Greek Biology & Greek Medicine

by Charles Singer

But with these works of the early part of the fourth century the first stage of Greek biology reaches its finest development. Later Hippocratic treatises which deal with physiological topics are on a lower plane, and we must seek some external cause for the failure. Nor have we far to seek. This period saw the rise of a movement that had the most profound influence on every department of thought. We see the advent into the Greek world of a great intellectual movement as a result of which the department of philosophy that dealt with nature receded before Ethics. Of that intellectual revolution—perhaps the greatest the world has seen—Athens was the site and Socrates (470-399) the protagonist. With the movement itself and its characteristic fruit we are not concerned. But the great successor and pupil of its founder gives us in the Timaeus a picture of the depth to which natural science can be degraded in the effort to give a specific teleological meaning to all parts of the visible Universe. The book and the picture which it draws, dark and repulsive to the mind trained in modern scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has made most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as a result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena, and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism stand to this day as a warning against any system which shall neglect the investigation of nature. But in its decay Platonism dragged science down and destroyed by neglect nearly all earlier biological material. Mathematics, not being a phenomenal study, suited better the Neoplatonic mood and continued to advance, carrying astronomy with it for a while—astronomy that affected the life of man and that soon became the handmaid of astrology; medicine, too, that determined the conditions of man’s life, was also cherished, though often mistakenly, but pure science was doomed.

But though the ethical view of nature overwhelmed science in the end, the advent of the mighty figure of Aristotle (384-322) stayed the tide for a time. Yet the writer on Greek Biology remains at a disadvantage in contrast with the Historian of Greek Mathematics, of Greek Astronomy, or of Greek Medicine, in the scantiness of the materials for presenting an account of the development of his studies before Aristotle. The huge form of that magnificent naturalist completely overshadows Greek as it does much of later Biology.

§ 2. Aristotle

With Aristotle we come in sight of the first clearly defined personality in the course of the development of Greek biological thought—for the attribution of the authorship of the earlier Hippocratic writings is more than doubtful, while the personality of the great man by whose name they are called cannot be provided with those clear outlines that historical treatment demands.

Aristotle was born in 384 b. c. at Stagira, a Greek colony in the Chalcidice a few miles from the northern limit of the present monastic settlement of Mount Athos. His father, Nicomachus, was physician to Amyntas III of Macedonia and a member of the guild or family of the Asclepiadae. From Nicomachus he may have inherited his taste for biological investigation and acquired some of his methods. At seventeen Aristotle became a pupil of Plato at Athens. After Plato’s death in 347 Aristotle crossed the Aegean to reside at the court of Hermias, despot of Atarneus in Mysia, whose niece, Pythias, he married. It is not improbable that the first draft of Aristotle’s biological works and the mass of his own observations were made during his stay in this region, for in his biological writings much attention is concentrated on the natural history of the Island of Lesbos, or Mytilene, that lies close opposite to Atarneus. Investigation has shown that in the History of Animals there are frequent references to places on the northern and eastern littoral of the Aegean, and especially to localities in the Island of Lesbos; on the other hand places in Greece proper are but seldom mentioned.[13] Thus his biological investigations, in outline at least, are probably the earliest of his extant works and preceded the philosophical writings which almost certainly date from his second sojourn in Athens.

Fig. 7. ARISTOTLE

From HERCULANEUM
Probably work of fourth century b. c.

In 342 b. c., at the request of Philip of Macedon, Aristotle became tutor to Philip’s son, Alexander. He remained in Macedonia for seven years and about 336, when Alexander departed for the invasion of Asia, returned to Athens where he taught at the Lyceum and established his famous school afterwards called the Peripatetic. Most of his works were produced during this the closing period of his life between 335 and 323 b. c. After Alexander’s death in 323 and the break up of his empire, Aristotle, who was regarded as friendly to the Macedonian power, was placed in a difficult position. Regarded with enmity by the anti-Macedonian party, he withdrew from Athens and died soon after in 322 b. c. at Chalcis in Euboea at about sixty-two years of age.