Ionia and early Greek science
Free inquiry prevailed here, which was at the crossroads of
civilizations, great cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia met and cross-fertilised
here in a vigorous manner. There was a confrontation of prejudices, languages
and gods. Each culture claimed its god as the most powerful.
They began to
think that there might be principles, forces, and laws of nature, through which
the world could be understood. Thus Ionia became the place where science was
born.
Thales of Miletus
He was the first Ionian scientist. He had travelled in Egypt
and was conversant with the knowledge of Babylon. By his astronomical
calculations, he rightly predicted a solar eclipse.
He rightly measured the
height of a pyramid by comparing the length of its shadow with that cast by a
stick of known height. He formulated many geometrical theorems which Euclid
codified centuries later.
He was the creator of geometry as a science. A
student of the history of science will see a clear continuity in the intellectual
tradition from Thales of Euclid to Isaac Newton.
Thales was a
statesman of great wisdom, a successful businessman who established a monopoly
in olive oil and a great astronomer. He is the father of Western philosophy.
His attainments so varied and deep, won him a place among the famed seven sages
of Greece.
Our knowledge of his philosophic and scientific speculations is
scanty. We have no direct quotations from him, Aristotle frequently quotes him
and says that Thales believed write to be the stuff of which all things are
made.
Anaximander of Miletus
He was a friend and colleague of Thales. He examined the
moving shadow cast by a vertical stick and determined accurately the length of
the year. He was the first person in Greece to make a sundial, a world map and
a celestial globe that showed the patterns of constellations.
He proposed
the spontaneous origin of life in mud. The first animals were fish covered with
spines. Some descendants of these fishes eventually abandoned the water and
moved to dry land where they evolved into other animals by the transmutation of
one form into another. Thus he was nearer to the modern view of science than
any other thinker of ancient times.
Pythagoras
He was a Greek philosopher and mathematician, born in Samos.
He was instructed in the teachings of the early Ionian philosophers. He
travelled, widely and was initiated into the doctrines of the Egyptian priests.
Being very much disgusted with the tyranny of Polycrates he left Samos and
settled in Groton, a Greek colony in southern Italy. Here he founded in 530 BC
the moral and religious movement known as the Pythagorean School, the
Pythagoreans led a pious life and followed obedience and silence, abstinence
from food, simplicity in dress and the habit of frequent self-examination. They
followed certain mysteries and believed in the immortality and transmigration
of souls.
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| Pythagoras |
They made
commendable studies in numbers and enriched arithmetic. Number represented for
them the ultimate principle of all proportion, order, and harmony in the
universe. Through such studies, they established a scientific foundation for
mathematics.
In geometry, their great discovery was the Pythagorean Theorem. Their astronomy marked an
important advance in ancient scientific thought because they were the first to
consider the earth as a globe revolving with the other planets.
They thought
that the heavenly bodies are arranged in a harmonics way and they move
according to a numerical scheme. This led them to think that the movement of
the spheres gives rise to a musical sound – the “harmony of the spheres”
.
The doctrines
of Pythagoras strongly influenced Plato. The philosophy of Pythagoras is known
only through the works of his disciples.
Hippocrates of Cos (father
of medicine)
Among almost all the primitive tribe illness was attributed
to attacks by spirits and ghosts or to their actual entry into the body of the
sufferer. Illness was thought to be a punishment for sin.
So this disease was
fought by exercise or propitiating spirits and demons. The priests were doctors.
Imhotep was the Egyptian god of healing and Aesculapius was the ancient Greek
god of healing. Temples were erected to these gods by grateful worshipers.
For the first
time, practical medicine was separated from religion and philosophy by
Hippocrates in 420 BC. He laid a scientific basis for medicine by declaring that
diseases were not due to the interference of gods but due to natural
causes. In this writing, he ignored all the gods and held that disease was a
natural phenomenon governed by natural laws.
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| Hippocrates of Cos (father of medicine) |
The actual
place and time of birth of Hippocrates are not known. Tradition dates his birth
to 460 BC. He is mentioned in Plato’s dialogues and in the writings of
Aristotle, who venerated him as the great physician.
The basic principle established by Hippocrates was ‘precise
observation’. He rejected speculation and guesses and emphasized the ‘exact
knowledge obtained from observation’.
However, while attempting to discover the
true causes of disease, he believed that the attempting to discover the true
causes of disease, he believed that four elements earth, air, fire and
water were represented in the body by four body fluids or “humors” blood,
phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.
In a healthy person, these four exist in a
harmonious proportion. When this harmony is disturbed disease is caused. So
cure meant restoring this harmony. These fanciful notions remained the accepted
doctrine till the mid-nineteenth century.
The
therapeutic means at his disposal were few and weak. But he taught that more
valuable than drugs were diet and exercise. Sedentary persons are advised to
walk. He also recommended moderation in eating, drinking, exercising and
sleeping. From the clinical standpoint, the most famous of all his writings are
his records of actual cases. Some forty-two of them have survived.
Hippocrates knew little of anatomy except for the bones. His
knowledge of the internal organs, arteries, veins and nerves was practically
very weak because among the Greeks dissection of the human body was forbidden
by the prejudice of religion and custom.
Hippocrates
was meticulous in his direction to physicians including such details as the
scrupulous cleanliness of the operating room, instruments, and the hands of the
physician.
He must be a man of honour, in good health, sympathetic and friendly,
properly dressed, careful to avoid notoriety and a philosopher in outlook. Out
of these high standards for the physician came the celebrated ‘Hippocratic
oath’.
Though he had
written only four or five treatises, nearly 80 others by nineteen different
later authors are attributed to him. His main achievement was the introduction
of a scientific point of view and scientific medical literature and clinical
archives.
Thus rebelling against myths and superstitions prevalent among the
physicians of his day, he laid a solid foundation for the study and for the
practice of the healing arts.
Greek technology
Around 540 B C. on the island of Samos, there came to power
tyrant named Polycrates. He was an international pirate too. Yet, he was a
generous patron of the arts, sciences and engineering. He made war on his neighbours
and oppressed his own people. Hearing an invasion from neighbours and oppressed his
own people.
Hearing invasions from neighbours, he surrounded his capital city with
a massive wall, about six kilometres long, whose remains stand to this day. To
carry water from a distant spring he ordered to build a great tunnel through a
mountain.
Two cutting were dug from either end which met almost perfectly in
the middle. The tunnel, one kilometre long, took about fifteen years to
complete. It is proof of the civil engineering skill of the Ionians. It was
built in part by slaves in chains, captured by the pirate ships of Polycrates.