[Link] Lost and Found
Related: Son of Low Hanging Fruit, Low Hanging Poop
A post by Gregory Cochran’s and Henry Harpending’s blog West Hunter.
Marcus Terentius Varro was called the most learned of the Romans. But what did he know, and how did he know it? I ask because of this quote, from Rerum rusticarum libri III (Agricultural Topics in Three Books):
“Especial care should be taken, in locating the steading, to place it at the foot of a wooded hill, where there are broad pastures, and so as to be exposed to the most healthful winds that blow in the region. A steading facing the east has the best situation, as it has the shade in summer and the sun in winter. If you are forced to build on the bank of a river, be careful not to let the steading face the river, as it will be extremely cold in winter, and unwholesome in summer. 2 Precautions must also be taken in the neighbourhood of swamps, both for the reasons given, and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.” “What can I do,” asked Fundanius, “to prevent disease if I should inherit a farm of that kind?” “Even I can answer that question,” replied Agrius; “sell it for the highest cash price; or if you can’t sell it, abandon it.”
I get the distinct impression that someone (probably someone other than Varro) came up with an approximation of germ theory 1500 years before Girolamo Fracastoro. But his work was lost.
Everybody knows, or should know, that the vast majority of Classical literature has not been preserved. Those lost works contained facts and ideas that might have value today – certainly there are topics that we understand much better because of insights from Classical literature. For example, Reich and Patterson find that some of the Indian castes have existed for something like three thousand years: this is easier to believe when you consider that Megasthenes wrote about the caste system as early as 300 BC.
We don’t put much effort into recovering lost Classical literature. But there are ways in which we could push harder – by increased funding for work on the Herculaneum scrolls, or the Oxyrhynchus papyri collection, for example. Some old-fashioned motivated archaeology might get lucky and find another set of Amarna cuneiform letters, or a new Antikythera mechanism.
Good post, lack of memory on the civ level is a real problem. Local solution is to read more of others, and be less “original.” Imo, LW could stand to move more in that direction.
The story of etiology of scurvy is a sad one also (and that was much shorter time frames and in recent times).
edit : Graphical models must have been rediscovered 4 or 5 times in the 20th century. Info theory people recently “rediscovered” the g-formula: http://infostructuralist.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/directed-stochastic-kernels-and-causal-interventions/
etc, etc.
In the past I’ve often waxed lyrical about the benefits of reading other people’s work in other disciplines and not re-inventing the wheel. But now I wonder if it’s really practical advice. Does it truly take less effort to trawl through mountains of literature than it does to simply think for a few minutes and come up with a solution yourself? The only answer I can come up with is: In some cases yes, in some cases no, but not always.
About LW, it’s true that a lot of what people have done here is simply re-invent concepts from philosophy. But in doing so they’ve given a different perspective to existing ideas, and looked at core issues rather than carrying along millenia of philosophical baggage.
A lot of mathematics, for instance, arose many times independently, and that was how people knew what stuff was important. When a concept gets reinvented many times, by people working on vastly different problems, you know it’s something that is important. Calculus, group theory, fourier analysis, etc. all fall under this definition.
This is in the class of “coordination problems”, and as we all know those are hard. I think it’s worthwhile to spend more energy on this particular one, though.
Related anecdote: one of my programmer friends uses the following algorithm for writing certain kinds of programs: “think of a plausible name for such a program had it already existed, then google for that.” This seems to work very often!
The amount of time that understanding of scurvy was lost is short compared to amount of time classical knowledge was lost, but why use that metric? I think a better metric is the speed at which it was lost. That is hard to measure, requiring the reconstruction of history, but Lucio Russo claims that it was quite quick, comparable to the 150 year story of scurvy. Russo suggests that Ptolemy was not the apotheosis of classical astronomy, but someone trying to salvage the wreckage. Russo’s hypothesis was the most interesting thing I got out of the post.
