Thursday, April 28, 2016
Hellenistic Curiosity
Richard Jenkyns, Virgil's Experience. Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 57:
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It is a mistake to separate too far the 'bookishness' which some people complain of finding in the Hellenistic world from their energy and invention in such fields as medicine, astronomy, hydraulics, and mathematics. The desire to list the origins of cults, unearth obscure myths, or describe the oddities of distant lands and peoples is part of a great impulse of curiosity to learn all that can be known, an impulse which finds another outlet in attempts to measure the diameter of the earth or explain the movements of the heavens.
