BMCR 2009.08.25: Volk on Keyser, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and Its Many Heirs

Paul T. Keyser, Georgia L. Irby-Massie, The Encyclopedia of Ancient
Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and Its Many Heirs.  London/New
York:  Routledge, 2008.  Pp. x, 1062.  ISBN 9780415340205.  $360.00.

Reviewed by Katharina Volk, Columbia University ([email protected])
Word count:  2175 words
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The Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists (EANS), edited by Paul
T. Keyser and Georgia L. Irby-Massie, is a remarkable achievement,
covering in its 2,053 entries a wide variety of scientific authors who
range in time from Homer to around AD 650 and in place from India to
Britain.  Given that "science" is nearly impossible to define,
especially in the context of premodern societies, the editors have
wisely decided on an inclusive approach, using as the sole criterion
for selection whether the author's "endeavor was to understand or model
some aspect of the natural world on the basis of investigation and
reason" (1).  The EANS thus covers specialists in the fields of
agriculture, alchemy, architecture, astrology, astronomy, biology,
cosmology, geography, harmonics, mathematics, mechanics, medicine,
meteorology, metrology, optics, pharmacy, physiognomy, psychology, and
veterinary medicine, as well as encyclopedists, doxographers, and
paradoxographers.  Most entries are on individuals, but some treat
trends or schools (e.g., Babylonian astronomy), anonymous sources
(including 44 papyri), or even objects (e.g., the Anticythera device
and the Lion Horoscope of Commagene).

This comprehensiveness, coupled with the compilers' diligence in
ferreting out obscure authors, makes the EANS a resource like no other.
As the statistics-happy editors point out (5), less than 25% of their
entries are found in such standard English-language reference works as
the Oxford Classical Dictionary or the Dictionary of Scientific
Biography; even Brill's New Pauly (the English version of the Neuer
Pauly), once completed, will cover only about 40% of the material of
the EANS.  Furthermore, 276 names (over one-eighth of the entries) are
effectively new to modern scholarship: 121 of these are medical writers
mentioned previously only by Johann Albert Fabricius in volume 13 of
his Bibliotheca Graeca of 1726; the remaining 155 do not appear in any
reference work.

About half the entries, including all the major ones, were written by
119 international scholars, many of them outstanding specialists in
their fields.  The editors themselves penned the remaining articles,
including most on the minor or next-to-unknown figures.  I should note
that in reading and assessing the entries, I have primarily
concentrated on my own interests, which include astronomy and
astrology, philosophy, and Latin authors, and my remarks in what
follows will focus on these.  I am working on the assumption that my
observations apply to the EANS as a whole, though it would be
interesting to know how specialists in, for example, medicine or some
of the more technological fields judge the volume.

As is perhaps not surprising, the quality of the entries varies
considerably.  Many are excellent, a few are mediocre, and some are so
idiosyncratic or otherwise problematic that readers would be well
advised to consult instead a more level-headed source, such as the OCD.
There are also great differences in style and structure.  Apparently
no firm guidelines were given, and it was left to the authors what to
include or not.  As a result (to take just one issue), some entries
abound in biographical information, while others contain hardly any.
We thus learn in detail about the military and political careers of
Julius Caesar and Germanicus, while the article on Cicero tells us
nothing about his life and does not even mention that he was also
active in politics.  Instead, we find a perceptive discussion of
Cicero's intellectual importance both in his own time and in later
periods, information of a kind lacking from many other entries.

The relative length of the articles leads to some skewing of
perspectives.  The entry on M. Tullius Cicero--to stay with this
example--is followed by one on his brother Q. Tullius Cicero, included
in the EANS by virtue of a poetic fragment attributed to him that
treats the zodiac.  The leisurely exposition on Quintus is about
one-third the length of the highly compressed discussion of Marcus,
giving a distorted impression of the relative significance of the two
brothers.  Obviously, the encyclopedia format--at least in the case of
a one-volume, printed book--necessitates a word limit for entries,
which means that major figures end up getting comparatively short
shrift.  Still, it is jarring when after only three and a-half pages on
Aristotle (one of the longest entries in the EANS and an outstanding
example of how to convey maximal information in minimal space), we find
eight pages on individual pseudo-Aristotelian works.

The lack of a common format means that some contributors very carefully
document each piece of information they provide, while others
indiscriminately report often questionable doxographical and
biographical material.  The plain statement that "Thales said all was
water" (779) is the kind of thing one would not like to read in a
student's term paper.  More problematic is the narrative of Vergil's
life that reports without any qualification that "[a]fter moving to
Naples," the poet "joined an Epicurean school led by Siron and became
acquainted with Philodemos.  During the veteran-resettlement program of
42-40 BCE his family's estate was confiscated, then apparently restored
through the intervention of his patron, Asinius Pollio" (824).

A widespread problem is the failure of many authors to make a clear
distinction between a writer's extant and lost works.  The otherwise
exemplary entry on Pliny, for example, could well raise readers' hopes
that they might be able to get their hands on Pliny's manual on
throwing javelins from horseback.  Positively misleading is the
statement, in the article on Lucan, that "[h]is best known works are
the Siluae and the Bellum Ciuile" (83).  Not surprisingly, nothing more
is said about the Siluae, a title known to us only from the Lucan
biography of the late-antique grammarian Vacca.

Despite the claim of the subtitle that the EANS covers a "tradition"
with "many heirs," it is not easy to get a sense from the book how
individual figures and achievements are connected.  As already
mentioned, reception (whether in antiquity or beyond) does not figure
large in most articles, and while there is the usual cross-referencing
(names printed in small capitals are ones that have their own entries),
there are no "see also" sections or other mechanisms for opening up the
discussion.  Readers of the highly informative article on Epicurus, for
instance, get no sense that there were Epicureans after the master, who
they were, and what they were up to.  In order to find out, they would
need to look up "Epicurean" in the Glossary (on which see further
below), where all related entries are listed.  This system is
cumbersome, and not all readers may realize that they have to take this
extra step.

