Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[Jona Lendering]

All of the Loebs I have read, always footnote the Chaldaeans as astrologers (and never as astronomers), and charlatans.

If you study, for example, Manichaeism, what would you do: read a Christian text or a tractate written by a Manichaean? I think you will prefer the second option. So, if you want to know something about Babylonian science, it is better not to read Greek sources, and read Babylonian texts.

Besides, many Loebs are pretty old. They are often already out of copyright. (I happen to know this as I am currently proofreading a web edition of Diodorus.) You really can not take the Loeb as a summary of the communis opinio. For decades, the Tusculum and Budé series were better; Loeb is now often replacing old translations by new ones (e.g., Philostratus' Life of Apollonius) and is rapidly improving.

As the Loebs are often old, the judgment of the translaters/commenters is often just a repeat of the ancient sources - which are unreliable. If you read Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, Lucian, and Porphyry - can you deduce anything about Judaism or Christianity? Of course not. You will immediately see that they are biased against unRoman wisdom. The same applies to Chaldaeans. The Greeks and Romans could not read cuneiform texts (although Iamblichus still learned "ta Babyloniaka" in the third century CE; I wonder what he was referring to).

The Greeks and Romans often did not even understand the difference between eastern wisdoms. Matthew 2.1 (visit of the wise men) is a case in point, where astrologoi or mathematikoi or Chaldaioi would be relevant, the evangelist says Magoi, which is certainly incorrect. (Magians are prayer assistents from Iran; the other three expressions refer to the sky-gazing futurologists that might indeed be interested in a strange star.)

There was one big surge of translations during the reigns of Alexander, Seleucus Nicator and Ptolemy Soter - and that was sufficient to change the face of Greek science. After that, they forgot, and all types of foreign wisdom were lumped together and regarded with suspicion. Pliny's history of magic (NH, book 30) is a case in point.

here's one further requirement for something to be science -- it has to be true. ... Chaldaeans were not these disinterested astronomic scientists, measuring and recording the movements of the planets. They sought to predict the future and to tell horoscopes. It doesn't matter how well and conscientiously they collected their data; their task was still pseudo-science.

By this definition, there's no Greek science either. Ptolemy considered his Tetrabiblos as his main work, which is an astrological treatise. Pliny, Plato, Aristotle, Strabo: they would all go down the drain if you use this definition, because they all believed in celestial omens. Kepler and Newton would, by this definition, not be scientists either.

Incidentally, it may be noted that the Chaldaeans of the seventh century BC were aware that their discipline was probably based on an erroneous assumption. The Omen Catalog (Enuma Anu Enlil, published by Erica Reiner in the 1990s) contains tablets of predictions that used to be true and were now refuted. After this, they continued their project, which was by now purely scientific, as I have already suggested in earlier postings (and see Neugebauer's opera omnia).

The first horoscopes, and the revitalizing of futurology, date from the fifth century; oddly enough, these can not be connected to the Chaldaeans. After, say, 300, we see horoscopes becoming more popular, in both Babylonia and the rest of the Hellenistic world.

I think we have the same development that we see in the second century AD: even though the foundations of something scientific have been laid, people move back to magic - in Babylonia, in the Graeco-Roman world. Eric Dodds wrote an interesting chapter about that, "The Fear of Freedom", in The Greeks and the Irrational. I don't know if I can still agree with Dodds' theory that people abhor from the total freedom of a world without gods and providence, but it is worth a thought - if only because it seems such an acurate description of our own world.

Maybe I'm misunderstood something - please, enlighten me about Homerian quotation from Gilgamesh :?:

I'll check; I will reply tomorrow.

Well, make that today. I was wrong: it's not the Epic of Gilgamesh that is being quoted by Homer, but the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma Enlil). It's Iliad 14.200-201, 246, 301-302; Oceanus and Tethys playing the roles of Apsu and Tiamat.