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PTOLEMY IN PERSPECTIVE 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 technology with one another: to investigate the technical, social and practical histories of specific developments in science and technology; and finally, where possible and desirable, to bring the histories of science and technology into closer contact with the philosophy of science. To these ends, each volume will have its own theme and title and will be planned by one or more members of the Advisory Board in consultation with the editor. Although the volumes have specific themes, the series itself will not be limited to one or even to a few particular areas. Its subjects include any of the sciences, ranging from biology through physics, all aspects of technology, broadly construed, as well as historically-engaged philosophy of science or technology. Taken as a whole, Archimedes will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and scientists, as well as to those in business and industry who seek to understand how science and industry have come to be so strongly linked. Ptolemy in Perspective Use and Criticism of his Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century ALEXANDER JONES Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University Editor Alexander Jones 15 East 84th Street New York NY 10028 USA [email protected] ISSN 1385-0180 ISBN 978-90-481-2787-0 e-ISBN 978-90-481-2788-7 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009940670 c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) 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 An Unpublished Astronomical Papyrus Contemporary with Ptolemy ..... 1 Anne Tihon Ancient Rejection and Adoption of Ptolemy’s Frame of Reference for Longitudes ........................................................ 11 Alexander Jones Ptolemy’s Doctrine of the Terms and Its Reception .................... 45 Stephan Heilen The Tradition of Texts and Maps in Ptolemy’s Geography ............... 95 Florian Mittenhuber Islamic Reactions to Ptolemy’s Imprecisions ........................... 121 F. Jamil Ragep The Use and Abuse of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe: Two Case Studies (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Filippo Fantoni) ...................................................135 H. Darrel Rutkin Tycho, Longomontanus, and Kepler on Ptolemy’s Solar Observations and Theory, Precession of the Equinoxes, and Obliquity of the Ecliptic ...151 N.M. Swerdlow Dunthorne, Mayer, and Lalande on the Secular Acceleration of the Moon. 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 Among the scientific authors of the ancient Greco-Roman world, none gives us such 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 masses as much by his grooming and deportment as by his declamation. From this milieu Ptolemy is utterly remote. Outside of his books he is nothing; no contempo- 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 whom we know nothing, and in them there is no personality, no reference to himself except as an observer, scholar, and theoretician, no allusion to his environment. His criticisms of other scientific practitioners are free of polemic. He habitually uses sesquipedalian verbs and writes vast, labyrinthine sentences; but his vocabulary and phrasing are repetitive, eschewing figurative language, and his tangled syntax results 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 bragging how profitable any book ascribed to himself is for the booksellers of Rome; one suspects that even in studious Alexandria Ptolemy’s technical treatises are not 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 cosmos as a bare list of highly precise numerical parameters, and his world map is a geometrical construction unembellished by crocodiles and pygmies. And so Ptolemy’s biography is practically complete when we have said that his full name was Klaudios Ptolemaios, and that he lived in or near Alexandria, 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 About half are astronomical, and of these, three are especially important. The Mathematical Composition (Mathematikeˆ Syntaxis), better known since the Middle 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 heavenly bodies from empirical evidence including specific dated observations. The Almagest also uses these models to derive tables for calculating the positions of the heavenly bodies on any given date, together with other phenomena such as eclipses xi xii Introduction and planetary first and last visibilities, but the tables also had a life of their own in slightly revised form as a separate publication that Ptolemy called the Handy Tables (Prokheiroi Kanones). Lastly, Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses (Hypotheseis tonˆ Planomenˆ onˆ ), a treatise in two books, gives a technical description, again slightly revised, of Ptolemy’s celestial models, suggests how they are likely to be arranged relative to each other and what their absolute dimensions would be, and offers a physical interpretation of the geometrical models in terms of systems of revolving bodies composed of aitherˆ , the Aristotelian fifth element. All Ptolemy’s other writings have at least a glancing connection to his astronomy, but two are especially close. The Tetrabiblos (again a

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