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31
Jan
2025

Recovering an ancient scientific culture: The case of the Roman artes

James L. Zainaldin

One of the most significant legacies of Greek and Roman antiquity is the vast body of scientific and technical writings which, copied and transmitted across the centuries, has exerted a profound influence on the development of the modern world. Certain centuries, certain places, have often captured the modern imagination as particularly significant for this tradition: the classical Athens of Plato and Aristotle, for example, or the Hellenistic Alexandria of Euclid and Herophilus. One period that has been less widely appreciated is that of the early Roman Empire (roughly 25 BCE to 100 CE). This was not the epoch that produced the (predominantly Greek) texts most widely admired, studied, or mythologized in traditional histories of science and technology, but it is in truth one of the most momentous chapters in Greco-Roman antiquity.

The early Roman Empire witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of the artes, the prose treatises in Latin that offered systematic and comprehensive overviews of a variety of disciplines. These early Imperial artes were the best and most ambitious works, and in some cases also the first, for many branches of specialized knowledge at Rome. In many instances, such as for architecture and agriculture, they are the only or most important textual source in their field to survive antiquity and thus played a special role in the millennia to come.

The work On Architecture by Vitruvius, published sometime between 35–25 BCE, was the first full-scale Latin treatise on its subject and the best of its kind to survive to survive from antiquity. Of Celsus’ Arts, dating from the first part of the first century CE, there remain only the eight celebrated books on medicine – a critical source for historians of medicine today – but his work once also included agriculture, the art of war, rhetoric, philosophy, and more. Columella published his On Agriculture in the early 60s, the greatest and most wide-ranging agricultural treatise to be transmitted from Greco-Roman antiquity. In the art of war, the Roman statesman Frontinus left behind two influential works: one supplying precepts for generalship, and the other, called Stratagems, presenting a collection of historical exempla; both likely date to the latter years of the Emperor Domitian’s reign. Under the Flavians and Trajan, the texts which would form the nucleus of the Roman land-surveying writings were also penned by Frontinus (as it seems), among many others. Quintilian’s Oratorical Education appeared near the end of the century. Finally, there is Pliny’s Natural History – not an ars, but embracing in the vast sweep of its ambition the spirit and subject of many artes, especially agriculture and medicine. Other artes, now lost, could be added, but these are enough to make the point.

As I argue in my book The artes and the Emergence of a Scientific Culture in the Early Roman Empire, it is no coincidence that these many notable works of literature appeared in the same epoch. Nor is this early Roman Empire marked out arbitrarily. Rather, I maintain that the artes of this age represent a coherent and unified intellectual movement: more precisely, the emergence of a uniquely Roman scientific culture.

My claim that the artes are “unified” is critical, because it is the foundation for the notion of a literary, intellectual, or scientific culture that can stand up to study. But in truth, the artes are very rarely read together today – and that is because they have been made, by and large, to suit our own age of scholarly specialization. Each ars has its scholarly specialists, who have set their findings into the sweep of disciplinary histories. Few scholars outside of those who concentrate on the respective disciplines spend much time with an author like Celsus or Vitruvius or Columella. Why would anyone want to read “technical literature” anyway?

Yet in my view, this perspective is deeply anachronistic – as is the notion of “technical” literature” itself. The Romans themselves did not understand the artes in this narrow way. If you don’t believe me, take an ancient witness. When the great Roman rhetorician Quintilian sought to inspire his Roman readers to strive for the pinnacle of learning in his own field, rhetoric, he brought forth four exemplary Romans who, he declares, mastered and transmitted through writing almost every discipline worth knowing something about (Institutio oratoria 12.11.22–4, my translation):

Antiquity has provided us with so many teachers and so many examples to emulate that that there may seem to be no age more fortunate to be born into than our own, for whose education earlier generations expended so much effort. So M. Cato was – one and the same man! – a general of the highest distinction, a man of wisdom, an orator, an historian, an extremely skilled lawyer and agriculturist . . . How much did Varro hand down to us – indeed, nearly everything there is to know! What means for speaking did M. Tullius Cicero not already possess? What more need I say, when even Cornelius Celsus, a man of moderate ability, not only composed works on all these arts, but also left precepts at even greater length on the art of war, agriculture, and medicine? He was worthy, simply in virtue of his intention, of our credence that he knew all of these things!

Quintilian is speaking here of a public intellectual ideal associated with Roman authors of the broadest learning and recognition – Cicero and Cato are still familiar names, and Varro was reputed the most learned Roman in his day! – not with narrow specialists. I suggest that, writ large, Quintilian’s polymathic ideal is none other than that of the artes, embodied in the treatises that marked out the extents of what Roman inquiry could achieve.

If my proposal is correct, it is natural to ask, what would happen if we approached the artes of the early Empire together, rather than in fragmented isolation? What would happen if we read the artes expansively, and through ancient eyes, and not narrowly, in the modern specialists’ terms? This is the project of my book. In it, I do not take the unity of the artes in the early Empire for granted but both try to demonstrate that the artes were unified and show how they were unified by close study, synthetic study of the texts themselves: specifically, those on architecture (Vitruvius), medicine (Celsus), agriculture (Columella), the art of war (Frontinus), and land-surveying (Frontinus and Hyginus among others). I aim not only to renovate our understanding of the early Imperial artes in their ancient literary context, but also to bring the artes to a wider audience of scholars today in classics, history of science, history, and philosophy in order to show how these treatises deserve a place in literary, intellectual, and scientific histories until now denied to them.

The effort of re-reading these treatises is well worth it. Not only are they revealed to be richly interesting and intellectually ambitious works of literature that shed light on the Roman experience of the world far beyond their disciplines, they also point to a larger phenomenon that remains largely unheralded until now – the emergence of a uniquely Roman scientific culture.

Image description: Centrale Montemartini

The artes and the Emergence of
a Scientific Culture in the Early
Roman Empire by James L. Zainaldin

About The Author

James L. Zainaldin

JAMES L. ZAINALDIN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. He has published on the scientific and technical tra...

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