What was Rome’s attitude toward science? To give an idea of the level of Roman interest in the scientific method, it may suffice to mention that, as far as is known, no one even attempted to translate Euclid’s Elements into Latin until the sixth century A.D. The first complete translation seems to have been Adelard’s: the year was around 1120 and Adelard was an Englishman (from Bath) translating from the Arabic.
When Varro lists in his agricultural manual earlier treatises on the subject, he says that Theophrastus’ writings are not so much for people who care to cultivate land but for those who want philosophical learning. Why were the Greek scientist’s books, which contained besides much else principles on which viticulture was reformed throughout the Hellenistic world, labeled as philosophical texts with no practical utility? Evidently because Theophrastus talks of theories. Varro, probably the most erudite of Romans, is turned off by such things, which he does not understand. He classes their content with the only “theory” whose existence he’s aware of: philosophy.
Varro represents a prescientific culture, to which science was utterly alien. By contrast, later Roman writers like Pliny or Seneca are fascinated by Hellenistic scientific works: they cannot follow the logic of the argu- ments, but nonetheless admire their conclusions, precisely because they appear unexpected and marvelous. These authors try to emulate their models while eliminating the logical connecting threads or replacing them with ones which, though arbitrary, are easier to visualize and so lead faster to the desired result, the wonderment of the reader. This contact with the results of a science whose methodology remains impenetrable then has the glaring effect of causing faith in common sense — a quality that earlier writers like Varro did not lack — to be jettisoned.
9.3:
That theoretical knowledge was applied to agriculture is indicated by the flourishing of treatises on the subject. Varro writes that in Greek there were fifty such works, and he names forty-nine of them. Not a single one has been preserved, nor do we have reliable quotes from them. It is indisputable that they were the ultimate origin of all Roman knowledge about the subject, but there is very little hope of reconstructing any sig- nificant fraction of their content based on the writings of learned Romans. Indeed, it seems that the chief source used by Varro and other Roman writers on agriculture was Diophanes of Bithynia, who summarized the translation made by Cassius Dionysius of the large handbook written by the Carthaginian Mago, itself a compilation of various Hellenistic treatises on agronomy.
I don’t like it when he uses words like “indisputable,” but the following page contains an example in a footnote:
Varro says that the first Romans who tried breeding these species learned about the practice in the books by Mago and Cassius Dionysius (De re rustica, III, ii §§13–14). In the same context he mentions the introduction of fish-farming.
Here is what Lucio Russo (8.2) says about Varro:
9.3:
I don’t like it when he uses words like “indisputable,” but the following page contains an example in a footnote: