In sorting through the history of the ancient skies,
We’ve tried our best to look at things through ancient eyes.
A modern reader,
looking at the work of the astronomers of Mesopotamia and Greece,
finds it easy to laugh at models and methods which seem crudely primitive today.
A geocentric universe, bounded by an enormous sphere which holds the stars,
seems laughable to readers who have viewed snapshots of the planets
as viewed from vehicles launched into space,
or spectacular photos of the depths of the universe
from space-based telescopes.
To fully appreciate the accomplishments of the ancients,
we have to try to look at the sky as they did.
Observations were done by naked eye.
Instruments were available for measuring
the angular distance between pairs of objects,
and techniques of spherical trigonometry were developed
for the mapping of objects onto a hypothetical spherical surface.
But there were no telescopes,
no photographs,
no computers,
no post-it notes. . .
how did they get anything done?
A modern reader marvels at the familiarity
of Ptolemy’s catalogue of stars, each entry defined
by stellar longitude and latitude and magnitude.
Today, one can go online and find comparable data
for hundreds of thousands of stars
Ptolemy’s Star Catalogue was the forerunner
of all such datasets
Ptolemy’s Almagest seems just a quaint bit of history today,
but for more than a thousand years, it was the pinnacle
of astronomical and computational science.
When viewed in the context of the time,
Ptolemy’s accomplishments are astounding.
Just as we’ve tried to look at the stars with ancient eyes,
we’ve tried to listen to the tales of Greek myth
in the contexts in which they first were told.
Some myths are from a time long before the alphabet,
memories of history kept alive by traditions of oral storytelling.
The early literate age was a time of transcribing
the stories of the ancestors.
But with time the new medium of writing gave rise
to new forms of storytelling, not incanted but composed:
Stories told not as a memory of the ancestors
but told for the sake of the story.
Fiction, in a modern sense, was born.
To properly understand the stories of Greco-Roman mythology,
we have to consider when they first were told,
and what they meant to those who first heard them.
We look to the sky with ancient eyes
and lend the storyteller an ancient ear
.
Posting about the past calls for modern currency.
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