Ptolemy in Perspective: Use and Criticism of his Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

238 Pages·2010·8.46 MB·English

by  Anne Tihon (auth.)

PTOLEMYINPERSPECTIVE
Archimedes
NEW STUDIES IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
VOLUME 23
EDITOR
Jed Z. Buchwald, Dreyfuss Professor of History, California Institute
of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES
Jeremy Gray, The Faculty of Mathematics and Computing,
The Open University, Buckinghamshire, UK.
Tilman Sauer, California Institute of Technology

ASSOCIATE EDITORS FOR BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Sharon Kingsland, Department of History of Science and Technology,
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Manfred Laubichler, Arizona State University

ADVISORY BOARD FOR MATHEMATICS, PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY
Henk Bos, University of Utrecht
Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology
Allan D. Franklin, University of Colorado at Boulder
Kostas Gavroglu, National Technical University of Athens
Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Leibniz University in Hannover
Trevor Levere, University of Toronto
Jesper Lützen, Copenhagen University
William Newman, Indian University, Bloomington
Lawrence Principe, The Johns Hopkins University
Jürgen Renn, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Alex Roland, Duke University
Alan Shapiro, University of Minnesota
Noel Swerdlow, California Institute of Technology

ADVISORY BOARD FOR BIOLOGY
Michael Dietrich, Dartmouth College, USA
Michel Morange, Centre Cavaillès, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
Han-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Nancy Siraisi, Hunter College of the City University of New York
Archimedes has three fundamental goals; to further the integration of the histories of science and
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each volume will have its own theme and title and will be planned by one or more members of the
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itself will not be limited to one or even to a few particular areas. Its subjects include any of the
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Ptolemy in Perspective
Use and Criticism of his Work from Antiquity
to the Nineteenth Century
ALEXANDERJONES
InstitutefortheStudyoftheAncientWorld,NewYorkUniversity
Editor
AlexanderJones
15East84thStreet
NewYorkNY10028
USA
[email protected]
ISSN1385-0180
ISBN978-90-481-2787-0 e-ISBN978-90-481-2788-7
SpringerDordrechtHeidelbergLondonNewYork
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2009940670
(cid:2)c SpringerScience+BusinessMediaB.V.2010
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anymeans,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,microfilming,recordingorotherwise,withoutwritten
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Acknowledgements
The 2007 Caltech conference “Ptolemy in Perspective” that gave rise to this volume
was generously funded by the Francis Bacon Foundation, and expertly organized
by the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech. The editor also
acknowledges the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University,
for providing resources and technical support in the book’s preparation.

v
Contents
AnUnpublishedAstronomicalPapyrusContemporarywithPtolemy..... 1
AnneTihon
AncientRejectionandAdoptionofPtolemy’sFrameofReferencefor
Longitudes ........................................................ 11
AlexanderJones
Ptolemy’sDoctrineoftheTermsandItsReception .................... 45
StephanHeilen
TheTraditionofTextsandMapsinPtolemy’sGeography ............... 95
FlorianMittenhuber
IslamicReactionstoPtolemy’sImprecisions........................... 121
F.JamilRagep
TheUseandAbuseofPtolemy’sTetrabiblosinRenaissanceandEarly
ModernEurope:TwoCaseStudies(GiovanniPicodellaMirandolaand
FilippoFantoni) ...................................................135
H.DarrelRutkin
Tycho,Longomontanus,andKepleronPtolemy’sSolarObservations
andTheory,PrecessionoftheEquinoxes,andObliquityof theEcliptic... 151
N.M.Swerdlow
Dunthorne,Mayer, andLalandeontheSecularAccelerationoftheMoon..203
J.M.Steele
Bibliography.......................................................217
vii
Contributors
Stephan Heilen Institut für Romanistik/Latinistik, Universität Osnabrück,
Germany, [email protected]

Alexander Jones Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University,
New York, NY, USA, [email protected]

Florian Mittenhuber Ptolemaios-Forschungsstelle, Institut für Klassische Philologie,
Universität Bern, Schweiz, [email protected]

F. Jamil Ragep Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec,
Canada, [email protected]

H. Darrel Rutkin Institute for the study of the Ancient World, New York University,
New York, NY, USA, [email protected]

J. M. Steele Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies,
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, [email protected]