On the other hand, discovering something for yourself is arguably one of the best ways to truly understand it, and it does not require you to read & memorize lots of sundry information for the occasional thing that actually ends up being useful.
This reminds me of the researcher’s maxim:
— Frank Westheimer
It is true that some of the ancient ideas still have value today. Or at least they are the foundation for the modern ideas that have value. It is also very likely that some of the “lost works” may contain “facts and ideas that might have value today”, beyond the obvious historical interest. It is much less likely that those ideas contain insights never again achieved and preserved. After all, almost every idea has been invented and reinvented time and again. We could indeed “push harder” to recover these lost works, but an evaluation of knowledge gained per dollar spent would likely show that this is an inefficient way to spend money compared to alternative ways of gaining knowledge. This should be easily testable: look through the ancient works discovered in the last 100 years or so and check which lost-and-found insights were new and interesting.
Would we even notice if we read ancient truths that had yet to be rediscovered? Rerum rusticarum libri III was around in the middle ages, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t scholastics have read it? It’s a “holy crap!” moment after you discover the germ theory of disease. Before that it’s a bizarre superstition of antiquity.
This passage is a mention of the germ theory of disease. Cochran suggests that there is a lost manuscript actually discussing it, intended for people who don’t already know the theory.
I get that, but germ theory during the middle ages wasn’t exactly widespread, was it? If I’m not mistaken, the dominant belief was that diseases were caused by foul-smelling odors, not germs.
Imagine reading Rerum rusticarum libri III as a medieval scholar, or maybe event the relevant source. Could we expect a medieval scholar to jump and shout: “Yes! Yes! Of course! Disease is caused by small invisible creatures, not water that smells bad.”
That’s what Jack is trying to say, I think. With knowledge (and even proof) of germ theory, a find like this is pretty amazing. Without that knowledge or proof, “small-invisible-creatures”-theory has as much evidence as “foul smell”-theory. Maybe even less.
Maybe the lost document contains amazing evidence, but this leaves me wondering, how much evidence could someone in Classical times find to support germ theory.
So, this previous post is also relevant. The Roman legions actually understood how disease worked, and used policies to minimize the impact of infectious disease on their armies. This knowledge was lost, and infectious disease was a major killer in medieval and modern armies, to the point where a military which had implemented Roman sanitation likely would have had a major advantage.
So you don’t really need a scholar who believes in an ancient work because of evidence- you need someone who tries it out, for whatever reason. In the realm of non-fiction, if it actually works, that will lead to them winning in some way.
It’s also worthwhile to consider the impact of new classics on a culture where ideas have to be worded as somehow related to the classics. It’s much easier to say “I agree with Democritus over Parmenides” than it is to say “I disagree with Parmenides.”
That’s a great post, but I think it’s going too far to say that the Romans understood disease. Maybe they did, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that they consciously designed their camps for disease reasons. Note that Cochran doesn’t claim that they understood. Also, he mentions the alternate hypothesis that there was less disease back then. It ought to be clear from the historical record if Rome won by avoiding disease that struck enemy armies. I don’t know the history, but Cochran implies that Rome didn’t have such an edge. Did the enemies have the same sanitation? or did it not make much difference?
I think it’s worth pointing out that early moderns didn’t seem to notice that disease in army camps was a big deal. So the observed failure to copy the Romans probably would not have been mitigated if they’d had an ancient text asserting that the method protected from disease. (Though maybe the assertion that disease mattered in war would have been helpful.) Yes, someone blindly copying Roman camps would have had an advantage, but an advantage not understood propagates slowly.
What does “understood disease” mean?
If the Romans knew that setting up an army camp one way leads to half the soldiers unable to step away from the latrines and setting up the camp another way leads to most everyone being fine—does that imply understanding disease?
And, by the way, I wonder if a big factor in comparing Roman to medieval European armies would be the prevailing military strategy. In Roman times warfare was mostly mobile—armies marched, then fought. In medieval times a lot more focus was on sieges where an army stays in one place for a long time. Obviously a marching army is less vulnerable to disease than an army that camps in a single place for months.
