happy-go-lucky way. He loved personal ease, the pleasures of the
table, the luxuries of life, games, recreations, festivals. He
took no heed for the morrow, except as the morrow might minister
to his personal needs. Essentially a sensual being, he scarcely
conceived the meaning of the intellectual life in the modern
sense of the term. He had perforce learned some things about
astronomy, because these were necessary to his worship of the
gods; about practical medicine, because this ministered to his
material needs; about practical arithmetic, because this aided
him in every-day affairs. The bare rudiments of an historical
science may be said to be crudely outlined in his defective lists
of kings. But beyond this he did not go. Science as science, and
for its own sake, was unknown to him. He had gods for all
material functions, and festivals in honor of every god; but
there was no goddess of mere wisdom in his pantheon. The
conception of Minerva was reserved for the creative genius of
another people.


III. SCIENCE OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA

Throughout classical antiquity Egyptian science was famous. We
know that Plato spent some years in Egypt in the hope of
penetrating the alleged mysteries of its fabled learning; and the
story of the Egyptian priest who patronizingly assured Solon that
the Greeks were but babes was quoted everywhere without
disapproval. Even so late as the time of Augustus, we find
Diodorus, the Sicilian, looking back with veneration upon the
Oriental learning, to which Pliny also refers with unbounded
respect. From what we have seen of Egyptian science, all this