Greek Science by G.E.R. Lloyd. Introduced by Lewis Wolpert. Frontispiece and 11 colour illustrations by Adam Simpson. Three-quarter-bound in buckram with a Modigliani paper side printed with a design by Adam Simpson. 384pp. 10×6¾in.

Around 600BC, Thales of Miletus set out to discover the causes of earthquakes. It had previously been imagined that they were caused by Poseidon, the sea God, but Thales proposed that earthquakes resulted from tremors in the water. His theory was wrong, but his method was revolutionary: he was among the first thinkers to try to understand the natural world without reference to the supernatural. Thanks to this fundamental shift, Thales and his fellow Greeks are widely acknowledged as the first scientists. G.E.R. Lloyd’s history traces the development of science in ancient Greece, from the earliest theories of Thales and his fellow Milesians, to Ptolemy and Galen in the 2nd century AD. Pythagoras and his followers were the first to give the study of nature a mathematical foundation; the Hippocratic authors were the first to identify illness as a natural phenomenon. The Greeks did make mistakes – for example, Aristotle thought that the brain contained no blood – but many of their methods and ideas are still valid today.

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