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Essay Review: Early Greek Astronomy: Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle

European astronomy, like so much else in European science, begins in Greece. It is from the Greeks that later centuries took their astronomical notions, ideas, models, systems, methods. A study of the early history of Greek astronomy can therefore be fruitful in more ways than one: it can illuminate the emergence of ideas against their background, and, at the same time, show how these ideas influenced later developments. Unfortunately, the evidence for the doctrines of astronomical thinkers (who, in any case, were mostly interested in astronomy only as a sideline) is not only very scanty, but often contradictory, anachronistic, unreliable and, always, fragmentary. Any reconstruction of these doctrines must therefore be based on a critical evaluation of the evidence and, in any case, will always be to some extent at least conjectural and speculative. Caution is certainly indicated in the use not only of ancient reports (sometimes many centuries later than the thinkers with whom they are concerned) but also in accepting modern reconstructions. Such caution is indeed recommended by Dr Dicks, the author of the book here under review. He is, of course, not the first to recommend or to practise this critical attitude; but warnings against credulity never come amiss. The author is equally right and in equally good company when he warns us against reading into early scientific thought ideas appropriate only to a later stage of development. In this volume the author treats Greek astronomy from its beginnings to the end of the classical age. We hear about the astronomical ideas of the Presocratics, of Plato and Eudoxus, Callippus and Aristotle. Much attention is paid here to the origin of the constellations and to the influence of Babylonian astronomy on that of the Greeks. Aristotle is chosen as the terminal point since after him mathematical astronomy undergoes a relatively rapid development along different lines. The author promises another volume dealing with later Greek astronomy. Dr Dicks is, of course, right in pointing out that early astronomy had intimate connections with the practical need to measure time, but he surely exaggerates somewhat when he says that the primary aim of Greek astronomy was the establishment of a scientific treatment of solar, lunar and stellar phenomena to facilitate the measurement of time, and that Ptolemaic planetary theory is no more than an ingenious appendage to this aim. Any reader of Ptolemy's own introduction to the Almagest knows that that astronomer would indignantly deny the primacy of the practical utility to be derived from astronomy; and a reader of Plato and Aristotle cannot but be impressed by their insistence on the desirability of knowledge for its own sake. In any case, the tendency towards theorizing for its own sake is so typically Greek that it hardly needs any exemplification. To diminish the importance of planetary theories in the development of Greek astronomical thought is really to disregard one of its most important constituents. In his discussion of the early period Dicks naturally has something to say on Babylonian astronomy. Here, bearing in mind his oft-repeated warnings against the uncritical acceptance of modern scholars' reconstructions, one is somewhat doubtful of our author's statement to the effect that in Babylonian astronomy-astrology celestial phenomena were thought of as affecting events on Earth, first a country as a whole and later the lives of particular individuals. That heavenly bodies and their movements and relative positions have an influence on the lives of men is, of course, a dogma of