Sure, but I think it is going too far even to say that the Romans thought that latrines reduced disease. Do you have ancient sources suggesting otherwise?
Yes, the more mobile the Romans are the less the design of their camps matters. And yet, they got it right and the medievals who needed it got it wrong.
There’s a bit of a discussion in the comments here.
That armies suffered from and could be wiped out by disease outbreaks was well-known in ancient times. And if you think that the design of Roman camps’ sanitation was not caused by the desire to avoid sickness, how do you think it arose?
But I agree that empirical advice of the “Don’t do X or bad things will happen” kind could come purely from repeated experience without any idea of why this is so.
I can think of lots of alternate hypotheses for why Romans had good camp hygiene.
(1) Russo’s answer to everything is that they copied all their technology from the Hellenistic Greeks without copying their understanding (eg, aqueducts). History or archaeology probably records who had these camps first. (2) Perhaps urban disease evolved cities to have good hygiene without understanding and the Romans copied the hygiene to the camps fairly arbitrarily. (3) Or maybe it copied some other urban practice that had non-disease reasons. Or pure superstition. This isn’t a detailed hypothesis, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to reject it.
I am sure you can, but before we get to proposing that it was the gurgling in Russel’s teapot that led the Romans to consider the sanitation of their camps, maybe a bit of a consultation with William of Occam is in order?
Sure, I agree that I oversold it, and should have worded it more carefully. But, I’ll point out that “understand disease” is not a single threshold. One could contest the claim that we understand disease. The following claims seem to be individually more likely than not: some educated Romans knew that sanitation and disease were linked, designed sanitation around their knowledge of disease, and that epidemic diseases were caused by invisible agents that were physically transmitted. It seems much more likely than not that Roman knowledge of disease- both theoretical and practical- surpassed medieval knowledge of disease for the majority of the medieval period.
Really? I get the impression that they knew disease inside a city could end the siege in the attacker’s favor, and disease outside a city could end the siege in the defender’s favor. I think they thought it was an unavoidable fact of life, though, which might cash out as ‘not a big deal.’ (For example, I get the impression that the British Navy lost a ton of men to scurvy, but didn’t embark on many explicit attempts to figure out and prevent scurvy because it wasn’t obvious to them that such a thing was possible / they didn’t know where to start.)
Sorry I wasn’t clear, as you can tell from the other thread with Lumifer, but I really do mean to object to the claim that Roman knowledge contributed to the design of the camps.
Yes, early moderns did notice that epidemics were important in sieges, but they didn’t seem to notice that disease mattered at other times.
Take a look at De Architectura:
From Book VIII:
All of the other surviving scraps I can find suggest they had a decent idea what they were talking about, and that they took health seriously. I don’t know of a manual on camp latrine placement, or sewer design, or so on, or any works on germ theories directly. But I’m operating from the presumption that survival is the exception, not the norm. (In particular, I’m not a Roman scholar. There very well might be a manual on camp latrine placement that’s survived to the modern day, which I simply haven’t heard of. I only knew to look in Vitruvius because he’s famous enough that I’ve heard of him.)
I don’t see what those quotes add to the Varro quote.
It seems to me that if A) their knowledge of health and disease contributed to their design of cities and camps, it should be more likely to see B) health and disease mentioned prominently in design manuals. We do see B, and so that makes me more confident in A.
It seems like a confirmation of “their knowledge contributed to the design of the camps,” though it’s not a confirmation that their knowledge was ‘correct’ or that their knowledge was the primary historical cause of that particular design.
It also affirms that this isn’t just Varro being a hypochondriac, and is evidence for a general trend of Roman design taking health and disease into account in ways that were actually effective.
Yes, multiple authors are good.
Sure, my point is about similar cases to this mention.
Here is what Lucio Russo (8.2) says about Varro:
9.3:
I don’t like it when he uses words like “indisputable,” but the following page contains an example in a footnote: