Circumference: Chapter 2

[Anaxagoras] was eminent for his noble birth and for his riches, and still more so for his magnanimity, inasmuch as he gave up all his patrimony to his relations...and at last he abandoned [his estate] entirely, and devoted himself to the contemplation of subjects of natural philosophy, disregarding politics.

[Anaxagoras] was eminent for his noble birth and for his riches, and still more so for his magnanimity, inasmuch as he gave up all his patrimony to his relations...and at last he abandoned [his estate] entirely, and devoted himself to the contemplation of subjects of natural philosophy, disregarding politics.

A “universal” compendium of astronomical objects produced by one Amenhope around 1100 includes the stars in but five constellations; observed patterns in the risings of other star groups (called “decans”) allowed the Egyptians to tell time at night to within an hour’s accuracy.

Like that of the Babylonians, the Pythagorean universe seems more a construction based on mysticism and aesthetics than the result of empirical study.

Ptolemaeus’s epochal influence has had the effect of making ancient astronomy seem, to us, a lot less diverse than it was.

There is a famous story, recounted by the Roman-era writer Plutarch, of how Pericles (495–429) reassured the helmsman of his ship during a solar eclipse by demonstrating the prosaic reality behind the spectacle.

When Plato, for instance, derides “ordinary” geometricians who “have in view practice only, and are always speaking, in a narrow and ridiculous manner, of squaring and extending and applying and the like,” he does so because “they confuse the necessities of geometry with those of daily life; whereas knowledge is the real object of the whole science.”

Rather than pursuing any single “correct” explanation of some phenomenon, Epicurus advised simultaneous acceptance of any number of explanations, as long as they were all consistent with observation. Indeed, he saw pursuit of a single truth as a symptom of an unbalanced mind, tantamount to superstition!

As the story goes, when he was done birds flew down and pecked away the outlines — a development that gave Alexander pause, until someone suggested that it augured well for the town’s prosperity.

Unlike in classical Athens, however, the power of the city’s civil servants was entirely circumscribed by the king’s, preserving only the outward form, not the substance, of self-government.

Such cities “marked a completely new stage in Mediterranean history,” writes Peter Green, “culminating, three centuries later, in what Horace was to describe as ‘the smoke and wealth and clamor of Rome.’”

The surviving documents tend to be parochial in nature — the kind of material (deeds, wills, receipts, records of litigation, administrative memoranda, and so on) that most often repose in safe, permanent oblivion in provincial archives.

Above all, the river’s reliable yearly inundations had long made the kingdom the breadbasket of the Mediterranean.

After warming up with a description of the tent set up for the feasters, with columns seventy feet tall, room for 130 couches, and a floor strewn with flowers and the skins of exotic beasts, the account speaks of a sumptuous procession led by images of Victory, having golden wings, [bearing] in their hands incense burners nine feet tall...

Instead of borrowing Egyptian terms, the Greeks preferred to revive abandoned Greek ones. Even after two millennia, the contempt implicit in these linguistic refusals is palpable.