ABSTRACT
Astronomy also included astrology, which enjoyed the same credibility and elicited the greatest interest in all ancient civilisations, including the Greek one, founded as it was on the study of numbers and numerical relations. Besides, the teaching of astrology constituted one of the main means of support for ancient scientists. The stars, the importance of which in the eyes of the ancients could hardly be overestimated, was also the object of a discipline with markedly empirical applications: meteorology. A closer correspondence between ancient and modern science is to be found in the case of medicine. Ancient medicine actually developed along far more complex and diverse lines than the surviving works and their transmission would suggest: the Corpus Hippocraticum illustrates medicine as seen from the winners' perspective, the rest is almost entirely lost. Ancient science one of its high points, which was to condition its entire later course.
