoux contends that even though many of the Romans’ views about the natural world have no place in modern science—the umbrella-footed monsters and dog-headed people that roamed the earth and the stars that foretold human destinies—their claims turn out not to be so radically different from our own. Lehoux draws upon a wide range of sources from what is unquestionably the most prolific period of ancient science, from the first century BC to the second century AD. He begins with Cicero’s theologico-philosophical trilogy On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, and On Fate, illustrating how Cicero’s engagement with nature is closely related to his concerns in politics, religion, and law. Lehoux then guides readers through highly technical works by Galen and Ptolemy, as well as the more philosophically oriented physics and cosmologies of Lucretius, Plutarch, and Seneca, all the while exploring the complex interrelationships between the objects of scientific inquiry and the norms, processes, and structures of that inquiry. This includes not only the tools and methods the Romans used to investigate nature, but also the Romans’ cultural, intellectual, political, and religious perspectives. Lehoux concludes by sketching a methodology that uses the historical material he has carefully explained to directly engage the philosophical questions of incommensurability, realism, and relativism. By situating Roman arguments about the natural world in their larger philosophical, political, and rhetorical contexts, What Did the Romans Know? demonstrates that the Romans had sophisticated and novel approaches to nature, approaches that were empirically rigorous, philosophically rich, and epistemologically complex.     

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Reviews

Brilliantly rethinks both the Roman and our own approaches to the cosmos.... Between the coherent past world that the Romans made and the presumed timelessness of our scientific world, Lehoux leaves us not with an unbridgeable chasm but with his pragmatic realism, born at the confluence of ancient science, historical epistemology and the philosophy of science. First rate. (Times Higher Education)

What Did the Romans Know? is a brilliant achievement. Equally historical and philosophical, Lehoux's book is simultaneously sophisticated and accessible. Virtually every page presents provocative and well-grounded insights that reshape what we thought we knew about the Romans and their interconnected world of nature, law, and religion. It is required reading for historians and philosophers, classicists, and anyone interested in antiquity and the bases of human knowledge about the natural world. --Lawrence M. Principe, Johns Hopkins University

Author Information

Daryn Lehoux is professor of classics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of Astronomy, Weather, and Calendars in the Ancient World.

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