Ancient Meteorology (review)

Our ancient forebears were as fascinated by weather lore as are we, but the "weather" was only one aspect of what the Greeks and Romans considered the "arts of prognostication"; "things lofty" (so Plato) constituted meteöra, but there was constant debate quite apart from philosophy about what were the appropriate facets of a "meteorology" that spanned earthquakes, volcanic eruptions (our seismology and geology) as well as astronomy and star charts, almanacs of a farmer's year, and the expected expertise in forecasting the weather. Taub has written a good introduction to the subject, quite in keeping with the objective of the series in which it appears (Sciences in Antiquity). Novices and scholars alike will appreciate the clear accounts summarizing pertinent details in the arcana of ancient astronomy, the collection of data on stellar and planetary motions, texts that indicate how the ancients calculated weather signs (Theophrastus has some fascinating data), and how Hesiod's Works and Days is essential to comprehend ancient notions of constellations fused with a weather lore both practical and theoretical.

By choosing, however, not to emphasize the numerous botanical, zoological, and medical particulars that appear in the Greek and Latin texts, Taub truncates the evidence to fit a mathematical or "physical" model: human pathologies (presumed to be associated with seasonal variations), "signs" of imminent storms or what we would call changes in humidity, and the meanings given to swarms of millipedes on garden walls are among several important Theophrastean texts omitted by Taub. Although she admits the prominence of Weather Signs as a source of Greek meteorology (authorship disputed among specialists), it seems inconsonant to neglect the multiple observations from natural history in favor of a presumably more philosophical (i.e., logical) set of records.

Taub displayed care and a clear writing style in her remarkable Ptolemy's Universe: The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy's Astronomy (Chicago 1993), and Ancient Meteorology shifts focus to an earlier time, in some ways expanding on the 1993 monograph. In this new work, one is rewarded by clarity in the sketch of the astrometeorological texts called parapëgmata explained as fusions of weather patterns and descriptive motions of the stars and planets.

Occasionally a quasi-Sartonian timbre intrudes: much of what the ancients thought was meteorological was bound together with popular physics, the farmer's openly folkloristic mythologies relevant to the agricultural year, as much as it was linked to cosmology and pure philosophy. John Vallance neatly called attention to the influence of George Sarton in the history of science (viz. "Marshall Claggett's Greek Science in Antiquity: Thirty-Five Years Later," Isis 81 [1990] 713–20), and Taub mirrors this ongoing debate about "science" among the ancients. Not everyone who studies ancient mathematics or astronomy has joined our "new" history of science in antiquity, a science that easily embraces astrology, magic, necromancy, and that host of formerly "rubbish" subjects. If one keeps her narrow, internal prejudice in mind, one can derive great benefit from Taub's book, even though the colorful folklore and mythologies about winds are generally ignored. For Taub, too much is unpredictable about wind-lore, and the Greek and Latin texts do not lend themselves easily to an analysis that centers on causes discerned and regular (not irregular) patterns described. Nonetheless, what Taub peruses she reports clearly, succinctly, and with convincing control and expertise in mathematics, astronomy, the epigraphy that contextually enables us to understand those enigmatic parapëgmata, and philosophy: particularly excellent is the interweaving of Aristotelian logic on "exhalations," the sources of information (including the ever-controversial endoxa [loosely, "opinions," usually "trustworthy" or "reputable"]), signals/signs of a pattern in nature, and how analogy, experiments, and diagrams all contribute to a logic in meteorology. Here is the wind-rose (anemoscope), a Graeco-Roman version of a weather vane (a flag stuck in the central hole of a column drum, the flag to indicate the direction of the wind). Especially...