37What did the ancients know about objects in nature? What even was
an object in nature for them? What was nature? Who were the experts?
Then, as now, the answers to these questions depend on time, place, in-
terests, and individuals. Nor is the knowledge base ever settled or static;
it contains many uncertainties, disagreements, areas for further explora-
tion, dead ends, and—dare I say it—misperceptions. Nevertheless, what
individual investigators know about nature, how they approach it, the
questions they ask, the authorities they look to, the debates they engage,
all of this forms an intertwined multifaceted whole. Only by keeping of
all of this in mind can we ourselves be said to know much about ancient
science.
What we fi nd is that there is profound change over time. From the
fi rst investigations into something explicitly called “nature” in the sixth
and fi fth centuries BCE, through the massively synthetic systematization
of Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, we see methods, questions, priori-
ties, and assumptions all changing. As Athens gave birth at just about this
time to the main philosophical schools (Platonism, Stoicism, Epicurean-
ism, and others) that would color and shape the questions asked of nature
and the answers given, we see further change and refi nement. At the same
time, the tradition to which each school was responding was communal,
and so the variability was confi ned and constrained both by what went
before, and by the different schools’ debates with themselves and with
each other. The kinds of answers each school was looking for are shaped
CHAPTER 2Natural Knowledge in the Classical World
Daryn Lehoux