V Some of Seneca’s Predecessors and Contemporaries
The history of ancient Science is a very tangled and abstruse subject, a portion of the history of ancient Philosophy, which lies as much outside the scope of the present work as beyond the powers of the writer. Still, Seneca cannot be altogether detached from what preceded him. In order to throw light upon his work, it may be permissible to pass in rapid review a few of the chief sources from which he drew. Our starting-point may be Aristotle.
Aristotle is with good reason named “the master of those who know” (Dante, H. iv.). He may be said to have summed up the knowledge of the ancient world, at least as far as Greece is concerned, on all subjects. If not the founder of Science any more than of Philosophy, he recapitulated so fully all that went before that he became the fountain-head and source from which all succeeding workers mainly drew. He systematised the existing materials, adding his own criticisms and observations, and illuminating the whole with the strong light of his unrivalled powers. He drew upon many authorities whose works are now lost, the leading names among them being familiar from the Q.N.—Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and the rest. The extent and variety of the material may, perhaps, best be understood from a work like Professor Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy, to which reference should be made. A reasoned consecutive account will there be found of the individual contributions made to philosophy (including science) by the early Greek thinkers. Long before Aristotle’s time numerous physical theories had been propounded, and had been supported by their authors with great acuteness of argument; hardly any question had been left unasked that related to matter, motion, or mind. “We may smile, if we please, at the strange medley of childish fancy and true scientific insight.... But we shall do well to remember at the same time that even now it is just such hardy anticipations of experience that make scientific progress possible, and that nearly every one of the early inquirers... made some permanent addition to the store of positive knowledge, besides opening up new views of the world in every direction” (op. cit. 29).
Seneca probably possessed fuller details of the investigations and speculations of these early workers than we now do. The existing materials are contained in Professor Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, with which his other great work, the Doxographi Graeci, should be compared.21
The chief work of Aristotle upon which Seneca drew was the Meteorologica. The extent to which its subject coincided with that of the Q.N. may be inferred from a glance at its contents. The Meteorologica is divided into four Books, arranged thus:—
I. Scope and relations of Meteorology. The four elementary bodies—earth, water, fire, air—and their relations. Celestial fires. Shooting stars. Comets. The Milky Way. Clouds. Fog. Dew. Hoar-frost. Rain. Snow. Hail. Wind. Formation of rivers. Change in land through action of rivers: effects on movements of races.
II. The sea and its salinity. Theory of the winds, their varieties, positions, etc. Earthquakes and their explanation. Lightning and thunder.
III. Lightning, thunder, and similar phenomena. Halo and rainbow. Mock sun and cognate appearances. Exhalation and its influence.
IV. Theory of the elements (= ingredients or first principles); two active—hot and cold, two passive—dry and moist. Their effect on bodies. Cohesion, Liquefaction, Solidification, Coagulation, Fusion, Solubility, and other properties. Homogeneous and non-homogeneous bodies. Effects of temperature. Place of this work in author’s scheme.
Another work that goes under Aristotle’s name, but is now generally considered spurious, is the De Mundo (the Universe), which in part repeats the subjects of the latter part of the Meteorology. Seneca may also have drawn on the De Coelo (the Heavens), whose subject covers portions of the Q.N. He refers more than a dozen of times to Aristotle by name, but it was not customary to refer to individual works. There are numerous instances in which Aristotle is his authority, though no specific mention of him occurs.
Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, and, his successor as head of the Academy, is also frequently referred to in the Q.N. His master bequeathed to him his library and original manuscripts, and Theophrastus was himself also a voluminous writer.
Among his extant works on Science, we have treatises or tracts dealing with Fire; Winds; Stones; Signs of Rain, Wind, Storm, and Fine Weather; not to mention Colours, Odours, etc., and an extensive work on Plants and their History. His work on Perception and Percepts is said to be a chapter of a larger work on the history of philosophy. At any rate, it records and discusses the opinions of earlier writers on the subjects to which the title refers. For his further views on Physics, and the lost treatise on the subject, see Diels, Dox. Graec. 119 et sqq., and 473 et sqq.
Aratus, who flourished about 280–270 B.C., wrote two poems (in Greek) entitled respectively Phaenomena,22 an introduction to the knowledge of the constellations; and Prognostics, a method of forecasting the weather from astronomical phenomena. Aratus scarcely ranks as a scientific writer, but Seneca refers to his opinions on one occasion in the Q.N. He was apparently held in high esteem by the Romans, for he found a translator (in part) in Cicero, and an imitator in Virgil (Georgics).
Plutarch stands in a somewhat different relation to Seneca. He was a little subsequent in date, but there is a sort of parallelism between the two, both in their scientific and their more general interests. Besides the Physical Causes, already referred to, Plutarch made a compilation in five Books—at least it goes under his name—of the Tenets of the Philosophers (Placita Philosophorum) regarding a vast number of physical, especially astronomical and physiological, subjects. Diels (op. cit. 65) scouts the idea of the genuineness of the “wretched epitome,” and assigns it to the middle of the second century. Whether this be so or not does not much affect its value for us. The existence of the work shows the nature of the material which was available in Seneca’s age. The work is a kind of distant echo of Theophrastus’ lost treatise and preserves many opinions of the older philosophers, of which, to say the least of it, we should otherwise have been less fully informed. The parallelism of the Placita to the Q.N. will appear from a few of the titles. Books II. and III. of the former reproduce a long array of opinions of Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, Anaximenes, Democritus, Xenophanes, Xenocrates, not to mention Plato, Aristotle, the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, etc., etc., regarding such subjects as Eclipses, the Milky Way, Comets, Earthquakes, Clouds, Winds, Thunder and Lightning, etc., etc.
Plutarch also has questions regarding Aratus Prognostics, and a Miscellanea of discussions on allied subjects.
Of Latin writers two have special bearing on Seneca. Lucretius (95–51 B.C.), in his great poem on Nature (De Rerum Natura), has expounded the Epicurean view of the universe. In so far as science is capable of metrical and poetical exposition, he ranks high among scientific writers; while the recent resuscitation of the atomic theory lends special interest to his views. The Romans were always a practical and not a speculative nation, and any deviation from the type, such as Lucretius or Seneca, becomes especially noteworthy and valuable. Numerous parallelisms between them have been brought out in the Commentary and Notes appended to this Translation.
Pliny the Elder stands in respect of date in much the same relation to Seneca as Plutarch does. His great work on Natural History, which was addressed to the reigning Emperor, Vespasian, was published in the year 77, that is, about a dozen years after Seneca’s death. We have already glanced at the bearing of this date upon that of the publication of the Q.N. We are now concerned rather with the relation of the contents of the two works. Gibbon (Decline and Fall, chap. xiii.) speaks of “that immense register where Pliny has deposited the discoveries, the arts, and the errors of mankind.” Nor is the description unjust. The work is of portentous length, extending to thirty-seven Books; it treats of an enormous variety of subjects, physical, geological, geographical, ethnographical, botanical, medical, etc., many of which are now quite dissociated from the title, Natural History. Pliny seems to have read everything that existed in writing on the various subjects included, and his array of authorities attached to the contents of each Book is very imposing.23 But unfortunately his judgment does not appear to have been equal to his industry. Everything is recorded, credible and incredible, whether derived from trustworthy literature or based on mere report: a more uncritical congeries of truth and error it would be difficult to imagine.
Book II. deals with the constitution of the universe, including astronomical and meteorological phenomena, such as Meteors, Halos, Eclipses, Winds, Earthquakes, Rain, etc., etc. Many of these cover the same ground as the Q.N. Among the domestic authors cited for this Book are M. Varro, Livy, Cornelius Nepos, Caecina, “who wrote on the Etruscan cult”; among the foreign authors are Plato, Anaximander, Democritus, Archimedes, Aristotle, etc., etc. The omission of Seneca from the Latin list is balanced by that of Theophrastus from the Greek list. It is, of course, unsafe to build any theory on a merely negative basis. Obviously Pliny had read at any rate portions of these authors, to whom he elsewhere refers, and may, through mere oversight or negligence, have omitted specific mention of them here: he usually refers to authors and not to their individual works. If, at the time of the composition of Book II., which may have been considerably earlier than the date of publication of the whole work, he did not know of Seneca’s Q.N., then the inference seems inevitable that there were current a collection or collections of the opinions (δόξαι) of the older philosophers which were common property to any one interested in such matters. The Placita attributed to Plutarch, though its present form may be much later than Pliny’s time, may have been derived from sources of this kind. We shall not be far wrong in supposing that, in addition to the works still extant, there was a mass of material available to Seneca and Pliny alike which represented the traditional views on physical and allied subjects handed down from the old Greek philosophy. Most of the Latin authors, seventeen in number in all, cited by Pliny on Book II. are now known to us only by name; of those whose works remain, Varro is the only one whom we should consider likely to furnish much material for the topic in hand.
Of Pliny’s lists in general it may be said that they indicate that a good many writers even among the Romans had been attracted by subjects of a scientific or quasi-scientific character, if we may not venture to say that their works can rank as science even in the modified sense in which the term is applicable to Seneca or Pliny. It is in keeping with the character of the people that practical sciences like agriculture (Varro, Columella) and architecture (Vitruvius), not to mention cookery, should have received special attention. These authors, with others like Manilius (Astronomica) and Pomponius Mela (geography), however interesting in themselves, have only an indirect and sometimes only a remote bearing on the Physical Science of their day.