Book
Древние цивилизации: социум и человек. Ярославль, 2018
The Reports of the ancient scholars
The analysis of Pericles' leadership pattern
This essay examines the quantitative aspects of Greco-Roman science, represented by a group of established disciplines that since the fourth century b.c.e. had been called mathēmata or mathēmatikai epistēmai. Among the mathēmata, which in antiquity normally comprised mathematics, mathematical astronomy, harmonics, mechanics, and optics, the essay also includes geography. Using a data set based on The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Natural Scientists, it considers a community of mathēmatikoi (as they called themselves), or ancient scientists (as they are defined for the purposes of this essay), from a sociological point of view, focusing on the size of the scientific population known to us and its disciplinary, temporal, and geographical distribution. A diachronic comparison of neighboring and partly overlapping communities—ancient scientists and philosophers—allows the pattern of their interrelationship to be traced. An examination of centers of science throughout ancient history reveals that there were five major sites—Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Rome, and Byzantium/Constantinople—that appeared, in succession, as leaders. These conclusions serve to reopen the issue of the place of mathēmata and mathēmatikoi in ancient society.
The chapter describes the peculiarities of the creative method of Strabo and tells about the possibilities and perspectives of the use of his description of the Black Sea region as a source of historical knowledge.
The collection of the articles publishrd in honor of prof.I.E.Surikov