Natural Knowledge in the Classical World 39thinker. He had thought through these propositions and made deliberate
decisions on each of them. Then again the choices he made and indeed
the very framework of his questions were deeply entrenched in sets of an-
cient debates and traditions. These debates and traditions were themselves
rooted in common stocks of experience and observation as well as com-
mon understandings and common methods of experience and observa-
tion, and these factors made Pliny’s particular universe characteristically
Roman. No practicing scientist today would or could use the evidence
available to them to prove just these four propositions, let alone these
four in combination with the rest of what Pliny believed about the cos-
mos. So Pliny was innovative, but he was innovative within a particular
tradition. This combination of tradition and innovation is, I suggest, as
inherent to science as to any other intellectual pursuit—it is the result of
individuals living in and participating in cultures: scientifi c, intellectual,
professional, social.^3
Now, Pliny was not himself a practicing scientist in the modern sense,
nor even did he perform the kinds of research and direct observation
we fi nd in, say, his near- contemporaries the astronomer Ptolemy or the
anatomist and physician Galen (both second century CE). Indeed, there is
no real ancient analog of the modern scientist, whose research is funded
by government or industry, and who works in a laboratory producing
research publications on a full- time basis. There are ancients who can be
said to “do science” (forgiving the anachronism of the nineteenth- century
word “science” here), but the institutional contexts are so very different
from the modern ones as to make it diffi cult to describe this doing as what
we would think of as a job. Instead, what we have is a situation where
well- educated (and therefore typically upper- class, almost universally
male) individuals performed various investigations into nature whenever
they could afford the time. This “affording of the time” had very differ-
ent meanings over the centuries and cultures covered by the rather broad
phrase “classical antiquity.” For example, one of the most important phi-
losophers of antiquity, Aristotle (fourth century BCE), began under royal
patronage as tutor to the young heir designate to the Macedonian throne
(Alexander the soon- to- be Great).^4 Later he founded a school (called the
Lyceum) where he and his students investigated and debated a wide range
of problems. Everything from fundamental questions of logic to theories
of poetry, rhetoric, politics, ethics, and natural philosophy was on the
agenda. The investigations undertaken into “natural philosophy” also
covered a much wider range than would be found in any one university
department or research facility today: astronomy, cosmology, physics,
biology (including systematics, anatomy, physiology, reproduction, and