The early days of Roman rule had promised much to the Jews. Augustus had favored them, as had his successor, Tiberius; but on Tiberius’s death the appalling potential of imperial power became all too evident with the accession of the emperor Gaius, known today by his childhood nickname, Caligula, or “Little Boots.” If we take the Roman historian Suetonius at his word, Caligula’s rule was marked by arbitrary executions, forced suicides, and increasing megalomania. If his prefects and governors wished to keep their jobs (and their lives) they had to go to any length to please him. In Alexandria the man with that unenviable job was Avillius Flaccus, prefect of Egypt. In an attempt to ingratiate himself with the emperor he turned to three notorious marketplace rabble-rousers, Lampo, Dionysius, and Isodorus, who suggested that persecution of the Jews, who had refused to worship Caligula as a god, would increase his popularity with the city mob and hence secure his position.
As the flames of anti-Semitic feeling were fanned, the Jewish community asked Herod Agrippa, a Jewish king in Palestine and a family friend of Philo’s, to intercede on their behalf. It was his arrival in the city that sparked the first outrages. Gathering in the gymnasium, the mob began ridiculing the king. They had found a man in the marketplace whom Philo describes:
There was a certain lunatic named Carabas, whose madness was not of the fierce and savage kind . . . but of the easier going, gentler style. He spent day and night in the streets naked, shunning neither heat nor cold, made game of by the children and the lads who were idling about.
Philo of Alexandria, The Embassy to Gaius, 36
This poor creature, dressed by the mob as Herod, was paraded through the streets. When the mob reached the theater, it demanded that a statue of Caligula be placed in the synagogue, claiming that the Jews had failed to honor the divine emperor as they should. Not having a statue of Caligula at hand, they dragged an old, corroded statue of a charioteer from the gymnasium.
The prefect did nothing to stop this desecration; indeed, he issued a statement denouncing Alexandria’s ancient Jewish population as foreigners with no legal rights. An orgy of looting ensued while the Jews were rounded up and forced into a small part of the Delta district. Philo explains their plan: “After driving these many myriads of men, women and children like herds of cattle out of the whole city into a very small portion as into a pen, they expected in a few days to find heaps of dead massed together” (Philo of Alexandria, The Embassy to Gaius, 124).
Those Jews who were caught searching for food outside this ghetto were beaten and stoned. Even Philo’s own privileged class did not escape: Members of the Jewish governing body were rounded up and scourged like common criminals in the theater, and some were even crucified.
Eventually the situation calmed, and Flaccus found to his dismay that the pogrom had not had the desired effect. The extremely irrational (or perhaps calculating) Caligula had decided, for the moment, that this was not what he wanted, and when two of the governor’s henchmen, Lampo and Isodorus, saw this change of heart, they were quick to condemn Flaccus to their paranoid emperor. Orders were soon sent for his arrest, and after exiling him on a barren Aegean island, Caligula eventually tired of him altogether and soldiers were sent to murder him.
Alexandria had shown itself to be a tinderbox; at one level the most cosmopolitan city on earth, it was always teetering on the brink of a dramatic descent into racial violence. Even with Flaccus gone the peace in the city remained fragile. Caligula had once more turned against the Jews, threatening to destroy the temple in Jerusalem if they persisted in refusing to worship him. If he did, all Jews in the empire would overnight become fair game for their persecutors. Alexandria was on tenterhooks, and in the following year both Jewish and anti-Jewish delegations headed for Rome to plead their case directly before the emperor; the Jewish group was headed by Philo himself. After months of prevarications the highly unstable Caligula agreed to meet Philo, but ominously began the interview with: “Are you the god-haters who do not believe me to be a god, a god acknowledged among all other nations but not to be named by you?” (Philo of Alexandria, The Embassy to Gaius, 353).
Fortunately for the Jews of Alexandria, Caligula seemed indifferent to the situation in the city and offered the anti-Jewish faction no more than he had offered Philo. In AD 41, on January 24, Caligula’s assassination finally brought the sorry episode to an end. His successor, Claudius, ordered that the Greeks of the city show toleration to the Jews and that the violence stop forthwith. He did not want to be considered a god in his lifetime and he did not want his statue erected in the synagogue. Peace had been restored. But Roman Alexandria had shown another, ugly face which would change the whole complexion of the city.
Philo died peacefully in AD 50 or 55. He had witnessed a haunting warning of what was to come in the city, but he had also experienced the heights of philosophical ecstasy still accessible in the gardens and porticoes of the museum. And it was in those still-quiet groves that another great Alexandrian would soon rise to prominence, a man who would show that if the city’s body was beginning to look diseased, its mind was still as healthy as ever.
Claudius Ptolemy looked beyond the confines of his turbulent city to the world outside, the whole world, and the heavens beyond that. His works would become the cornerstone of science until the Renaissance, and their influence is still seen today.
