museum and library; but the whole
aspect of world-history was rapidly changing. Greece, after her brief
day of political supremacy, was sinking rapidly into desuetude, and
the hard-headed Roman in the West was making himself master everywhere.
While Hipparchus of Rhodes was in his prime, Corinth, the last
stronghold of the main-land of Greece, had fallen before the prowess
of the Roman, and the kingdom of the Ptolemies, though still nominally
free, had begun to come within the sphere of Roman influence.

Just what share these political changes had in changing the aspect of
Greek thought is a question regarding which difference of opinion might
easily prevail; but there can be no question that, for one reason or
another, the Alexandrian school as a creative centre went into a rapid
decline at about the time of the Roman rise to world-power. There are
some distinguished names, but, as a general rule, the spirit of the
times is reminiscent rather than creative; the workers tend to collate
the researches of their predecessors rather than to make new and
original researches for themselves. Eratosthenes, the inventive
world-measurer, was succeeded by Strabo, the industrious collator of
facts; Aristarchus and Hipparchus, the originators of new astronomical
methods, were succeeded by Ptolemy, the perfecter of their methods and
the systematizer of their knowledge. Meanwhile, in the West, Rome
never became a true culture-centre. The great genius of the Roman was
political; the Augustan Age produced a few great historians and poets,
but not a single great philosopher or creative devotee of science.
Cicero, Lucian, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, give us at best a reflection
of Greek philosophy. Pliny, the one world-famous name in the scientific
annals of Rome, can lay claim to no higher credit than that of a
marvellously industrious collector of facts--the compiler of an
encyclopaedia which contains not one creative touch.

All in all, then, this epoch of Roman domination is one that need detain
the historian of science but a brief moment. With the culmination of
Greek effort in the so-called Hellenistic period we have seen ancient
science at its climax. The Roman period is but a time of transition,
marking, as it were, a plateau on the slope between those earlier
heights and the deep, dark valleys of the Middle Ages. Yet we cannot
quite disregard the efforts of such workers as those we have just named.
Let us take a more specific glanc