The history of knowledge might still be described as an emerging field in the cultural strand of history. While in the last decades it has mainly developed in medieval, early modern, and modern history, it is also becoming a dynamic field for ancient history. To be sure, the study of technical treatises and sciences has a long tradition in the Classics, but it has mostly confined itself to individual disciplines and their authoritative representatives. The history of knowledge, instead, has a broader approach and aims to examine knowledge beyond the sciences. In this sense it departs from the study of individual scientific disciplines as doctrines and opens up space for questions about different kinds of knowledge, about different (non-scientific) actors, practices and settings, or about the (literary) constitution and transformation of knowledge.
The monograph of James L. Zainaldin lies exactly between these two strands: the history of science and the history of knowledge. In a synthetic approach, he examines Latin technical literature across (ancient) disciplinary boundaries. He focuses on the Early Roman Empire and aims to illustrate architecture, agriculture, medicine, the art of war and land-surveying as interconnected through shared principles and as products of a coherent and vibrant scientific culture that strove to assess the Roman world. In the introduction, he persuasively defines artes not as science but as scientific, “in that they engage with science, implicate science into their own aims, and exhibit the fruits of science” (p.7), and argues for a scientific culture instead of an intellectual culture insofar as their approach “involves systematic inquiry into the world” (p.7). This nuanced argumentation makes Zainaldin’s contribution original, because the focus on “scientific” instead of “science” opens the view to such genres as military manuals, which are usually excluded from studies on ancient sciences. Likewise, it takes the aims of the ancient authors seriously and does not read them as products of encyclopaedism or antiquarianism.
His study is divided into seven main chapters. In the first two chapters Zainaldin searches for the roots of the Roman artes and contextualizes them within the political and social setting of the Early Roman Empire. Refreshingly, he gives no chronological overview of earlier technical writings but establishes four criteria that he regards as defining Roman scientific literature of the first century AD: systematicity, interdisciplinarity, explanation, and balance. Latin artes would be united in their striving for logically organized and elaborated content, in their reliance on shared principles and methods, in the foundation of their methods on natural principles, and in their negotiation of the value of experienced know-how in relation to theoretical knowledge (p.18). Likewise, Zainaldin limits biographical information on the ancient authors to a minimum and is more concerned with illustrating the Early Roman Empire as an epoch of imperial self-assertion, in particular in intellectual circles: Romans would have looked in wonder at the empire they had conquered and would now try to make “Roman imperium into a knowable whole” (p.46). This process would have included an examination of the Greek heritage and, in contrast to it, an alignment with political developments in the sense that the Latin artes promoted imperial values or supported concrete imperial policies (p.75f). Surely, these two conceptual chapters, which serve as the basis for his further investigation, make the strongest contribution to scholarly discussion, since they go beyond questions of authorship, genre and audience. Each of the following chapters has one scientific discipline such as architecture, agriculture, medicine, warfare and land-surveying at its centre and focuses on one author or work as a representative.
Chapter 3 is the first analytical part and is dedicated to Vitruvius. In an analysis of the introduction of De architectura and in two case studies on the construction / orientation of cities and on felling timber, Zainaldin portrays Vitruvius’ understanding of architecture as that of an “architectonic art” (p.85) that should not be mistaken for a penchant for polymathy. Rather, it would aim to explain the methods of architecture with natural first principles and therefore would require an interdisciplinary approach (linked to mathematics, geography, and biology) as well as the reasoning of an architect who is capable of acknowledging and judging the shared principles of the artes.
In Chapter 4 Zainaldin moves on to Columella’s De re rustica as an example of the Latin ars of agriculture. His main argument is that Columella’s writing is a scientific response to a contemporary discourse on deteriorating soil conditions and harvests. Columella would argue that meagre harvests were more a sign of moral decay than of natural decline. Therefore, a capacious theoretical understanding of natural principles and the practical experience of the agricola perfectus would be required to treat nature correctly and acknowledge it as divine, eternal and providential (p.152).
Chapter 5 puts Celsus’ De medicina at its centre and argues that the treatise should be read as an attempt to deal with and emancipate medicina from the Greek legacy of medicine, in which Celsus adopts a “middle ground” between Rationalists and Empiricists. The outcome is not only different from Greek antecedents but also from Vitruvius’ and Columella’s approach to science, as it focuses on the practical dimensions of medicine, rejects the importance of underlying natural principles, and emphasises the physician’s experience as key in causal reasoning and medical decision-making.