As with his illustrious antecedent Euclid, we know almost nothing of the life of Claudius Ptolemy. His name suggests that he was a Roman citizen of Greek extraction, as citizens usually took Roman first names. Though some have argued that he was born in the Egyptian town of Ptolemais (hence his surname), there is no solid evidence to support this claim. Nor is there any evidence that he was connected to the royal Ptolemies, though this mistake was made repeatedly in subsequent centuries and he is often portrayed with a crown and scepter. It is pretty certain, from the caliber of his work and the detail of the material he makes reference to, that he was educated and spent his working life in Alexandria, where a few years before his birth the Roman emperor Claudius, having brought peace to the streets, considerably expanded the museum. It is possible that while there he was either tutored by or received patronage from a man by the name of Syrus, to whom all his major works are dedicated, but this man has yet to be identified.
In the true Alexandrian tradition, Claudius Ptolemy was an extraordinary polymath, writing about mathematics, music, astronomy, astrology, optics, philosophy, geography, and cartography. But also in his work is a hint as to how the museum was changing. His books, magnificent as they are, are mainly syntheses. Where Ptolemy does venture into unexplored realms he is often wrong in his interpretation; indeed, there is even the suggestion that he made up data to match his hypotheses. However, there is no questioning the lucidity of his style and the clarity of presentation, and it is these which would carry his work and his name down the centuries. At the beginning of his mammoth work on astronomy, he tells us:
We shall try to note down everything which we think we have discovered up to the present time; we shall do this as concisely as possible and in a manner which can be followed by those who have already made some progress in the field. For the sake of completeness in our treatment we shall set out everything useful for the theory of the heavens in proper order, but to avoid undue length we shall merely recount what has been adequately established by the ancients. However, those topics which have not been dealt with by our predecessors at all, or not as usefully as they might have been, will be discussed at length to the best of our ability.
Claudius Ptolemy, Almagest, 1.i
Ptolemy was nothing if not comprehensive. In this massive work he suggests a complex mathematical model for the workings of the universe. And he produces a star catalog listing 1,022 stars in forty-three constellations, which is, incidentally, 22 more stars than Tycho Brahe could manage at the end of the sixteenth century. Ptolemy clearly considered his book to be a practical manual, not merely a reference work, and he wanted it used by and distrib
uted to as wide a portion of the population as possible, and in doing this he became one of the world’s first popular publishers. Having finished the main work, he collected together the tables of practical use to astronomers which are scattered throughout it and published them in a slim volume known as the Handy Tables. He then decided to write a popular account for lay readers, a sort of paperback version, called Planetary Hypothesis.
The Almagest is the second-most important and longest-lasting scientific textbook of all time, after Euclid’s Elements; it held sway in the classical, then Arabic, and finally Western European world until Kepler unraveled the true movements of the “wandering” planets in 1618. But there is a problem. Whereas Euclid’s work is substantially correct, Ptolemy’s is not. In his researches in the library Ptolemy overlooked or ignored the observation by Aristarchus that the sun lies at the center of the solar system, and chose instead a geocentric model. Perhaps to be fair to him, Aristarchus’s work may not have been there, destroyed in the fire started by Julius Caesar. Even if it had survived, other great men like Archimedes had dismissed the idea, so Ptolemy can perhaps be forgiven for doing likewise. Instead, using Aristotle’s vision, along with data collected by the Babylonians and his illustrious Greek predecessor Hipparchus, as well as with some basic trigonometry, Claudius Ptolemy concocted what was by then a conventional view of the universe, with the earth static at its center and the sun, moon, planets, and fixed stars revolving steadily around it.
Observing that the planets do not move smoothly across the sky in one direction but sometimes appear to backtrack, Ptolemy ironed out these eccentricities by introducing the notion of “epicycles,” little pirouettes the planets performed when they appeared to retreat along their paths. With this system, even previously unobserved erratic planetary behavior could be explained with the addition of a new epicycle or two. The addition of this catchy little device meant that cosmology became stuck in the rut of an earth-centered universe, a view which became so ingrained that it became pure dogma, to the point where, according to Arthur Koestler, on February 23, 1616, the church’s qualifiers (theological experts) in Rome gave their decision concerning two propositions put to them:
1. The sun is the centre of the world and wholly immovable of local motion.
2. The earth is not the centre of the world nor immovable, but moves as a whole, also with a diurnal motion.
The Qualifiers unanimously declared the first proposition to be “foolish and absurd, philosophically and formally heretical in as much as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of Holy Scripture in many passages, both in their literal meaning and according to the general interpretation of the Fathers and Doctors.”
The second proposition was declared “to deserve the like censure in philosophy, and as regards theological truth, to be at least erroneous in faith.”
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, part 5, chapter 1, section 7, p. 455
Such was the gag order pinned on Galileo for daring to suggest that Aristarchus (plagiarized by Copernicus) was right and Claudius Ptolemy, after Aristotle, was wrong.
