Page 126 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

skill of the classical period, Hellenistic sculptors moved away from the idealism of fifth-century classicism to a more emotional and realistic art, seen in numerous stat- ues of old women, drunks, and little children at play.
Alexander the Great’s incursion into the western part of India resulted in some Greek cultural influ- ences there, especially during the Hellenistic era. In the first century B.C.E., Indian sculptors began to create statues of the Buddha. The impact of Greek sculpture was especially evident in the Buddhist statues made in Gandhara, which is today part of Pakistan.
A Golden Age of Science
The Hellenistic era witnessed a more conscious sep- aration of science from philosophy. In classical Greece, what we would call the physical and life sci- ences had been divisions of philosophical inquiry. Nevertheless, by the time of Aristotle, the Greeks had already established an important principle of scientific investigation—empirical research, or sys- tematic observation, as the basis for generalization. In the Hellenistic Age, the sciences tended to be studied in their own right.
One of the traditional areas of Greek science was astronomy, and two Alexandrian scholars continued this exploration. Aristarchus (ar-iss-TAR- kus) of Samos (ca. 310–230 B.C.E.) developed a heliocentric view of the universe, contending that the sun and the fixed stars remained stationary while the earth rotated around the sun in a circular orbit. This view was not widely accepted, and most scholars clung to the earlier geocentric view of the Greeks, which held that the earth was at the center of the universe. Another astronomer, Eratosthenes (er-uh-TAHSS-thuh-neez) (ca. 275–194 B.C.E.), determined that the earth was round and calculated its circumference at 24,675 miles, within 200 miles of the actual figure.
A third Alexandrian scholar was Euclid (YOO-klid), who lived around 300 B.C.E. He established a school in Alexandria but is primarily known for his Elements, a systematic organization of the fundamental elements of geom- etry as they had already been worked out. It became the standard textbook of plane geometry and was used up to modern times.
The most famous of the scientists of the Hellenistic period, Archimedes (ahr-kuh-MEE-deez) (287–212 B.C.E.), came from the western Mediterranean region. Archimedes was especially im- portant for his work on the geometry of spheres and cylinders and for estab- lishing the value of the mathematical constant pi. Archimedes was also a
Hellenistic Sculpture and a Greek-Style Buddha. Greek architects
and sculptors were highly valued throughout the Hellenistic world. Shown
on the left is a terracotta statuette of a draped young woman, made as a
tomb offering near Thebes, probably around 300 B.C.E. Alexander’s
advance into western India resulted in some Greek cultural influences
there. During the first century B.C.E., Indian sculptors in Gandhara began
to make statues of the Buddha in a style that combined Indian and
Hellenistic artistic traditions, evident in the stone sculpture of the Buddha
on the right. Note the wavy hair topped by a bun tied with a ribbon,
which is also a feature of earlier statues of Greek deities. This Buddha is
also wearing a Greek-style toga. (Left: Kanellopoulos Museum, Athens//Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY; Right: National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi//Borromeo/Art Resource, NY)
88 Chapter 4 The Hellenistic World
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