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  • An Overture to The Oxford HandbookSerafina Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity
  • Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow (bio)

Serafina Cuomo produced her thoughtful but somewhat quirky book at an opportune moment.1 It not only offers a timely recognition of the ever-increasing popularity of the subject of ancient technology, but it is also a serious attempt to correct its long marginalization and to acknowledge all that it has to contribute to an understanding of ancient culture itself.

Until recently, the amateur enthusiast was hard-pressed to find a suitably detailed survey of any of the issues surrounding ancient technology or engineering. With the recent publication of The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, edited by John Peter Oleson (2008), all that has changed. It is especially important to read Cuomo’s book as an overture to the symphony that is the Oxford handbook, since many of the most critical points she makes about ancient technology are made again in different contexts and with different evidence in the handbook. (Cuomo contributed the opening chapter to the handbook, “Ancient Written Sources for Engineering and Technology.”)

Cuomo’s own book has an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion, and, while all the sections have some relationship to each other, they are also quite distinct essays on very diverse topics that can be read separately. The introduction grapples with: the surprising pervasiveness of technology in the classical world; how the Greek word techne, and its Latin [End Page 450] equivalent ars, covered a much wider spectrum of meanings than modern technologies, including among “qualified technicians,” for example, carpenters, doctors, and even rhetoricians; and how few people have studied ancient technology, although that changed in the year since her book was published. She is quite vocal in her criticism of the two approaches that, in her view, have marred the historiography of ancient technology and are to blame for its relative neglect: the “blocage question,” which suggests that something “blocked” or prevented the ancient mind from making connections between technology and the economy; and the “mainstream view” which argues practitioners of technology were marginalized and widely despised in ancient society. Because Plato and Aristotle expressed this latter “mainstream view,” it has tended to dominate. Cuomo then proposes her series of case studies as an exercise in writing the history of ancient technology. She looks for particular types of sources or she approaches certain sources in a way that reveals their special angles.

Many of the points in the introduction are taken up in more detail in the following chapters. Chapter 1, “The Definition of Techne in Classical Athens,” considers the practice of ancient medicine in a wide variety of ancient texts from the fifth to the first century BCE. In the end, Cuomo’s attempt to define techne in classical Greece does not produce a unified result. She manages to establish some of the characteristics of techne—how it involves chance, how it is teachable, how it precipitates dramatic changes in society, although sometimes with moral ambiguity and strong political resonance—and she even identifies some disciplines as technai. Cuomo also notes that there was competition for techne, attempts on several sides to appropriate and control competing forms of knowledge, and that these were mirrored in the competitiveness of the political arena. She succeeds in demonstrating the complex place that technology held in ancient Athens, and that views about it were not homogeneous, not even within one individual author. She effectively argues that to understand techne, we must learn to appreciate the ongoing, dynamic negotiation between elite and nonelite notions about it.

The case study of chapter 2, “The Hellenistic Military Revolution,” takes a big leap in time and topic for a particular focus on techne and its impact on ancient society. Cuomo sees the rise of a new world leader in the Hellenistic period, along with a new type of war and warrior, embodied by the Romans as described by Polybius (p. 74). She considers the introduction of the catapult not so much the end of manly virtue, but the redefinition of the virtues necessary to be a man—which now must include mastery of military...

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