Claudius Ptolemy should not be criticized out of his time, however. The Almagest—a working, functioning model of the universe, creating mathematically based explanations for all the celestial movements as well as updating and expanding Hipparchus’s star catalog into four figures—was still a stupendous achievement. It may not have been a correct model, but it fitted the observations of the day and provided a usable, working cosmological background to the whole of the Middle Ages.
Nor was Ptolemy about to leave the cosmos at that. His follow-up work, the Tetrabiblos (“The Four Books”), is concerned with the impact which the heavens have upon individual personalities and worldly affairs—that is, astrology. The very mention of the word incites passionate controversy. It did so then, too. But whether we believe in it or not, Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, containing as it does a great deal of data drawn from Babylonian, ancient Egyptian, and earlier Greek sources, is the seminal work on the subject. The Tetrabiblos has had the longest life of all his works, being studied and employed by contemporary astrologers more than 1,800 years after he set down his basic principles.
As astrology, long dismissed as a pseudoscience by many, raises such passionate hackles, it is perhaps worth making some general observations on the subject before going into the details of Ptolemy’s formulations. Astrology as we know it probably originated largely in Babylonia, where priestly watchmen studied the movements of the heavenly bodies in great detail and over very long periods of time. Their reputations as magi were widespread and attracted the attention of classical thinkers like Pythagoras.
This was of course an age of omens, when kings and slaves alike attempted to deal with the often cruel vagaries of life by looking for clues as to what the future might hold. The magi believed that in their observations of the movements of the stars they had found a unique method to do just that—to assess the personalities and fates of individuals by considering the positions of the heavenly bodies at the moment of birth or what is called today “natal astrology.” Whether or not this connection is true or false, the least we can say about astrology is that it is humanity’s first enormous attempt at human psychology. From their observatories every possible form of human personality trait was projected onto the cosmos, though of course the astrologers argued the other way around. So Mars projected warlike characteristics onto people born under its influence, love emanated from Venus, and so forth. And here of course lies the problem: The scientific skeptic simply has to ask the question, how do the planets and other celestial bodies transmit these qualities to individuals on earth? Over the millennia this matter of transmission has essentially been an article of faith, a mystery whose veracity is borne out only by the accuracy of its predictions.
Ptolemy’s approach to astrology was that it was a conjectural rather than a precise science. So many variable factors had to be taken into account, such as race, country, and local culture, that absolute precision was difficult to achieve. And Ptolemy was also very aware that the subject was plagued by charlatans:
As for the nonsense on which many waste their labour and of which not even a plausible account can be given, this we shall dismiss in favour of the primary natural causes. What, however, admits of prediction we shall investigate, not by means of lots and numbers of which no reasonable explanation can be given, but merely through the science of the aspects of the stars to the places with which they have familiarity.
. . . It is the same with philosophy—we need not abolish it because there are evident rascals among those that pretend to it.
Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, 3.iii
While Ptolemy displays no interest in the magical or mystical, or even the symbolic, aspects of astrology, he does draw on contemporary scientific thinking, which maintained that planetary characteristics were drawn from this relationship to the sun, where they received heat and light, and the earth, which was the source of moisture. Thus the moon was moist and dark, while Saturn, at the outermost position of all the known planets, was both cold and dark, and therefore thoroughly malevolent, the purveyor of death and destruction. His view was that the constantly changing positions of the celestial bodies created a continually fluctuating atmosphere to which all living creatures must respond.
Whether Claudius Ptolemy was right or not concerning astrology—and we should bear in mind that millions of people worldwide consult astrologers every day, as do countless millions of Western newspaper readers—it is his incredibly convincing presentation of the subject which gave his work its longevity. This is how he opens the Tetrabiblos:
Of the means of prediction through astronomy, O Syrus, two are the most important and valid. One, which is first both in order and in effectiveness, is that whereby we apprehend the aspects of the movements of sun, moon and stars in relation to each other and to Earth, as they occur from time to time; second is that in which by means of the natural character of these aspects themselves we invest
igate the changes which they bring about in that which they surround.
Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, 1.i
With the thirteen books of the Almagest and the four books of the Tetrabiblos Ptolemy effectively created a model of the universe and its workings which would dominate the world for more than a thousand years. Even though we may now consider his work flawed, the fact remains that by all the standards of the time, Ptolemy’s universe worked. And though for the most part his language remains couched in the scientific terminology of his day, he is not above occasionally letting us know his inner, spiritual attitude. For while his work was the first attempt to gather and systematize the mechanism by which the universe operates, his universe is not simply mechanical. Occasionally in his writing we can feel the inspiration behind his work, the sense of wonder that every astronomer knows and which must first have overwhelmed him when, as a child, he looked up through the clear Alexandrian night sky at the great vault of the heavens above him: “I know that I am mortal and ephemeral, but when I scan the multitudinous circling spirals of the stars, no longer do I touch earth with my feet, but sit with Zeus himself, and take my fill of the ambrosial food of the gods” (Claudius Ptolemy, quoted in W. Gunnyon, A Century of Translations from the Greek Anthology, epigram 33).
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