Why is the Study of Science Important to the Ancient World

A major part of the corpus of ancient writing is scientific in character ? Galen being perhaps the most prolific non-Christian author extant from antiquity, and the writings of the Alexandrian mathematicians offering some of our most substantial evidence for Hellenistic civilization. There are good reasons for that: science was seen by the ancients themselves to be constitutive to Greek civilization, while many later civilizations took Greek science as their model ? right down to our own modern science. The study of ancient science is therefore rewarding both for what it teaches us about classical antiquity as well as for what it teaches us about ourselves.

Classicists have, largely speaking, come late to the study of science, perhaps because traditionally the study of the Classics was taken to be the alternative to a technical education. Such disciplinary boundaries have fallen down in the last generation, and the study of ancient science is today among the most exciting areas in the field.

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