Quote:
Originally Posted by Stephjk
I was also amazed at how advanced Lucretius' thinking was, however, I wonder sometimes if there's an arrogance about the modern era - what makes us think that we're so much more advanced than other eras? Obviously the science and technological advances we have made over the last couple of hundred years have been staggering, but does that give us the right to feel superior? Should we be surprised that there weren't more writings like this?  |
I quite agree with you and I certainly don't feel superior to the Ancient Greeks for example - history, geometry, the weight of the earth and its size (which I understand was pretty accurate) and so on and on. The thing was that so much of it was lost/buried/suppressed that I think it must have been all the more amazing to read such a text in the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance period.
And by the way, a word of thanks here too to the Arabian scholars who rescued and translated many of these ancient works. We can also lose sight of their enormous contribution to what has survived through to modern times and that is often not acknowledged.