the pantomine as polymath in ancient Greece

As I wrote yesterday, the ancient Greeks thought so much of polymathy that they had competitions in it. Here is another example of how far some of them pushed the polymathy idea.

The great second century playwright Lucian specifically wrote in one of his plays, De Saltatione (The Dance), that even that a pantomime must be polymathic. Lucian’s idea of polymathy for a pantomime included knowledge of culture; music, rhythm, and meter; natural and moral philosophy; rhetoric; painting and sculpting; and ancient myths and history. That seems like an awful amount of knowledge for a mere pantomime to have, but a possible explanation for this is that, in Roman times, which is when Lucian lived, the concept of pantomime did not mean miming, as it does now. Rather, it meant a production, usually based upon myth or legend, for a solo male dancer.

That explanation of pantomine does help somewhat, but Lucian's idea still seems like a little much for a plain old dancer to know.

Polymathy as an early College Bowl

As we know, the word polymathy came from ancient Greek, and the ancient Greeks had a lot of thoughts about polymathy. Believe it or not, that they even held competitions in polymathy!

Polymathy appears in a second century BCE inscription from the Ionian city of Teos (which is in modern Turkey), which listed the winners in student competitions for, among other sports and subjects, polymathía.

I guess that this was the predecessor of the College Bowl.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - definitely a polymath

While Lichtenberg is remembered today primarily for his aphorisms, he was known throughout Europe during his lifetime as one of Germany’s greatest scientists. Although I will grant him scientific polymath status only for his physics, that was hardly his only area of expertise.

Among other things, he measured the geodetic coordinates of several German cities, wrote a paper on atmospheric temperature distributions, wrote a book on the theory of rain formation, and was the first German to correctly install fellow polymath Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod. He was elected a fellow of the British Royal Society in 1793.

Lichtenberg was not a fan of the “two cultures,” the idea popularized by British scientist and writer C.P. Snow that the sciences and the humanities are separate concepts. Lichtenberg lived and believed in the connections between the arts and sciences and in fact the connections between all things. For Lichtenberg, science was a story. Was he a literary scientist? A scientific scribe? He was both, and proud of it.

For being a leading physicist and a successful aphorist whose witty sayings have lasted two hundred years and counting, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is definitely a polymath.

The Lichtenberg Society website

Apparently, there is a Lichtenberg Society. It's from Lichtenberg's home base of Göttingen, so the site is in German, but it is pretty comprehensive for those of you who read German.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, pt. 4

We’ve been talking about Lichtenberg’s accomplishments in physics, but physics was only half of Lichtenberg’s life. Writing was the other half.

For five years, he co-published the Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Literatur (Göttingen magazine for science and literature), and for over twenty years he edited and wrote for the Göttinger Taschen-Calendar (pocket calendar), a popular scientific and literary almanac.

He became one of the leading commentators on the English painter and printmaker William Hogarth. And, at least since he was a student, he had kept a diary, which ultimately became the source of his fame.

His journals contained not just the usual events of a diarist’s life, but also page upon page of witty observations. He called them his Sudelbücher (scrap or waste books). The term came from the notebooks that merchants would use to make quick notes of their transactions before later entering them more carefully into a more formal ledger.

Lichtenberg kept his Sudelbücher, labeled A through L, for himself; he never intended that they be published, at least not while he was alive. He called them, according to one of his biographers, Jürgen Teichmann, nothing more than “remarks which were thrown away.” But they were not thrown away. They were published after Lichtenberg’s death, and he achieved fame as one of Europe’s greatest aphorists. They are still in print today, and his sayings live on today in any major collection of aphorisms and quotations.

And in keeping with the spirit of polymathy, he even had a saying on polymathy. He wrote: 

"That which creates the polymath is often not a knowledge of many things but a happy relationship between his abilities and his taste by virtue of which the latter always approves of what the former produces."

The Waste Books, Notebook F.130

And he was somewhat of a skeptic:

"Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatsoever."

The Waste Books, Notebook E.11.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, pt. 3

Let’s get back to Lichtenberg the physicist.

Lichtenberg’s most famous physical discovery, in 1777, was the accidental discovery of electrostatic recording (i.e., the use of static electricity to record images). He built a large (six feet high!) electrophorus, which is a device that creates static electricity when a resin base is rubbed.

In the course of shaving the resin for the base, Lichtenberg noticed that the dust pattern on the base always reformed the same fractal pattern on the base after air disturbed it. But Lichtenberg was a writer; we should let him tell the story:

The occasion for the discovery of the phenomenon was the following: At the beginning of the spring, in 1777 [...] my room was still full of very fine dust of resin which had risen up during the planing and polishing the base of the instrument [...]. It happened [...] that the dust, lying at the base. [...] to my great pleasure formed at several places, small stars, which at the beginning could be seen only faintly and weakly. But when I scattered the dust on purpose with more vigour the stars became distinct and very beautiful and often looked like an elaborate and intricate piece of work. Sometimes there arose numerous small stars, whole milky ways and larger suns [...]. further on very pretty small branches, similar to those produced by frozen vapour on  window panes [...] (as translated from Lichtenberg’s Latin by Jürgen Teichmann).

These patterns became known as Lichtenberg figures.

Here is a website featuring several galleries of Lichtenberg figures.

Lichtenberg then figured out that the patterns could be preserved by taking a piece of paper with glue on it, and pressing the paper onto the powder. Voila! Photocopying was born.