Can one argue that Ancient Egypt was more advanced than Ancient Rome

[Flying Pig]

Do you have a source for mandatory primary education other than the Spartan agoge? I think you'd have to argue very hard to make that into anything close to an academic education, even at an extremely low level (I'd be surprised, for example, if it included literacy) rather than a brutal sort of basic military training. Even then, bear in mind that only a small minority of people living in Sparta qualified for it, even if we don't count the female half of the population.

 

[Kyriakos]

Do you have a source for mandatory primary education other than the Spartan agoge? I think you'd have to argue very hard to make that into anything close to an academic education, even at an extremely low level (I'd be surprised, for example, if it included literacy) rather than a brutal sort of basic military training. Even then, bear in mind that only a small minority of people living in Sparta qualified for it, even if we don't count the female half of the population.

Well, Plato mentions elementary schooling, i didn't even know this is a point of contention in the first place. Afterall, how else would you expect those Politiai to function as systems with communal participation laws, if their citizens were near entirely illiterate as with the egyptian non-aristocrats/priests, or other concurrent societies?

When Socrates wants to demonstrate how one can get to a knowledge even without any basic, he calls in a non-citizen/servant, so i'd suppose he could just expand that paradigm if most of the actual citizens were illiterate (btw his example there involved basic math, iirc the diagonal, and was about his concept of 'anamnesis').

 

[Atticus]

Lot of things passed as oral tradition in antiquity. One popular tale is that the twelve tables of Roman law didn't survive to posterity because people knew them by heart and didn't feel need to write them down everywhere.

Socrates on the other hand, was he at Menon's house in that dialogue? That would explain why they need to ask for a slave, there weren't necessarily common folks present. On the other hand, you can't know how much of it is just artistic liberty of Plato. Maybe he wanted to demonstrate that even slaves can come up with things.

I'm not saying that there wouldn't have been public education, but if it's general knowledge at least I am lacking it, and not yet convinced.

 

[Lexicus]

Iron/Steel (depending on what you're defining as "ancient Rome") is objectively better than bronze

By what measure? Unless you add some carbon to it iron is softer than bronze. Iron is easier to mass-produce but...seems more like a trade-off to me than an 'objectively better.'

 

[Flying Pig]

Well, Plato mentions elementary schooling, i didn't even know this is a point of contention in the first place. Afterall, how else would you expect those Politiai to function as systems with communal participation laws, if their citizens were near entirely illiterate as with the egyptian non-aristocrats/priests, or other concurrent societies?

When Socrates wants to demonstrate how one can get to a knowledge even without any basic, he calls in a non-citizen/servant, so i'd suppose he could just expand that paradigm if most of the actual citizens were illiterate (btw his example there involved basic math, iirc the diagonal, and was about his concept of 'anamnesis').

Greek democracy doesn't require you to be able to read: the only point at which the ordinary voter used writing was on an ostraka, and - even if we assume that they physically wrote it themselves, rather than asking or paying somebody else to write down the name - there's a leap between being able to copy the signs that you know make up the name 'Cleon', and actually being able to read and write.

Nor does anything in the Meno, which I suppose is what you're going after. The whole point of that dialogue is (as you say) that the slave is a blank canvas - it deliberately doesn't rely on the slave knowing the first thing about geometry, Socrates is saying 'look how even this person can be brought to knowledge'. I'm not arguing that elementary schooling didn't exist, I'm arguing that it was expensive (if it was anything like the Roman system, done by a slave or paid master) and only available to people with money to afford both the teacher and to not have their children work. A big key word in that sentence was 'mandatory', but I'll happily exchange that for 'universal' or even 'routine'. People like Plato, bear in mind, were only exposed to (and interested in) the top end of society: he for one is quite open in his contempt for the great mass of people.

 

[Kyriakos]

Ok, yet Socrates was not from the hugely aristocratic background of Plato (Plato afaik was even related to Solon the legislator...). Socrates was from two working class parents (a mid-wife and apparently some helper-stone-mason working at some point for a sculptor). Protagoras, also, was dirt poor until he was picked up by Democritos.
To argue that up to that point such people did not know ANYTHING AT ALL about either basic greek math or literature, is not very logical, no?

