This book provides a comprehensive overview of the key themes in Greek and Roman science, medicine, mathematics and technology. A distinguished team of specialists engage with topics including the role of observation and experiment, Presocratic natural philosophy, ancient creationism, and the special style of ancient Greek mathematical texts, while several chapters confront key questions in the philosophy of science such as the relationship between evidence and explanation. The volume will spark renewed discussion about the character of 'ancient' versus 'modern' science, and will broaden readers' understanding of the rich traditions of ancient Greco-Roman natural philosophy, science, medicine and mathematics.

Introduction Liba Taub1. Presocratic natural philosophy Patricia Curd2. Reason, experience and art: the Gorgias and On Ancient Medicine James Allen3. Towards a science of life: the cosmological method, teleology and living things Klaus Corcilius4. Aristotle on the matter for birth, life and the elements David Ebrey5. From craft to nature: the emergence of natural teleology Thomas Johansen6. Creationism in antiquity David Sedley7. What's a plant? Laurence M. V. Totelin8. Meteorology Monte Ransome Johnson9. Ancient Greek mathematics Nathan Sidoli10. Astronomy in its contexts Liba Taub11. Ancient Greek mechanics and the mechanical hypothesis Sylvia Berryman12. Measuring musical beauty: instruments, reason and perception in ancient harmonics Massimo Raffa13. Ancient Greek historiography of science Leonid Zhmud.

Liba Taub is Director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Ancient Meteorology (2003), Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome (2008), and Science Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, 2017).

Liba Taub, Patricia Curd, James Allen, Klaus Corcilius, David Ebrey, Thomas Johansen, David Sedley, Laurence M. V. Totelin, Monte Ransome Johnson, Nathan Sidoli, Sylvia Berryman, Massimo Raffa, Leonid Zhmud