Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture

Description

How did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine, architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and philosophy - focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the literature of the Roman Empire. It draws attention to habits that these different fields had in common, while also showing how individual texts and authors manipulated standard techniques of self-authorisation in distinctive ways. It stresses the importance of competitive and assertive styles of self-presentation, and also examines some of the pressures that pulled in the opposite direction by looking at authors who chose to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge or resisted close identification with narrow versions of expert identity. A final chapter by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd offers a comparative account of scientific authority and expertise in ancient Chinese, Indian and Mesopotamian culture. "A major strand of recent ancient-science scholarship has given prominence to questions about how ancient scientists represented themselves and their disciplines, and particularly how they made their writings authoritative. /.../ ancient experts had to work much harder than their modern counterparts to convince their audiences and potential clients and students, by rhetorical means, of their competence, and so tended to reach for selfassertive and ostentatiously innovative first-person personas. In that sense attention to persona and authority is perhaps an even more obvious priority for the ancient world than for modern science, given that the scientific ‘I’ was often so much more prominent. There are now many publications which pay serious attention to these issues for specific texts and authors. The work of Galen, the great medical writer of the second century CE, is an obvious example. The extraordinary range of his surviving works and the prominence of his own personality in many of his writings make him an ideal candidate for viewing ancient scientific self-assertion in action. And in many respects his work is typical of ancient scientificwritingmore broadly.He gives a prominent role tohis own persona. He is consistently competitive: he regularly debunks rival practitioners and rival disciplines which do not measure up to the philosophically inspired medical knowledge he himself espouses. He draws attention to his own moral virtue in ways which bring an impression of reliability. He also draws attention to his remarkably wide learning. His authority rests in part on his intricate knowledge of the work of his predecessors, and his alignment of himselfwith that tradition, especially in his opportunistic appropriation of the writings of the Hippocratic corpus so that they come to match his own medical views. At the same time he repeatedly challenges received wisdom. In some cases, he does that through a claim to personal experience and observation, for example in his frequent narration of incidents from his wide clinical experience and in his frequent accounts of experimentation on the bodies of animals (in some cases conducted in front of an audience, in a way which allows him to indulge in public refutation and humiliation of his poorly informed rivals). He also repeatedly draws attentiontothe complexity of themedical expertisewhichhe espouses,writing at length on the various subdivisions of the art of medicine, and then in turn subdividing, in enormously complicated ways, the various subdisciplines of medical knowledge, so as to leave an impressive sense of his command over a very sophisticated body of knowledge.9 Many other authors too have begun to be analysed for their use of these and other related techniques of self-presentation, even if there are few other authors who use them anything like so richly and forcefully as Galen. One of our arguments in this volume, however, is that even more needs to be done to understand the connections between different bodies of expertise and different authors in their techniques of self-authorisation."