Also note how many thousands went to see theatrical plays. Again it is not realistic to argue that those were only a tiny fraction of the citizens. And the plays do include quite elaborate elements and info on the epics, or even known figures of math/philo (eg Thales, to name one even Aristophanes uses as a name).

 

[Atticus]

Protagoras and Socrates don't prove the point, as they may very well be exceptional individuals who became learned despite being poor. Besides, Socrates didn't know that much, only one thing.

Aristofanes doesn't prove the point either, since you don't have to understand everything to enjoy his plays. That's why they are quite entertaining today too! Also, you have to take into account what the mythology, Homer etc. were to the contemporaries. Maybe they were the popular culture of the day.

EDIT: instead of purely speculating I took a look at the Wikipedia and almost read the first paragraph to find out that there was public education in the ancient Greece. Since it's in Wikipedia it must be true. Still, I don't think it's common knowledge.

 

[Kyriakos]

I was too lazy to look that up in wiki (southeuro-greek, what do you expect) but yeah, i am sure this isn't a point of contention, at least to the degree we discuss about (some years of primary education for all citizens). Maybe something like first 5-6-7 years of school-life, which is longer now and mandatory as well.

 

[Flying Pig]

Again, understanding plays and the epics doesn't imply education - those were parts of oral culture, that you would pick up from being surrounded by all the time. People knew those stories from hearing them and seeing them in art, regardless of being able to read them - and the level of literacy a 5th-century Athenian would have needed to read Homer, which is written in a very different sort of Greek to that in common usage, would have been many times higher than what you can reasonably say ordinary people would have had.

The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article is based on one source (a book review from 1957) which doesn't actually say what it says that it does: I'll pick out a few quotations from the source itself - it's a paper called 'Ancient Education' by Glanville Downey, which I found online:

Neither in theory nor in practice was education thought of as something to be given to all people, nor something that all people had a right to receive

Plato, for example, was less concerned with the education of the ordinary citizen than how to train political technicians

In all discussions of education, education ... was something that could practically and appropriately be given only to those whose natural endowments and circumstances in life fitted them to assimilate the training properly and put it to good use: and it is plain that they were not thinking of universal, uniform, free education

Education was not something for slaves (except for special purposes), or manual labourers, or women

Education as a rule was available only to those who could pay for it, or had the leisure to study with teachers who accepted no fees. Usually, the poor could not afford to have their children educated.

Illiteracy was a natural feature of the educational system

 

[Kyriakos]

^Well, sorry for ruining your anti-pro-ancient Greece party then. Better don't call wiki again here

 

[Plotinus]

Also note how many thousands went to see theatrical plays. Again it is not realistic to argue that those were only a tiny fraction of the citizens. And the plays do include quite elaborate elements and info on the epics, or even known figures of math/philo (eg Thales, to name one even Aristophanes uses as a name).

It seems to me that this is a bit like saying that because Stephen Hawking appears in The Simpsons, the average American understands advanced cosmology.

Look, for example, at the depiction of Socrates in The Clouds. He's nothing like the Socrates of Plato or Xenocrates, but a sort of caricature of what people at the time evidently thought a philosopher was like.

 

[Kyriakos]

I take it you believe Plato's account of the apologia, rather than Xenophon's

Well, while likely most people wouldn't have known of Socrates at that time (he appeared very annoyed that virtually everyone knew Protagoras), that doesn't change the fact that some knowledge of myth and greek math/science was needed to at all have a sense of what is going on. Not that Aristophanes is the best example there, afaik most of his plays are set on concurrent events (Pelop war), but the tragic poets had loads of myth themes going.

Moreover every athenian citizen had to (generically) take part in most of the state's functions open to citizens past some age. Eg Socrates did serve as a judge (or similar) in the day the case of the Argynousae victory (and loss of two ship's crews) was heard at one of the courts. Not just higher class people were summoned to assume such roles- even if it was just for one day.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

By what measure? Unless you add some carbon to it iron is softer than bronze. Iron is easier to mass-produce but...seems more like a trade-off to me than an 'objectively better.'

I take your point but isn't cost and manufacture-ability a pretty good indicator of superiority?

There is a point where the perfect becomes the enemy of the good; particularly in the military. You can produce the 'perfect' weapon system that costs a ton but lose out to an enemy that employs vast numbers of 'good enough' systems.

