Scientific Modes of Perception and Expression

Greek and Roman authors make complex observations about the sensory perception of taste and flavor. Although excellent work has been done in this area (e.g.,Wilkins and Hill 1993; Alcock 1993), scholars have not yet fully treated the Elder Pliny's ideas about taste and flavor. Pliny's Naturalis Historia relates flavor to a broader intellectual outlook that emphasizes change in the sense of both generation and decay.

Why, in his discussion of gemstones in Book 37 of the Natural History, does Pliny the Elder utilize the term candidus over three times as often as the term albus? Why does he describe red stones as ruber only once, but as sanguineus twelve times? In this paper I situate the peculiarities of Pliny’s use of color terms in Book 37 within the framework of anthropological scholarship on color terminology, and I will present and interpret the peculiarities of Pliny’s language.

Stephens 2003 and others have shown the ability of Ptolemaic court poets to "see double" by manipulating the symbols and narratives from classical Egyptian ideology of kingship to portray the bicephalous Ptolemaic monarchy. Natural scientists also dedicated treatises to Ptolemaic rulers and participated in the discourses of the court. Among them was Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who produced both poetry and scientific texts for Ptolemy III Euergetes.

The purpose of Euclid’s Optics is not primarily to explain false appearances or to provide an account of sight, as is often claimed. Rather, the text has a far less defined or unified goal; it simply inscribes vision and a few related phenomena into a set of mathematical practices.