Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture

Jason König, Greg Woolf

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781107060067
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316849545
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Self-Assertion and Its Alternatives in Ancient Scientific and Technical Writing
• 2 Philosophical Authority in the Imperial Period
• 3 Philosophical Authority in the Younger Seneca
• 4 Iurisperiti: ‘Men Skilled in Law’
• 5 Making and Defending Claims to Authority in Vitruvius’ De architectura
• 6 Fragile Expertise and the Authority of the Past: The ‘Roman Art of War’
• 7 Conflicting Models of Authority and Expertise in Frontinus’ Strategemata
• 8 The Authority of Writing in Varro’s De re rustica
• 9 The Limits of Enquiry in Imperial Greek Didactic Poetry
• 10 Expertise, ‘Character’ and the ‘Authority Effect’ in the Early Roman History of Dionysius of Halicarnassus
• 11 The Authority of Galen’s Witnesses
• 12 Anatomy and Aporia in Galen’s On the Construction of Fetuses
• 13 Varro the Roman Cynic: The Destruction of Religious Authority in the Antiquitates rerum divinarum
• 14 Signs, Seers and Senators: Divinatory Expertise in Cicero and Nigidius Figulus
• 15 The Public Face of Expertise: Utility, Zeal and Collaboration in Ptolemy’s Syntaxis
• 16 The Authority of Mathematical Expertise and the Question of Ancient Writing More Geometrico
• 17 Authority and Expertise: Some Cross-Cultural Comparisons
• Bibliography
• Index