The Science of Man in Ancient Greece (review)

Maria Michela Sassi. The Science of Man in Ancient Greece. Translated by Paul Tucker. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001. xxx, 224 pp., illus. $34.

First published in Italian in 1988, but with minor changes, mostly at the footnote level, made to take account of work published in the intervening years, this book represents an interesting introduction to some aspects of ancient science; in particular, to medicine, ethnography, and astrology. The scope of the book is broader than the title suggests, as it extends to the Roman world and its appropriation of Greek anthropology by the simple move of putting Rome rather than Greece at the center of the world, but it is also more narrow, as Sassi devotes little space to classical mythology and its contributions to ancient speculations on what constitutes a “mortal man.” However, the focus here is on “scientific thought,” defined in terms of the spur to explanation, or the search for a “why” behind observations such as “fair women emit more seed than dark women” or “the people of the north are fair-skinned.” But, as these examples show and as Sassi never forgets, observation cannot be neutral: observation is not only shaped by ideology, but takes place solely within the framework which it provides.

Central to Sassi’s argument is the role of skin color in classical thought. The fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian ideal of women as pale and men as dark, expressed in literature and in art, was linked to socially specific valuations of indoors and outdoors as the proper spheres of each sex, but also interacted with perceptions of different social groups; craftsmen, low in the social hierarchy, were associated with “womanish” paleness, but so were the philosophers who challenged the status quo. As for Greek ethnography, driven by “an interest in difference” (p. 105), Sassi argues that “anthropology—like democracy—was born in Greece thanks to its victims” (p. 33). Where Sassi moves beyond a host of similar studies of ancient patterns of polarity and analogy, of women and barbarians, and of the adult Greek male as the unmarked term, is in her interest in “the natural”; how far can one escape one’s nature? Can the “naturally” inferior, such as women, do anything about it? Here, she investigates the claims of physiognomy that outward appearance indicates character, using as a key text the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomics as well as discussing the role of the mask in drama and the development of the individual portrait.

Historians of the human sciences not familiar with this period will find much of interest here; for example, the discussions of the role of climate, and of “the systematizing power of the theory of the humors” (p. 154) and its subsequent development. Defining sexual difference, and issues surrounding generation, play a central role in the argument throughout. All texts are translated into English. However, readers may well be frustrated at the level of knowledge assumed by the author; occasional typographical errors will not help here. For example, even if one can cope with Phallopius for Fallopius (p. 100), “See below for the theory of Hippo” (p. 86, n. 9) is not helpful for someone who was previously feeling confident that Hipp. was Hippocrates, and who was not aware of the fifth-century B.C.E. philosopher Hippon, also known as Hipponax.

For those working in the classics, much of this material will be familiar, but even such scholars will find provocative suggestions here: for myself, I would single out the discussion of the footprint; the claim that, outside the area of diet, classical Greek medicine was in “therapeutical stasis” (p. 142); the discussion of Plutarch’s Table Talk as a case where “scientific discussion has been emptied of all content and is at best a matter of playing fossilized arguments off against one another” (p. 138); and the suggestion that, while Hippocratic medicine&#8217...