The Ancients - Eureka! Innovation in Ancient Greece

Episode Date: February 20, 2022

It's often thought that the ancient Greeks were devout in tradition, strict in their ways and beliefs. But how true is this? When it comes to creative thinking and innovation, the ancient Greeks excelled! In this episode, Tristan is joined by professor and historian Dr Armand D'Angour as they explore the impact of Ancient Greek innovation, delving into their perception of 'new'. From famous figures in the arts, philosophy, and the ideas of the model state, we look beyond the lens of tragedy. What can we learn from the Ancient Greeks today?Armand D'Angour is the author of 'How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking' published by Princeton University Press. Order Armand's book today!If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit.To download, go to Android or Apple store.If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating The Ancients content then subscribe to our Ancients newsletter!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and Eureka! Finally, we're talking about innovations. We're talking about famous figures such as Archimedes, Aristotle, and a lesser known,

really interesting figure called Archytas or Archytas. That's right. We're going to be talking about innovations, lessons from ancient Greece, how to innovate lessons from ancient Greece. Now we're talking all about this with the legendary Dr. Armand d'Angour from Jesus College, Oxford. Armand, he does a lot of work around ancient Greece, particularly around ancient Greek music. As you're about to hear, we even get a mention of the Beatles, Taylor Swift and Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing in this episode. So if an episode of the Ancients podcast mentions Sultans of Swing and Dire Straits, you know it's going to be a good ep because a little inside knowledge

to you from me here Dire Straits is my favourite band of all time Thanks Dad But without further ado to talk about how to innovate lessons from ancient Greece here's Armand Armand, thank you so much

for taking the time to come on the podcast today Thank you for inviting me You are very, very welcome indeed Armand, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you for inviting me. You are very, very welcome indeed. And this whole topic, like change, ancient Greece, innovation. I mean, Armand, is it sometimes fair to say that we can sometimes think of ancient Greece, ancient Greeks as being quite traditional, averse to change, but actually, as we're going to discuss, they were incredibly innovative. Of course they were incredibly innovative.

That doesn't mean that they actually wanted to innovate. But that seemed to me a bit of a contradiction when I started thinking about it some years ago, actually. In fact, I did my doctorate on this in the 90s. And I looked at innovation and the way it was received and thought about by the ancient Greeks. and the way it was received and thought about by the ancient Greeks. And I realised that the standard view that the ancient Greeks were not that keen on anything new needed to be rethought considerably, partly because, as you say, they were tremendously innovative. And the notion that over several hundred years, all those innovations happened despite their better judgment, you know, we don't really want anything new, but hey, guess what? We've got some world-shattering cultural innovation. Well, that can't have been right. They must have known that they did find something very exciting about the new. And indeed, when I started looking into

it, there was all kinds of evidence that some people very much promoted the notion of doing something new because it was better. And the evidence on which a lot of scholars had based the notion that they didn't like something new needed to be revised in terms of how we should interpret it. So clearly, in a Greek tragedy, whenever the word new crops up, and you know, the kind of positivistic approaches account the numbers of words and their context, wherever the word new crops up in tragedy, it's because something terrible has happened. So what's new? Oh, Oedipus has blinded himself. Oh dear, we don't like anything new, do we? So we needed to get our minds out of the notion that all the occurrences of novelty were somehow

negative and to think more broadly. And so I looked at all kinds of things, including religion and music and literature and all sorts of cultural innovations like maths and logic and philosophy and sculpture and architecture. And of course, there was a tremendous promotion of doing things new and better. And a recognition, of course, that one could do something new and not improve. And therefore, there was a bit of an imperative to be careful. I mean, absolutely, Armand. And like to kick it all off, I really want to go back to like, let's say, earlier stages, as it were. The ideas of novelty, of change, of studying almost these ideas.

Because the first idea I'd like to talk about is this whole question of change itself. Because this feels like this idea of, this is something that Greek philosophers have been thinking about, you know, for the longest time. In many ways, it was the most important question for the pre-Socratic philosophers, those philosophers like Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes, who we know about from Aristotle, who preceded Socrates. That's why they're the pre-Socratics. And one of the things they seem to have really struggled with was the idea that something can change into something else and become different. How is that possible? How is it that change even happens? Because what happens to the original thing? You know, one minute is there, next minute, there's something else there. Is that really possible? And one of those pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides,

decided it can't logically be the case. If something changes into something completely different, that's just not possible. So he said change is an illusion. Change and multiplicity is an illusion. Everything is just static. We just happen to be fooled into thinking that there's multiplicity. I mean, it's a weird philosophy, a weird doctrine to try and sustain. But that's what he said. And that's what he argued. And actually Aristotle in the physics starts off by taking issue with that idea because it's clearly counterintuitive. It doesn't really respect the phenomena. And Aristotle was very keen to respect the phenomena and to say, look, we see things changing. There has to be a logical way in which change happens. And of course,

he is right about that. Even if it were purely illusory, we'd have to ask ourselves, what brings about that illusion of change? And Aristotle's solution was eminently sensible and brilliant, actually, which is, of course, that there is always a substrate from which something changes. And that substrate is itself modified by the change. So, you know, you can have an acorn that turns into a tree. It doesn't mean that a tree is a completely different object. It partakes of some elements of the original acorn. But, of course, it has gone beyond that. So Aristotle came up with various solutions which were basically evolutionary in nature.

That suggested that change happens and that things change by partaking from something that already exists which you know actually a lot of people say oh that's radically new the idea that something can burst onto the scene which has no roots at all in the past and that just doesn't make sense at all because even even if that were the case, we wouldn't recognize such a novelty, would we? We have to have some point of comparison, whereby we will understand that something new is built upon, or in some way relates to something that already exists. And this is the mindset that these early philosophers, many of them had when considering questions like, you know, where did everything come from? Yes. Thales said everything must have

originated in one substance, which then differentiated itself. And he nominated water as that original substance. I mean, water is clearly a very versatile and hugely important element. And also you can imagine that water evaporates and becomes air, it's liquid, it becomes ice, so somehow it can solidify. And so it seemed like a good candidate to this, the earliest of the Ionian philosophers, to be the prime substance. So that was the term they used, the arche, the first principle we sometimes translate it. and then others said well just a moment you know something must be prior to that and Ximene said it was air and Heraclitus said it was the Logos which is the principle of order in the universe which he sort of equated

with fire but I don't think he thought fire was the first element in a material sense and then you know you got these monists, as they were called, because they were looking for one single element from which everything could emerge. And then Empedocles in the late 6th century, early 5th century, a Sicilian Greek, came up with this brilliant notion that actually there were four different elements, earth, fire, air and water, which he called the roots of the cosmos, and that they were subject to two key principles, love and strife. Love which brought them together, many combinations, and strife which pulled them apart. And so this was the principle that governed the creation of

everything. Out of those four elements, you had these principles of division and combination. I mean, just a question that emerges in that straight away, how do they manage those ideas with the whole mythical background too? Because does this seem to go completely against the myths of creation and so on? Yes, in a way, they rationalize those early myths. So a lot of the early myths do talk about the creation of the world from, say, sky and earth giving birth. So that kind of mythical fantasy could perhaps be rationalized in terms of sky being the air and earth being the physical concrete substance.

So in a sense, they have roots themselves, like everything has roots in the past. So the rational notion of a physical starting point does have roots in the mythical background that the Greeks would have known about. Thank you for that. Now, you did mention Aristotle, so I feel we must go back to Aristotle. And when Aristotle is living and he's talking about change, he's looking at change, when he is living, the background, the context to when he's living, there does seem to be already a strong sense by this time that innovation, that change can be for the better, shall we say? Very much so. So I think that idea that something new can lead to something better emerges quite strongly in the 5th century BC. And the great classical scholar E.R. Dodds wrote a book called The Idea of Progress, and he somewhat more or less pinpoints

the sense of capacity in the 5th century, during the 5th century BC. This is the Athenian century when Athens becomes the head of an empire of Greek city-states. And a lot of ideas flow into Athens from all around the Greek world and then flow out again. There's a centripetal and centrifugal force that spreads ideas around the Greek world. So although Athens is the center of it, it doesn't mean that all these thinkers are themselves Athenians. They are from all over the Greek world. But it is at that period that higher education of some kind begins, that formal education is established, that philosophical ideas start to become written down. It is the century of prose writing. I mean, almost everything prior to that, including philosophy,

has been written in verse. And it's sometimes thought of as the period when mythos, myth, starts to give way to logos, reason. I mean, that's a bit uncomplicated. It's much more complex than that. And myth certainly survives. Irrationality of all kinds survives, as it does indeed today. But nonetheless, rational ideas start to take root. Things like rational medical approaches. Let's actually see what works instead of, you know, making spells and throwing potions at people, incredible work of the Hippocratic authors, and a lot of other things which seem to suggest that progress is possible through what they called mathesis, education, learning. And you get this fantastic ode to man written by Sophocles in around 440, perhaps 438 BC, in his drama The Antigone,

in which he says many things are wonderful on earth, many things are formidable, but nothing is more formidable than human beings. And he goes into a sort of peon of praise for humanity's discoveries. Not only do we sail the seas and plough the earth, but we've come up with thoughts, we've come up with language, we've come up with laws and customs. And he says, frankly, we can do everything apart from end death itself. Death is the one thing we can do nothing about. But he says, but even for terrible diseases, one thing we can do nothing about. But he says, but even for terrible diseases,

human beings have discovered remedies. So it's a real expression of hope and the sense that human reason and thought has brought about progress. The positivity is like an ancient Greek Tony Robbins speech. It's fantastic, Armand. Exactly, yes. I guess like another area, and I know this one's very close to your hearts,

the music at this time as well. There seems to be a lot of positive change and innovation in music too. There is a lot of positive change. But of course, anyone who is a music lover will know that when things change, very often people say it's for the worse. So especially the old fashioned conservatives. And interestingly, there is a huge wave of innovation in music in the 5th century BC, and most of the reports we have about it are actually quite negative. Plato in particular, a hugely influential voice, published thousands, perhaps millions of words, and said that the new music of his youth, which would be the late 5th century BC, was essentially degenerate, that it had lost its form, it had lost its traditional shape and expression, and that it was all over the place,

and it was sexualized, and it pandered to the common people. And he actually talks about theocratia, which is like the equivalent of democracy, but it's theatocracy, the rule of the theatre mob. He says, you know, they are clamouring for this kind of stuff, but actually that's not what good music is. And he would ban it from his ideal state, this kind of musical excess and extravagance and lawlessness, as he calls it. But having said that, of course, what he is showing is a conservative response to a massively popular movement. This was the pop music of the ancient world. And we have other reports which talks about how the theater,

and imagine a theater of 12,000 to 15,000 people, was driven wild by the gyrations of one of their key performers, a double pipe player called Pronymus, by his movements and by the expressions on his face, that the theater just, you know, burst out into applause. So you can imagine, as I often think of this man as the Elvis Presley of the ancient world, gyrating on stage and making all these funny noises and looking really intense,

and the theatre crowd loving it. And this particular performer, Phronomus of Thebes and others like Timotheus of Miletus, they are named. They became extremely successful, very wealthy pop musicians of their day. And although they were kind of somewhat dismissed by Plato, you know, others recognize them to be the future. And amazingly, we have an inscription which tells us that Timotheus was still being sung in Arcadia in the second century A.D. Can you imagine that? He's active in Arcadia in the 2nd century AD.

Can you imagine that? He's active in, say, 410 BC. 600 years later, they're still singing his songs. Can you imagine the Beatles lasting 2600 AD? It's hard to imagine, but this is what happened to Timotheus. It's good that you said the Beatles straight away, because my mind was going to say straight away Taylor Swift. So evidently you've got the better music taste right there my friend or Dire Straits let's go with Dire Straits then um yeah Sultans of Swing in 2600

CE or AD who knows who knows indeed now we talked about music but let's therefore go back to Aristotle and his views about change and creating change in this time. He's got lots of ideas, I know he does, but he also has ideas of how people can create change in the political arena too. He writes a fantastic account in his Politics, which I translate in my book on how to innovate, about a number of thinkers who came up with very deliberate ways of changing political constitutions. And of course, the most important of those for Aristotle is his own teacher, Plato. And Plato wrote the Republic as it's translated. We might translate it as the ideal city or something of that kind. And in it, he said, this is how an ideal city should work. Everyone should have their own place, for example. People should recognize what they do the best. Soldiers should

have their own class and slaves should have their own class. I mean, in a sense, he was taking his current society, but then trying to order it in a way that he thought would work. So this is quasi-communistic. And Aristotle has a bit of a go at that idea that you can have women in common, which is what Plato's Republic would do. Plato then revised his thoughts, and he wrote another very long, even longer book called The Laws, in which he talks about model state based on specific laws, laws which would allow certain things and ban other things such as the wrong kind of music, for example. So he came up with two blueprints, you might say,

for a new kind of society. So Aristotle discusses that and critiques it. He then goes on to talk about two extraordinary figures. One was Hippodamus of Miletus, who was a town planner who probably laid out the city of Rhodes, was what we're told he did. And he designed the street plan for the Piraeus in Athens, the docks. So he was a very innovative individual. And apparently he was quite extravagant in the way he dressed and performed and presented himself. And he comes up with a kind of blueprint for a society. But one aspect of that I found very interesting was that he said we should set up a competition with prizes for people who come up with new constitutions or new laws, because that way we might incentivize people to come up with very good innovations. And that was one aspect I wanted to pick out and say,

you know, the idea that you can come up with something new and positive, so Hippodamus believes, because you give people financial or other incentives to do so, is there at the basis of that very innovative notion of a state. But Aristotle doesn't think that's a good idea because he says, well, you know, you can come up with a new idea and you can win a prize for it, but who's to say it would actually work? And really, you know, with things like law, he said, it's a matter of societies getting to the habit of obeying laws. So sometimes even if a law is not perfect, it's probably better to stick with it, he says, than to simply try and create a new one. And I think he's got a very good point there. Certainly on a broad social level, you can't have this kind of rapid change without chaos emerging. And so Aristotle was a kind of Edmund Burke before the letter. As you listen to this, me and Team History Hit are on our way down to the Weddell Sea,

joining the expedition mounted by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust to the place where we believe the endurance lies on the seafloor. If we find it, it'll be the greatest underwater discovery since the Titanic. So get ready. Dan Snow's History Hit podcast is the exclusive place to follow in real time the search for the lost Endurance shipwreck in Antarctica, with regular episodes and updates dropping in the feed throughout the month. I mean, Amon, it's quite interesting how it's almost as if he realises that there are different types of change and there are different processes through which to enact this change, depending on the area of society, can we say, whether it's in music, whether it's in politics, whether it's in warfare and so on. And that's what he says. Unfortunately, he kind of leaves his discussion of political change by saying, well, of course, change is not the same in disciplines like music, say, as it is in constitutional matters. So to change the law or to change the way

the government works is a very different thing from innovating in a technical discipline. And, you know, he mentions carpentry and gymnastics and music. And you can see that he says in those areas, it's clear that innovation is a good thing. You need to find new ways of doing things. Obviously, in the case of music, I think it was a question of, you know, you don't want to bore people by just producing the same kind of stuff all over and over again. to bore people by just producing the same kind of stuff all over and over again. In other cases, it was the technical changes that make you a better carpenter or a better gymnast or so on. So I think by making that distinction, it's kind of very casual, but it's a kind of very

important distinction at the end of his discussion of changing constitutions. It does alert us to the notion that Aristotle was a far more sophisticated thinker than just saying change is good or bad. You know, the first thing you have to do is decide, well, in what area are we operating? And is it the kind of area in which innovation in its own right is a good thing? So I think we in the modern world are so used to the notion of technological innovation bringing improvements that we just assume that we need to innovate all the time because we know that the older technology is no match for the newer. But in a pre-technological world, in a way that's what's interesting about the ancient Greek world, they weren't thinking so much about technological innovation. That did come in Aristotle's time and subsequently in the

so-called Hellenistic period only to be shut down by the emphasis on military change and so when Alexander the Great conquers the world the only real innovation is that he is you know technically the greatest general with the greatest armies with the longest spears, you know, this extraordinary battalion with these huge sarissas and so on, which cut a swathe through the known world, that ends all sorts of innovations, as far as we can tell, all sorts of cultural innovations. But there are other technical innovations which slip under the radar, but never become sufficiently powerful before the Romans take over and destroy the empire of Alexander's successors. And so those innovations, technical innovation,

include such things as steam power, include such things as this extraordinary object called the Antikythera mechanism, which is in the Athens National Museum, an unbelievable, complicated object with loads of cogs and wheels and so on, which could tell you where the stars were at any particular time. It was basically a calendar that worked with incredible finesse. It has been reconstructed. And there are thousands of these little cogs and wheels and so on. So that kind of thing, we have no written description of, but it happened then. So my view actually is that the Greeks were on the cusp of a technological revolution. And had there been the kind of interstate competitiveness and freedom that we find in some parts of the fifth century BC, If that had survived, I suspect there would have

been a kind of industrial revolution. I'm going to go on a slight tangent here, because that was so, so interesting. And one figure who I find really interesting from that period I'm on is, let's go west, and let's go to the city-state of Tarentum in southern Italy, and this statesman, mathematician, politician called Archytas. And he is an extraordinary figure, isn't he, when it comes to innovations? Yes. So he was an inventor and an engineer. I'm not sure I mentioned him in my book because it's hard to fit him in, but I'm a fan of his too, actually. He invented, for example, a steam-powered bird, which could actually fly. And we're given this on good authority. And people have tried to reconstruct this steam-powered thing. That kind of practical inventiveness is extraordinary. He also came up with a theory of

sound, which is in its own way, very similar to what we believe today. It's about beats and waves of sound. So, you know, he did experiments with things that whirred around called rhomboid. And he was an experimental scientist, which, you know, is extremely rare. This is the turn of the fifth and fourth century. Archytas was a friend of Plato. And, you know, he was recognized as being an extraordinary inventor and engineer. But as I say, a lot of the texts that we have don't talk about these things. We have some of Archytas' own writing about acoustics, for example,

and we have some reports of some of the things he did, like the mechanical bird. If only we had more, I think we'd find all this was the tip of the iceberg of new experimental approaches to science and invention. It's always so interesting when you do actually ask that question, how much has been lost? And he said, you've only got the tip of the iceberg surviving, as you say, Armand.

I mean, we've got to keep on the inventions in this innovation and we can't not talk about ancient Greek inventions, innovations, without going to the city-state of Syracuse in Sicily. And as you've already mentioned competitive innovation, let's start with this figure called Dionysius I. Now, Amund, who is Dionysius and what's his innovation, his competitive innovation, shall we say? So he is the so-called tyrant of Syracuse, tyrant simply meaning the dynastic head or king of that city-state. And he's the descendant of a long line of similar leaders of Syracuse, an early one of which Hieron II had actually commissioned from Archimedes the design of a

giant ship, which we have a very detailed description of, which I translate in my book. And it's an amazing description of this vast ship which could take you know thousands of people on board had a swimming pool and a library and walkways so Hieron then was competing with his predecessors who were other tyrants of Sicily who had created great inventions and one of them was Dionysius So Dionysus sometime in the early fourth century is aware that there's a big power to the southwest of Greece, of Sicily, and that is the Carthaginians or the Phoenicians who had settled there hundreds of years earlier and were a great power, of course, the power that was to challenge and nearly defeat Rome several centuries thereafter under Hannibal. And so there are constant wars

with Carthage and a worry that the Carthaginians will actually invade Syracuse and conquer them. I mean, they already managed to do that with some islands off the coast of Sicily. And so Dionysius sets up a competition to produce weapons of war, artillery weapons, artillery weapons such as catapults and ballistas. and artisans and inventors swarmed into the central cyclades. They took over private homes, they settled in wherever they could in gymnasia and so on, and they started building things. And the result of that was essentially an invention of the catapult. Now, this is a hugely important invention because the biggest problem for ancient generals was besieging a city. What would happen is most of these cities would have protective walls, and if the citizens had enough food and access to water, they could retreat behind these walls, and armies, however big, would have to sit outside day after day in

camps trying to get through them and being attacked by arrows and boiling pitch and all that sort of stuff. So sieges were almost never successful in the ancient world. I mean, you'd have to sit there for a year with a big army and all the logistics that that took to feed them and look after them in order to actually break a siege. So what was needed was weaponry that could basically bash down walls and send massive missiles, you know, great boulders of molten iron or whatever, into the centre of cities. So what you're talking about is an ICBM of some kind, and that was what was created, these extraordinary catapults using amazing torsion ropes and so on,

these extraordinary catapults using amazing torsion ropes and so on in order to hurl incredibly heavy rocks to break down fortifications and to destroy besieged cities. So that's what happened then. And of course, this continued to be used as a method all the way through to Alexander the Great and beyond. And, you know, when you look at the opening scenes of Ridley Scott's Gladiator, you get a sense of that kind of power of the Roman army with their ability to use their extraordinary sort of weapons. And I think that kind of thing was clearly what began with Dionysius' aim to get these inventions off the ground by setting up prizes and competitions.

Absolutely, absolutely, Amund. Thank you for that. And I want to make the most out of the time that we've got with you. So we're going to keep on Syracuse. And you did mention it earlier here on the second. And we can't not talk about innovation and invention without mentioning and talking about this great titan

of ancient Greek innovation, Armand Archimedes. First of all, who was he? And then talk us through the Eureka moment, the story of the Eureka moment. He was an inventor. He was a brilliant mathematician. He was recognized as such. He was from Syracuse in Sicily,

this hugely powerful city-state. So Hieron I was an early 5th century tyrant. Hieron II, as I've mentioned much later, under Hieron II, a descendant of Dionysius, king of Syracuse, Archimedes was an important henchman. He helped with all kinds of inventions. He famously invented an object which was supposed to be able to train the sun's light in such a way that it could set another ship on fire. So this was called Greek fire. You know, it's like the magnifying glass. We don't know exactly whether that is what happened.

So the reports, unfortunately, are a bit garbled. I mean, there's no question that he did invent some extraordinary things, such as the water screw, which should pull water up using this screw mechanism, and the windlass, which similarly could pull ropes up. So things like windlasses and pulleys and so on, Archimedes clearly either invented or improved. But the stories that tells of the Eureka moment is that King Hieron had ordered the creation of a crown out of gold. And then when he received this intricate object, a crown made of gold, he suspected that the artisan had adulterated it with something like silver.

Now, how would you tell? He apparently commissioned Archimedes to find out whether that was the case. And Archimedes went away wondering how he could do that. You know, you can't chip at a beautiful golden crown to try and weigh bits of it. You Can't use sort of the assay methods they used to use, rubbing it on bits of stone in order to see whether it really is made of gold, you know, because there could have been silver inside it, you know, whatever. So the story is that Archimedes went and thought, how can I find out whether it is? And he got into the bath and he saw the water level rising

and he realised that if the object was made of slightly lighter metal than gold or even partly of slightly lighter metal then it would displace more water so the water would at least in principle rise more if the density of the object was not as great as that of pure gold and so he jumped out of the bath, shouting Eureka, according to the story, ran down the streets of Syracuse naked, screaming, I've got the answer. Now, that's the story. And few have questioned it, though most scholars have doubted its accuracy, partly because the idea of measuring the volume of an object by sticking it in a bowl of water is a pretty obvious one. And there was actually an old fable by Aesop, which talks about the crow who wanted to drink

some water, but it was at the bottom of a pail. So even a crow knew that it could drop pebbles into the bowl until the water level rose. So in that sense, displacing the water with pebbles. So that idea that you could measure the volume of an object by immersing it in water, or the mass of an object, I suppose, scientifically speaking, and then divide that by its weight in order to get its density, doesn't seem to me and to others quite as crucial a discovery for such a great inventor as Archimedes as it's made out to be. And so when I came across in a second century AD Egyptian author called Athenaeus the description of the Syracusia, which was this massive boat I talked about before, and it says clearly that Hyrum II commissioned Archimedes to build this ship. I realize it had nothing to do with a crown. I think that the Eureka moment had to do with the building of one of the biggest vessels that floated on water

in the history of the world. And that Archimedes' problem must have been to try and prove to Hyrum that this thing was going to float. And so he must have worried about the question of how is it that something that heavy can float? Because in the ancient world, you know, some people would say, well, of course, the reason it will sink is because it's too heavy. So it's going to be weighing tons, as it would have done, then there's no way it can float. But what, of course, he came up with was what is still called the Archimedes principle, which is the principle of buoyancy. And the principle of buoyancy states that the force that is exerted on the object that allows it to flow, the upward, as it were, force of the water must be equal to or greater

than the force of the object pushing downwards. So that's what allows it to float. And so if you have an object that is a supertanker, it will have a large area which will not be as heavy as the area of water in which it is placed. And so that water will allow that object to float. So it doesn't matter how big it is, it matters how much water is displaced by it. And so that's the principle. I mean, there is a scientific formula for it, which Archimedes came up up with but i think he would have been massively excited to rush to higher end and say look i know this is going to work you can make it as big as you like because what matters is how much the force of the water boiling upwards is rather than whether it weighs one ton or 50 tons. Amol, is it quite interesting that in this story, whichever version we're talking about,

that this great innovation, this great, you know, eureka moment for Archimedes, it doesn't happen when he's at his desk and he's working on it. It happens when he's in the bath and he's relaxing that these thoughts come to him. That I think is very important. And what I wanted to show from this story

was not so much that he came up with an invention that was related directly to his being in the bath. It wasn't related necessarily to his sinking into the bath and because most of the baths in that ancient time consisted of steam rooms and various other areas for relaxation and there probably were also bath tubs but they weren't necessarily the most important part of going to the baths you know you'd scrape yourself down and all the rest of it so my thought was that maybe the point was that Archimedes had gone to have his weekly bath, or however often they did it, maybe his daily bath, and he'd relaxed. And as I say, at the moment that you relax, you switch off, your mind goes into a different mode, various beta or other kinds of waves start to affect your thinking, things fall into place, as they do for many inventors, it's well proven, when they go to sleep inventors. It's well proven when they go to

sleep, for example, and they wake up and go, I've got it. And I think that may well be actually the story of the Archimedes Eureka moment, that the conditions for his coming up with something new and exciting were that he had thought very hard for a long time about how he could explain that a giant ship would actually float and then he decided okay I'll switch off go to the bars and it came to him at that moment and then he rushed out naked shouting I've got it Eureka. Oh it's so interesting to listen to all this and especially when we now think of the modern day with innovations everywhere but also that whole relaxing idea i mean it just came to me this idea that sometimes some of my i'd like to

think best ideas come around let's say going for a walk or let's say you're out at dinner with someone and they've gone to the loo for five minutes whatsoever you don't get on your phone you just kind of sit back and enjoy and relax as you wait and you have a think and that's when like these thoughts these ideas come is this one like the great lessons do you think we can learn from this innovation from ancient greek times for today i think it is i think that description of what you've said is as i say a well-known phenomenon you know there's a series called the shower principle which you know the guy has his best thoughts at the shower and we have all experienced that moment well i have certainly in which you switch off from something you think, oh, my God, that's the answer.

So for an individual who's tried to innovate, I think it is terribly important that one has that oscillation between being deeply involved. So I don't think you can get away from that. You've really got to know what you're thinking about and kind of switching off. And you see it in musicians. There was a recent film of the Beatles with kind of they're just, you know, playing around and suddenly kind of Paul McCartney comes up with this thing. So they weren't looking to find the solution. But the solution emerges as you're kind of playing. Now, that's certainly a very important condition, I think, for individuals coming up with innovations, innovative ideas. What I wanted to draw was a more

general principle that you need to create the conditions, whether it is for individuals or for the society as a whole. And there are all kinds of different conditions, and they include setting up competitive events, they include incentivizing, so giving prizes, they include people's desire for honor and glory, all sorts of things. And also within social terms, in social terms, they require freedom, the ability to take a risk, to think out of the box, as we might put it nowadays, and the ability to disseminate one's ideas. I mean, it's no good just living in a society where if you come up with an idea, you'll be sent to prison. You know, we're not in North Korea coming up with a good idea because that

good idea is going to have to be thought of by Kim Jong-un, otherwise you're done for. So you need that kind of freedom. You need the ability to disseminate it. And we have at this period in ancient Athens, papyrus, which allows people to write things down. We have an alphabet, which allows reams of stuff to be sent out, to be thought about, to be critiqued. And all those are the conditions, the prior conditions. So that's my first principle. And there are four in this book. First principle is actually an external principle that of setting the scene, getting the conditions right, so that individuals or groups or societies can find themselves able to innovate. And then there are three so-called mechanisms

that I talk about. Very simple, adaptation, which is building on the past, reversal, which is turning it upside down, doing something that is opposite to what you've done before, and combination or cross-fertilization, which is bringing two things together, which have not previously been associated. And I think that the ancient Greek experience gives us examples of all of those, but also that these are essentially everything there is to innovation in, of course, millions of different permutations. So I've done something quite Aristotelian, you might say. I've tried to boil down the notion of innovation to a few principles, without saying, of course, that few principles without saying of course that there

aren't all kinds of additional complicated ways in which these things work but as yet i haven't found that there are other basic principles that need to be added to that list to give us the mechanisms that will bring about something that is new well i'm on it's a great read an important book and i mean last but certainly not least it's great to have had you on the pod for the last 30, 40 minutes or so. This book, Armand, it is called? How to Innovate, An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking. Fantastic. That's what we all need. Now, Armand, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you for your questions. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you for your questions. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Armand Dongor talking all about innovation lessons from ancient Greece, the likes of Archimedes, Aristotle, Archytas, and so many more. His book, How to Innovate an Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking is out now, and we will put a link to that in the description below. Now, before I wrap up completely, just one special announcement to let you all know.

March is nearing, and for the month of March, Team Ancients, we've got a special series of episodes for you, all about topics related to the most infamous, most renowned day in the ancient history calendar. I'm talking, of course, about the 15th of March, 44 BC, the Ides of March, when Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, was assassinated in a Senate meeting. For this day, for the month of March, we're going to be releasing a series of episodes about topics related to this infamous day in ancient history. March is going to be a special month for the ancients.

This is the first time we're doing this sort of thing, so it's very exciting indeed. Do tune in for those episodes. We've got some great, fantastic guests lined up. Some new guests, some old guests returning to the pod. Veterans of the pod, shall we say. People who we know are brilliant speakers. So stay tuned for that coming next month a special ides of march march month on the ancients now last things for me of course if

you want more ancient history content then subscribe to our newsletter via the link in the description below where we give little hints as to what we're going to be doing next on the ancients and little snippets about what's been happening in team ancient history hit world that week and of course we'd also be very grateful if you left us a lovely rating on either spotify or apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts from that's enough rambling from me i will see you in the next episode Thank you.