^Well, sorry for ruining your anti-pro-ancient Greece party then. Better don't call wiki again here

You see, this is why it's hard to even engage you. No one is having an anti-Greece party. People are simply pointing out what they feel is a misrepresentation of Greece. No one is saying Greece was in any way 'inferior' to anyone else in this context, despite the name of the thread lending itself to that kind of conclusion.

 

[mightfire500]

No, and even if they had, that wouldn't be "stealing" any more than we're currently "stealing" from the Romans by using their alphabet.

I was told that ancient Greece never contributed anything original to math and science

that Babylonians and Egyptians already knew many of the greek concepts

is this true?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't think that's entirely true. While it is true that other societies the world over before and after ancient Greece developed much of the same mathematical concepts the Greeks developed, I think it would give them short shrift to say they contributed nothing. On the other hand, yes, their contributions are usually drastically overstated - particularly when viewed through the lens of western perspective.

The typical narrative that is given in the western world is 'such and such formula/concept came down to us from the Greeks; therefore the Greeks were fundamental to our understanding of math/science/whatever'. That narrative completely neglects the independent discovery of the same concepts/formulas by other civilizations which, if not for historical accident, would have wound up in our hands through them instead of the Greeks. It also throws out the important pre-Greek contribution to maths by other civilizations and even the concurrent discoveries being made during the time of the Greeks that they learned about. In other words, every formula/concept that ancient Greek philosophers wrote down that has survived to the present tends to be attributed exclusively to the Greeks even if other civilizations had the same knowledge and even if the Greek philosopher didn't independently discover it all, they merely copied it from abroad.

And finally, it's very hard to prove exactly who discovered what as written/oral records are not infallible and at best are missing lots of the whole story and at worst can be little more than self-serving propaganda. This last bit is not a problem exclusive to the ancient Greeks by any means.

Re Ancient Science -
I am not really comfortable calling much of what any ancient civilization developed a contribution to science as the scientific method didn't exist in ancient times. Sure, there were great observations and empirical datasets developed but there was also a ton of garbage and guesswork involved with ancient 'scientific' discoveries. Science is, after all, a rather modern concept and while there were certainly good contributions to what would become the scientific method before it itself existed, you can't really call them science in and of themselves.

 

[Kyriakos]

^My tone is always joyful. At least identify as much Also you seem to think that i somehow deem discussion in a thread as crucial to something because crucial reasons.

Re your view of 'ancient science' (wot) though, it is plainly wrong, and wouldn't be this if you bothered to at least read some of the texts discussed here as well.

 

[Atticus]

I was told that ancient Greece never contributed anything original to math and science

that Babylonians and Egyptians already knew many of the greek concepts

The first sentence doesn't follow from the second one.

On maths that's plainly and utterly wrong. It's true that Egyptians, Babylonians etc. knew some of the things that the Greeks knew, like the Pythagoras' theorem. However, they had no proofs for these things. Greeks came up with the method of mathematics: taking some things as axioms and deducing the rest from them. That wasn't only the foundation of maths, but also an ideal to which all the science and knowing aimed at for the two following millennia, check Descartes and Spinoza for an example. Someone could say that this ideal even slowed down the scientific progress, but that's another topic.

It's a different thing to think something is true and to know it because you have justification.

Aside to that, Greeks also knew a great deal more than their predecessors, whose knowledge was mostly just arithmetics. Instead of listing all of it, let's just remember that Arkhimedes came up with the basic idea of the integral calculus, and came very close to give it the rigour it achieved not until the 19th century.

Actual sciences is a different thing. Like Hobbsyoyo said before, they didn't really have the method for science then (maths isn't included as science, as it has different method, i.e. it doesn't rely on observation). Aristotle's physics based more on everyday observation and speculation than systematic inquiry. There was reasons for this too, first they didn't have good measuring tools, and foremost, they were in trouble with unreliable observation. They knew very well that you can't always trust your senses, and they had Zeno's paradoxes that were troublesome when you try to even start making a mathematical model of the physical world. Since maths had been so successful, they thought physics should follow the same method too. I'd think it's fair to say that the empirical method had to have a similar triumph (Newton) before it became accepted as the method of physics.