Chapter 6 might be regarded as the most controversial segment (more on that below) in that it aims to understand the Latin art of war by looking at Onasander’s Strategikos (written in Greek), Frontinus’ lost De re militari and his Strategamata, which Zainaldin denies is an ars proper if judged according to his established criteria. The argument is nevertheless inspiring, as it tries to elucidate Frontinus’ collection of exempla as a response to critics who disregard military writings as useful. While Onasander presented an “intensely abstracting approach to generalship” (p.283), in which he set out general praecepta based on psychological principles about human nature that the general should regard during campaign, Frontinus’ example-collection, which prefers exempla to generalized rules, is presented as an “organic outgrowth of the artes under epistemological pressures both within and without the discipline” (p.302).
In the last analytical chapter, land-surveying texts of Hyginus and Frontinus and their attempt to constitute land measuring as an ars proper come under scrutiny. Their focus on the etymology of specific terms of surveying language is explained as a strategy to stress the historical foundation of the discipline. Likewise, their interdisciplinary approach and the way local variations of measuring were incorporated into the discipline are plausibly presented as attempts to establish a coherent discipline that has a theoretical foundation in natural first principles.
Although it should not need to be pointed out, it is a positive feature of his work that Zainaldin based his study on broad knowledge not only of anglophone but also of French, German, and Italian studies. Furthermore, his careful handling of the ancient sources goes beyond close reading of the ancient texts to a thorough philological analysis. In this regard it is noteworthy that he critically reviews even his own studies and revises earlier views (e. g. p.94 n.52).
While Zainaldin bases his analysis on broad knowledge of the sources and research, one sometimes misses a more detailed discussion of the research, which is almost exclusively limited to the footnotes (e. g. how his approach is influenced by previous studies is touched upon only in p.4 n.4; how and why he deviates from these frameworks is not made explicit). This leads to a second point: what might be regarded as one of the biggest advantages of this study, namely the cross-disciplinary approach to Latin technical literature, might also be problematic: the coherence of the corpus. Zainaldin acknowledges this himself when he writes that the artes were not univocal, but highly diverse (p.207). That Pliny’s Historia naturalis, a work that is of some importance for Zainaldin’s conceptual reflections (pp.47–51), “is not an ars proper” (p.47), is stated but never explained. Moreover, that the Greek Strategikos of Onasander is used as a basis for an analysis of the Latin art of war and Zainaldin’s result that Onasander, like Vitruvius, relied on secure first principles as an epistemic foundation (p.283f.) puts the question of Greek and Latin literary traditions at the centre. When Greek and Latin traditions seem to have come into closer contact during the Early Roman Empire (p.263), how useful is an analysis limited to Latin treatises?
Finally, some arguments seem (at least to this reader) overly simplistic or, at least, do not take sufficient account of their constructed and controversial nature, e. g. the argument about the lost De re militari of Frontinus and military writings in general. Zainaldin claims as premise that during the late Republic and Early Empire, criticism of intellectual studies in warfare became common. Inter alia he cites Cicero and Marius, or rather Sallust’s Marius, arguing against mere armchair generals (pp.285–287). His reading, however, leaves little room for considering the literary depictions of this deliberately casual general of the late Republic. At the same time, reading books as preparation for warfare was not univocally criticised, as examples of Cicero himself show, concerning Lucullus’ or his own preparation for his governorship in Cilicia (Cic. Luc. 1,3; ad fam. 114,1–2). A more nuanced view would also have been appreciated with regard to the claimed influence of Frontinus’ Strategemata (p.315). So while Zainaldin might be right in reading Frontinus’ exempla-collection as a literary form to complement or complete more generalized approaches to warfare, it would require further research to establish whether Polyaenus’ Strategemata, a Greek collection of examples written a century later, actually served the same scientific principles and purposes.
In sum, Zainaldin has offered a well-written contribution with useful indices of references, Greek and Latin words, and names. One would have expected an outlook on the development of the artes in the later centuries of the Roman Empire or a view on the influences of and on contemporary Greek scientific literature, but as Zainaldin rightly points to, “this is a large subject” (p.53) and it is his contribution to give a new stimulus for further studies in these directions.