N. M. Swerdlow Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Techno-
logy, Pasadena, CA, USA, [email protected]

Anne Tihon Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium,
[email protected]
ix
Introduction
AmongthescientificauthorsoftheancientGreco-Romanworld,nonegivesussuch
a strong impression of writing for posterity as Ptolemy. He lives in a time when
learned and eloquent men seek and attain public adulation and private patronage,
when the physician Galen performs dissections of pigs and sheep before the elite
of Rome and when the sophist Alexander the “Clay Plato” dazzles the Athenian
massesasmuchbyhisgroominganddeportmentasbyhisdeclamation.Fromthis
milieuPtolemyisutterlyremote.Outsideofhisbooksheisnothing;nocontempo-
rary mentions the man, and no later account of his life or person will preserve an
authentic report. He addresses his books without flourish to a certain Syros, about
whomweknownothing,andinthemthereisnopersonality,noreferencetohimself
exceptasanobserver,scholar,andtheoretician,noallusiontohisenvironment.His
criticisms of other scientific practitioners are free of polemic. He habitually uses
sesquipedalianverbsandwritesvast,labyrinthinesentences;buthisvocabularyand
phrasingare repetitive,eschewingfigurativelanguage,andhistangledsyntaxresults
from the impulse to express the conditions and consequences of a thought all at
once, and is worlds away from self-conscious rhetoric. Galen cannot refrain from
bragginghowprofitableanybookascribedtohimselfisforthebooksellersofRome;
onesuspectsthateveninstudiousAlexandriaPtolemy’stechnicaltreatisesarenot
exactly bestsellers. Nor is there anything meretricious about Ptolemy’s efforts to
give his science a public face: the inscription he erects at Canopus represents his
cosmosasabarelistofhighlyprecisenumericalparameters,andhisworldmapis
ageometricalconstructionunembellishedbycrocodilesandpygmies.
AndsoPtolemy’sbiographyispracticallycompletewhenwehavesaidthathis
fullnamewasKlaudiosPtolemaios,andthathelivedinornearAlexandria,made
astronomical observations between the mid-120s and the early 140s of our era,
and wrote books on scientific topics of which about a dozen have come down to
us.1 Abouthalfareastronomical,andofthese,threeareespeciallyimportant.The
MathematicalComposition(Mathematikeˆ Syntaxis),betterknownsincetheMiddle
Ages as the Almagest, is a systematic treatise in thirteen books in which Ptolemy
deduces the structure and quantitative parameters of geometrical models for the
heavenlybodiesfromempiricalevidenceincludingspecificdatedobservations.The
Almagestalsousesthesemodelstoderivetablesforcalculatingthepositionsofthe
heavenlybodiesonanygivendate,togetherwithotherphenomenasuchaseclipses
xi
xii Introduction
andplanetaryfirstandlastvisibilities,butthetablesalsohadalifeoftheirownin
slightlyrevisedformasaseparatepublicationthatPtolemycalledtheHandyTables
(Prokheiroi Kanones). Lastly, Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses (Hypotheseis toˆn
Planoˆmenoˆn), a treatise in two books, gives a technical description, again slightly
revised,ofPtolemy’scelestialmodels,suggestshowtheyarelikelytobearranged
relative to each other and what their absolute dimensions would be, and offers a
physicalinterpretationofthegeometricalmodelsintermsofsystemsofrevolving
bodiescomposedofaitheˆr,theAristotelianfifthelement.
AllPtolemy’sotherwritingshaveatleastaglancingconnectiontohisastronomy,
buttwoareespeciallyclose.TheTetrabiblos(againanickname—wedonotknow
Ptolemy’s own title, but a credible guess is Apotelesmatika, roughly “Astrological
Influences”)isafour-booktreatisearguingfortheviabilityofastrologyasaphys-
ical science of the effects of celestial bodies on the terrestrial environment and on
individuals, and on this basis Ptolemy undertakes a systematic reform of the gen-
eralprinciplesofastrologicalprediction.TheGeography(GeoˆgraphikeˆHypheˆgeˆsis,
“GuidetoWorld-Cartography,”alsocommonlyknownbeforemoderntimesasthe
Cosmography)providestheprinciplesandmaterialsforthedrawingofamapofthe
knownpartsoftheworldbasedonacriticalanalysisofastronomicalmeasurements
andothergeographicalreports.
Ptolemy crafted each of his major treatises to be self-standing, so that no
reader would have to be familiar with other texts on the same topic to follow
Ptolemy’sargumentonitsownterms.Perhapsinpartforthatveryreason,Ptolemy’s
tended to be the only works of their genres to survive into late antiquity and the
medieval Byzantine and Arabic traditions. (The exception is astrology, which was
handed down through many other texts in addition to the Tetrabiblos.) Each of
Ptolemy’s treatises has a distinct, sometimes complex path of subsequent recep-
tion and exploitation as a text of living scientific value, or of criticism that could
lead to rejection. In the case of the Almagest, the presence of observation reports
that,iftrustworthy,mightcontributetothemeasurementoftheEarth’svariablerate
of rotation has kept that work from entirely subsiding into a condition of purely
historicalinterestuptoourowntime.
From May 31 through June 2, 2007 the Division of the Humanities and Social
SciencesattheCaliforniaInstituteofTechnology,withgeneroussupportfromthe
FrancisBaconFoundation,hostedaconferenceonusesandcriticismsofPtolemy’s
astronomical,geographical,andastrologicalworksfromantiquitythroughmodern
times,thefocusbeingontheroleofPtolemyincurrentscientificpracticeanddis-
pute.Thepresentvolumegathersmostofthepapersfromthatconferencetogether
withanewpaperbytheeditor.
IntheAlmagestPtolemytreatsHipparchusashisonlylegitimatepredecessorin
theoretical astronomy, making only brief and dismissively vague allusions to the
astronomers of the intervening three centuries and his own time. Modern eluci-
dation of traces of Greek astronomy in Indian sources (a field of evidence by no
meansexhausted,thoughtricky)haverevealedthatPtolemyelidedoveragreatdeal
of work in mathematical astronomy that had been done after Hipparchus, and the
ongoingdiscoveryofastronomicaltextsandtablesamongthepapyrifromRoman