Sometimes, a strand in the larger intellectual tradition gets entirely
lost.  The article on Aratus makes no mention of the fact that the
Phaenomena became one of the most popular poems of antiquity, served
for centuries as a textbook of astronomy, and occasioned numerous
commentaries.  It states in general terms that the work was repeatedly
translated into Latin, but no details are given, and since there is no
entry for "Aratea" either, readers who did not know about Aratus'
reception in Rome will not find out from the EANS and those who were
hoping to learn more will be forced to look up separately all the
individual translators.  If they do so, they will encounter further
obstacles.  While there is an entry on Germanicus, the already stuffed
article on Cicero does not mention his translation of Aratus, and the
pitifully short discussion of Avienus contains only the briefest
reference (ditto for Varro of Atax).  By contrast, the
disproportionately long entry on Ovid tells us what each of the two
tiny fragments of his Phaenomena is about.  Though the article on
Vergil dutifully reports Aratean influence (the one on Manilius does
not), and though there are numerous individual entries on commentators
of his poem, the overall significance of Aratus (not exactly a major
scientist, but still an important figure in the history of science) is
not apparent from the EANS.

However, one of the great joys of encyclopedias in general and the EANS
in particular is not so much looking up central figures (on whom
information is easy to come by elsewhere, after all) as having the
opportunity to encounter previously unknown characters and facts.  With
its stress on novelty, the EANS is perfect for browsing, and the dozens
of short notices on obscure scientists, most of them written by the
editors themselves, are colorful gems in this Wunderkammer.  Who would
not be delighted to find out about Agesias of Megara, "cited for crane
ethology by the Paradoxographus Vaticanus" (45); Calliphanes, an
"authority on Libyan hermaphrodites" (464); and the medical writer
Apollodorus of Citium, who "recommended crushed radish in water as an
antidote to mistletoe poisoning" (108)?  The comprehensiveness of the
EANS indeed borders on the marvelous.  I had made a list of figures
that I consider, well, marginal and was impressed to find each and
every one of them in the work, including such not-exactly-household
names as the first-century BC Latin didactic poet Egnatius and Fronto
the astrologer, quoted for his antiscia theory by Firmicus Maternus.

It is in the copious appendices that the editors get carried away by
their encyclopedic urge to a point that transcends the utilitarian.
Some parts of these 200+ pages of what one might think of as bonus
features are genuinely helpful.  These include the already-mentioned
Glossary, which explains common terms used in the entries: mostly
philosophical schools, philosophical and medical terms, and the names
of plants (some accompanied by illustrations from the Athos
Dioscurides, as explained in a learned disquisition on the manuscripts
of Dioscurides, which follows the Glossary--but is, unfortunately, not
cross-referenced in the entry on Dioscurides).  Also very useful is a
list of all entries by topic; this is where you go if you want to find
all agricultural authors or all encyclopedists.  The various indices,
by contrast, seem inspired by nothing so much as an unfettered delight
in classification: scientists are categorized not only by ethnicity and
the language in which they wrote, but also according to whether they
were female, poets, monotheists, or rulers.  I am sure I am not the
only person to be reminded of the Chinese encyclopedia ("Celestial
Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge") playfully reported by Jorge Luis
Borges as classifying animals as "(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e)
mermaids" all the way up to "(n) those that resemble flies from a
distance" (in Borges's "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins").

The benevolent knowledge of the editors is on evidence in the
monumental Gazetteer, 55 pages that list "all 290 or more sites and all
35 or more regions from which around 1000 ancient scientists are
attested or considered to have originated" (855).  This catalogue, of
which Pliny would have been proud, is an obvious labor of love: it
gives brief historical sketches and secondary literature, as well as
the modern place name and--"[b]ecause modern names are subject to
change" (855)--the longitude and latitude of each town!  Perhaps it
attests to my lack of imagination that I fail to see the use of this
particular appendix for the readers of the EANS, though I assume that
if you look at the world with the ambition of an encyclopedist, more is
always better than less, and if you can have an Encyclopedia of the
Places of Origin of Ancient Natural Scientists, why not?  I only
briefly mention that there is also a frankly amazing index of all the
plants that make an appearance in the EANS (beyond those included in
the Glossary), which first lists them alphabetically according to their
Greek, Latin, or English names and then provides a second list by
binomial taxonomy.

To end on a more mundane note, the volume is generally attractive and
well produced, with a nice cover picture of the Anticythera device.
The typographic conventions (use of bold, underlining, small caps,
etc.) take some getting used to, as does the consistent transliteration
of Greek names, with the more common Latinate or Anglicized forms used
only in special cases (the reader will notice that I have tacitly
reverted to Latinate spelling for the purpose of this review).  This is
a matter of taste, though I note that while most classicists will have
no problem with finding Heraclitus under Herakleitos, historians of
science who specialize in more recent periods--and who might otherwise
use the EANS with great profit--may end up confused.  I myself was more
perturbed by the spelling of Latin names: if u is used for both /u/ and
/w/ in the lower case, then V should be its equivalent in the upper
case, but the EANS uses V only at the beginning of names and only if it
is a consonant, and U word-internally throughout.  This enables the
editors to keep names separate that begin with U- and V-, but in turn
gives us such atrocities as VITRUUIUS.

Needless to say, all serious libraries need to own this book (which is
also available in electronic form).  Most individuals will balk at the
price of $360, but if you can afford it, you will have bought yourself
a book of wonders.