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The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity by Ludwig Edelstein (review)

1969; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1969.a892321

1097-3729

Alex Keller,

Classical Antiquity Studies

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 87 before we move on to its neighbors (and in the case of Hacilar in Asia Minor and Jericho in Palestine this means starting with settlement at the very beginning of the seventh millennium b.c.), but within any given culture each aspect—history, religion, towns, and the rest—is pursued to its conclusion before the next is taken up. Other features of the book do not help matters. The text is illustrated entirely by drawings which, with the exceptions of plans, are done so sketchily as to make it impossible to read the details. Worse, many drawings are ambiguously or inadequately titled, and at least one is wholly unidentified. In the text proper the author is excessively pre­ occupied with describing plans and is far too little concerned with structural techniques, materials, and their associated three-dimensional forms, which are always relegated to a separate section at the end of each chapter. Finally, the maps are not perfectly reliable; the important com­ munities of Hacilar, Ugarit, and Jarmo, for example, have been omitted from the key map facing the title page. In short, while recognizing the author’s learning and his careful attention to dimensions, dates, and influences, and being willing to concede that tracing the historical devel­ opment of a complex multidimensional process may present insoluble organizational problems, I am nevertheless forced to regard his work as a very condensed and superficial handbook at best rather than a true historical account of its subject. Carl W. Condit* The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity. By Ludwig Edelstein. Balti­ more: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Pp. xxxiii-[-211. $8.00. Historians who compare the development of science and technology in antiquity, which got so far but no further, with their explosive growth since the seventeenth century, have made it a commonplace to announce that the ancient Greeks and Romans had no real concept of progress. The very term, with all its implications, is supposed to have been quite alien to their world view. Either their idea of time was cycli­ cal, not linear, so that the past was continually returning and what would be must inevitably repeat what had already been, or else they never re­ linquished the dream of a Golden Age in the earliest period of human history, since which time they imagined that life had steadily deteri­ orated. This version of the story has not always been accepted without quali­ fication. And here comes a new book of considerable learning to deny and refute every facet of it. The late Professor Edelstein had published extensively in the history of ancient thought, notably ancient medicine, and he concluded that many ancient authors had espoused a doctrine of • Dr. Condit, of Northwestern University, is the author of many works on archi­ tectural and structural history, his most recent being American Building (1968) in the Chicago History of American Civilization Series. 88 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE progress that developed gradually over several centuries and that was eventually to differ little from that held in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unhappily he did not live to produce a definitive study of the topic, but his exposition to the end of the Hellenistic age was sufficiently complete to be publishable, and it has now appeared. In fact, the main Roman protagonists, Lucretius, Pliny, Seneca, were so dependent on their Hellenistic antecedents, the later Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, as to be usable in lieu of the vanished writings of the latter. So in prac­ tice we do have here a study of the idea of progress as far as the highwater mark of ancient economic wealth and political unity in the Roman Empire of the first century a.d. Edelstein devotes his first chapter to the “First Inventor” of the con­ cept in the late sixth century b.c., the philosopher Xenophanes, well known for his boldness in matters of religion and tradition, who de­ clared, “The gods did not reveal to all men all things from the beginning, but men through their own search find in the course of time that which is better.” Although Edelstein warns us of the danger of basing too much on...