From J. E. J. Altham
Cambridge
Roy Porter implies that the close association between words for seeing and
knowing comes from the 17th century optical revolution (Review, 16 November, p
44). It is in fact much older. In Ancient Greek the standard words for “know”
and “see” are the perfect and aorist tenses respectively of the same verb, whose
root is the same as that of the Latin “video”, which has a similar duality of
meaning. Vision has in fact always been the queen of the senses, since so much
of what we want to know concerns objects that are out of reach, silent, and do
not smell.
Mirrors, of course, go back long before silvered glass. The ancient world
used polished metal, and Narcissus admired his reflection in a pool of water.
Long before Castiglione, the Athenian statesman Alcibiades monitored his facial
expressions: there is an anecdote that he threw away his flute because it
discomposed his features.
