Labour Monthly

How slavery killed Greek Science

Review of Greek Science, its Meaning for Us (Thales to Aristotle) by Benjamin Farrington, (Pelican Books 9d.)


Source : Labour Monthly July 1945, p.190-191
Publisher : The Labour Publishing Company Ltd., London.
Transcription/HTML : Ted Crawford/D. Walters
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2010). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.


The study of ancient history has one very great advantage over that of mediaeval or modern history. One man can read all the documents and thus form his own judgement with as good a right as anyone else. Hence really authoritative work can be of quite small compass. Professor Farrington’s book deals with the first third of the history of Greek science, in which the thought was most original. His heroes are the men of the rising bourgeoisie of the free city states who applied the ideas learned in handicrafts and trade to the universe, as did their successors in the free cities of Italy and the Netherlands, 2,000 years later. His villains are Parmenides and particularly Plato.

He shows that as slavery developed, and handcrafts and even trade became vulgar and ignoble it came to be believed that “pure” reason was a more powerful tool in understanding the universe than exact observation, let alone experiment. I consider that he has proved his point conclusively. No marxist who wishes to understand the relation between science and society can possibly neglect this book.

I sincerely hope it is only the first part of a general history of Greek science. Certainly it will republished in a more durable form. I therefore propose a few criticisms of detail. I think the author has underestimated the Mesopotamian astronomers, Naburrianu and Kidunnu, the contemporaries of the men of whom he writes, were not particularly theological in their outlook, and their account of the sun’s apparent motion round the earth as non uniform motion in a circle was far more accurate than Ptolemy’s. In fact some of their numerical values were better than any calculated in Europe till about 1850. We can see why. As regards irrigation, ancient Iraq had a planned economy. And a planned economy was impossible without accurate methods for surveying and for predicting the times of river floods.

I wonder whether Socrates has been quite fairly treated. In his later years he probably believed that the best approach to truth was by verbal arguments. But Aristophanes’ Clouds strongly suggests that in middle life he was studying the matter directly. It would be extremely interesting to see whether Professor Farrington thinks this was the case, and, if so, whether Socrates changed outlook was a reflection in his mind of the fall of Athenian democracy before Spartan militarism. And many readers would have welcomed a page on Aristotle’s classification of animals. In one respect it was more dialectical than that of Linnaeus or even Lamark, since it took account of differences in development and not only differences between the adult forms. Hence Aristotle did not regard the lizards and salamanders as closely related. Linnaeus fell into this trap, but I think Aristotle would have done the same had he followed his philosophy rather than his biological intuition.

Finally if I had to state in three words what killed Greek science, I would say “slavery and sodomy.” Plato and other idealists were extremely tolerant of this latter aberration, which is fairly inevitable when women are so oppressed that they cannot be men’s intellectual and aesthetic companions. Today it is common in literary circles and rare among scientists. For it is a second-rate imitation like the substitution of words for things, with which it is associated today as it was in Athens. In Ionia, where Greek science originated, women had a good deal in independence. Queen Artemesia of Halicarnassos was a prominent quisling on the Persian side at the battle of Salamis. But Athenian women were confined to the harem when they were not slaves or prostitutes. And in the early stages of science women’s knowledge of technique may indispensable. Probably any very great step forward in civilisation demands co-operation of the sexes. The partial revival of ancient science at a later date coincided with a rise in the position of women, even though slavery persisted.

Probably Professor Farrington can answer all these criticisms. But even if he cannot, they do not appreciably detract from the value of a first rate book, which should be widely read, not only by scientists but by students of history, economics and philosophy.

J.B.S. HALDANE