Our Debt to the Ancient Greeks

Ten years ago, my wife, Ruth, and I had the incredible good fortune to take a remarkable trip with four friends: four days of sailing in the eastern Aegean Sea on a Turkish wooden sailing ship called a gulet followed by a ground tour of southwestern Turkey’s Ionian peninsula. We started at Bodrum and drove north to Didyma, Miletus, Priene, and Ephesus. Our guides were fine at showing us all the massive ruins of ancient Greek amphitheaters, monuments, and cities. They were not so good at pointing out the great ideas that originated there: This was where the great Ionian philosophers lived—Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, Anaximander, and many others. Offshore to the left as we drove north all one day loomed the island of Samos. Samos! That’s where Pythagoras lived! That’s where Aristarchus (“The Ancient Copernicus”) lived and studied the heavens! I was right there! Only a few years earlier, I had heard historian Richard Berthold lecture about the “electrifying moment in world history” when the Ionian natural philosophers came up with the idea of rationality—in which logic, consistency, and natural causation reigned and myths were merely poetry. The ideas of humanism and individualism arose. Doubt and inquiry were encouraged. These ideas, that the world is knowable and not a passive pinball of supernatural forces, created a burst of intellectual inquiry.

All these thoughts and memories flooded back to me as I first read the manuscript for our cover article, “The Antikythera Mechanism: The Greek Computer of Science and Reason.” Evaggelos Vallianatos, with a doctorate in Greek-European history, became fascinated with the story of a bronze tooth-geared astronomical computer found in fragments undersea in 1900 and now in an Athens museum. He investigated, eventually writing his own book about this newly appreciated scientific marvel of Greek civilization. He places the find within the context of ancient Greek science and culture, where laws and reason governed the Greek gods and instilled the notion of a universe regulated by natural laws. He believes the real scientific father of the Antikythera machine is Hipparchos, who had a laboratory in Rhodes, where the mechanism came into being. Hipparchos also invented trigonometry and theorized that the Moon moves around Earth in an elliptical orbit.