Of course though, Greeks still made progress in physics too. For example, they came up with the sizes and distances of the Moon, Earth and Sun via observation, and some of them based the heliocentric world view on that. What's different from mature physics is that those were more of single facts without a theory to explain them all. So, you could say that the ancient Greek physics is related to the modern in the similar way that the Baylonian or Egyptian maths was related to the ancient Greek maths.

As to what your friend has told to you, I'd think it's just the way people use to speak. It's uncolourful to say things like "The Greeks made use of the knowledge of other civilizations to further the knowledge". It's more fun to say something more flamboyant. Some people may do that to appear smarter. That's what hoaxters rely on too: if you say things confidently enough, people don't require evidence, they are satisfied to be as sure and look like as smart as the guy who says: "Actually, X was overrated, almost everything he did was already done by Y".


Disclaimer: don't trust me on the physics part. Do trust me on the maths.

 

[Kyriakos]

Archimedes was surely one of the most impressive thinkers of the era. He used his scale/balance physical-bound tool (lever) to also provide an archimedian calculus proof for his famous "The volume of a cylinder of periphery x equals the volume of a sphere and a cone of the same periphery".

Also used it in proving if an object supposedly of pure mass (eg gold) was mixed with lesser metals.

Also used it in P, iirc (based on Antiphon's method).

Fermat et al always mention mathematicians including Archimedes, Apollonios, Diophantos and Pappos.

I am very fond of the geometrical proofs. Obviously i am not a mathematician, yet i adore reading/learning of some of the proofs, and sometimes check on the modern adaptations of them as well.

Important: Re physics and ancient Greece: up to Aristotle most philosophers deem epistemic (ie non specific practical) examination of the external world as far lesser an occupation, due to a number of philo reasons.

 

[Flying Pig]

I take it you believe Plato's account of the apologia, rather than Xenophon's

Well, while likely most people wouldn't have known of Socrates at that time (he appeared very annoyed that virtually everyone knew Protagoras), that doesn't change the fact that some knowledge of myth and greek math/science was needed to at all have a sense of what is going on. Not that Aristophanes is the best example there, afaik most of his plays are set on concurrent events (Pelop war), but the tragic poets had loads of myth themes going.

Moreover every athenian citizen had to (generically) take part in most of the state's functions open to citizens past some age. Eg Socrates did serve as a judge (or similar) in the day the case of the Argynousae victory (and loss of two ship's crews) was heard at one of the courts. Not just higher class people were summoned to assume such roles- even if it was just for one day.

I still fail to see how a knowledge of mythology implies formal education. By definition, myths are stories which people tell each other: this is a world without television, remember, and Aristophanes isn't on every night. Telling stories would have been quite a big part of evening entertainment.

On the subject of being 'anti-ancient-Greece': I don't think you have to believe that ancient Greece was excellent in every respect to admire the great things that were done there. To me, Sophocles' plays and Demosthenes' speeches are no less brilliant for the fact that people only had time to listen to them because they didn't have to do the work being done by thousands of slaves. The Spartan stand at Thermopylae is no less an inspiring for the mass murder on which their state was built. I'm no less proud to be British for acknowledging that British people have waved our flag while doing awful things in the past; I don't stop when I see them do it today. It is the great nationalist lie that an admirable country must be perfect, and portraying a country's history as imperfect is unpatriotic. You can admire and be proud of the great bits of history and your country without doing mental gymnastics to excuse or deny the horrible parts.

 

[Kyriakos]

I still fail to see how a knowledge of mythology implies formal education. By definition, myths are stories which people tell each other: this is a world without television, remember, and Aristophanes isn't on every night. Telling stories would have been quite a big part of evening entertainment.

On the subject of being 'anti-ancient-Greece': I don't think you have to believe that ancient Greece was excellent in every respect to admire the great things that were done there. To me, Sophocles' plays and Demosthenes' speeches are no less brilliant for the fact that people only had time to listen to them because they didn't have to do the work being done by thousands of slaves. The Spartan stand at Thermopylae is no less an inspiring for the mass murder on which their state was built. I'm no less proud to be British for acknowledging that British people have waved our flag while doing awful things in the past; I don't stop when I see them do it today. It is the great nationalist lie that an admirable country must be perfect, and portraying a country's history as imperfect is unpatriotic. You can admire and be proud of the great bits of history and your country without doing mental gymnastics to excuse or deny the horrible parts.

You know i said that in jest. And i always consider you a friend :monocle: