But there were great differences in the intellectual climates of Alexandria and Athens. For one thing, the scholars of the Museum generally did not pursue the kind of all-embracing theories that had preoccupied the Greeks from Thales to Aristotle. As Floris Cohen has remarked,4 “Athenian thought was comprehensive, Alexandrian piecemeal.” The Alexandrians concentrated on understanding specific phenomena, where real progress could be made. These topics included optics and hydrostatics, and above all astronomy, the subject of Part II.
