Assumptions that rigorous experimentation and logic are essential elements in any real scientific inquiry would, presumably, be shared by most members of the modern scientific community – doctors, physicists, chemists and biologists alike. But Liba Taub's Aetna and the Moon argues that ancient assumptions about what science means were entirely different from our own. Part of the difficulty and challenge of approaching ancient theories of science is, as Taub emphasizes, the fact that there is no equivalent to the term ‘science’ in either ancient Greek or Latin.

Defining ‘science’ as ‘the attempt to understand and explain natural phenomena’, Taub argues that there was in antiquity no sharp distinction between attempts to explain nature by what we might consider ‘scientific’ means – such as careful observation, or rigorous debate of competing theories – and explanations that relied on myth. She challenges the old scholarly truism that the ‘Greek miracle’ saw a progression from mythos to logos – in the movement from the Homeric poems to the development of philosophy, history, medicine and mathematics in the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BC. Rather, Taub rightly reminds us that mythos and logos may both connote ‘story’. She argues that throughout antiquity, in both Greek and Roman times, ‘scientific’ ideas were expressed in a number of diverse ‘literary’ genres, rather than in an exclusively scientific professional arena, and that science and myth were seen not as competing but as complementary ways of explaining natural phenomena.

Taub's main focus is on two relatively little-known texts: the anonymous pseudo-Virgilian Latin poem Aetna; and Plutarch's dialogue On the Face on the Moon, which was an important influence on Kepler. She also incorporates more familiar works, making links between Aetna and Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, and between the Plutarch dialogue and Plato's Timaeus. Taub emphasizes that all these texts combine an apparently rationalist approach to the causation of natural phenomena with myth and and divine machinery – a combination that may seem puzzling to modern readers. Plutarch's dialogue includes a sustained and theoretically sophisticated discussion of possible explanations of the apparent face in the moon – such as that it is a reflection of the ocean – but ends with a mythic account of the moon as the final destination of the soul after death. Aetna includes an early warning that readers of the poem must reject false mythical explanations of volcanic activity:

But myth is not, in fact, entirely excluded from Aetna. The conclusion of the poem is a story about two sons who were miraculously unhurt by the volcano because they were rescuing their parents from the flames; they were, the poet assures us, rewarded with a special place in Hades. In both cases, these ancient authors proceed from naturalistic explanations of the phenomena at hand to stories or fables of how volcanoes and the moon, respectively, might form part of a providentialist universe.

More generally, if ‘science’ is a genre of writing that excludes legends, myths and stories about gods, then very few ancient authors wrote ‘science’. But if ‘science’, like ‘philosophy’, is seen in terms of a dedication to finding out the truth about the universe, in a critical and self-critical spirit, then these ancient texts may not seem so ‘unscientific’ after all. Taub rightly stresses that Plutarch's use of the dialogue form is designed to encourage a thoughtful, critical readerly response, rather than blind acceptance of an authoritative scientific ‘truth’. The Aetna poet, too, is particularly concerned with fighting intellectual passivity: he wants to teach people ‘not to lie outstretched on the ground feeding a weight of flesh, but to grasp the truth of things and search into doubtful causes’ (p. 47). Myth and theory can both play a part in the intellectual quest to explain the universe.

Taub's book is especially valuable in its emphasis on the broad range of genres used by ancient authors to discuss ‘science’. She rightly reminds us that there is no ancient equivalent to the scholarly paper published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It would have been useful to have a more sustained account of the differences between various ancient scientific genres and their readerships – Taub gestures towards this issue, but does not pursue it in any depth. For instance, presumably Virgil's Georgics was not read as a handbook on agriculture, astronomy or apiculture; those who tried to use the text in this way would have found it peculiarly useless. But the same would be true of modern literary works that make use of science, but whose primary goal is literary rather than scientific: Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters is not a scientific guide to saltationism, Michel Houellebecq's Elementary Particles is not a treatise on molecular biology, Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is not concerned with the mechanics of cloning. Taub's awareness of genre perhaps does not go deep enough. There are other works from antiquity which certainly were intended as scientific teaching tools. The most obvious instance is the Hippocratic corpus of medical texts, which is oddly almost entirely absent from Taub's study. The inclusion of the Hippocratic works – rather than the much more obviously literary genres of hexameter poetry and Platonic/Plutarchan dialogue – would have radically altered the thrust of Taub's argument, since most of these works make no explicit use of myth. Moreover, the Hippocratics provide some of our earliest evidence for the experimental method, which is often seen as essential to specifically scientific inquiry.

Taub's wide-ranging and readable study is based on lectures given at Oregon State University in 2007. It is a very short (86 pages) account of a very large subject, but one which is consistently stimulating and intelligent, and which opens all kinds of avenues for future thought and investigation.