Sciences et techniques dans l’Antiquité: l’homme romain, héritier de la Grèce

Abstrakt

The scientific thought in the Greco-Roman world appeared with the birth of philosophy and the first philosophers in Greece (Thales, Pythagoras): they tried to explain the world and the nature without taking into account the traditional gods of the polytheism. There are two great philosophies in classical Antiquity: Epicureans (atomistic theory) and Stoics (world based on logos and ratio). The first great philosopher who founded a scientific thought in Aristotle. A great school of scientists flourished in Alexandria (Archimedes, Euclid, Eratosthenes, Heron, Claudius Ptolemy). In the Roman world, education was based on artes liberales and a system called trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and quadrivium (including arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). This system is well represented by Martianus Capella, Boethius, Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville. It survived during the Middle Age. In Rome, Lucretius exposed the Epicurean philosophy and Seneca was a Stoic philosopher. Pliny the Elder composed his great encyclopedia, Historia naturalis (thirty-seven books); a special mention is due to Vitruvius for the architecture (De architectura), a science in which the Romans really succeeded. It is well known that the Romans were great builders (the construction is based on a kind of cement, opus caementicium). We must also focus on the link between science and poetry, in technical literature, for example in the Georgics of Vergil.