218
hence solar, events related to the agricultural year within the awkwardly mobile
lunar calendar that Greek city-states maintained. In particular, agriculturallyfocussed religious festivals could have benefitted from a more stable calendar to
maintain synchrony between nature and ritual.
3
It is unlikely that this increase was
the result of an attempt to ‘weatherproof’ the observations (i.e. by having more
observations for the same time period the chances of missing the desired moment in
the year because of poor weather conditions may be greatly reduced). Should this
have been the reason for the great increase in the recording of fifth century observations we would expect that the majority of added star phases would have been during the winter months when bad weather conditions are more likely to occur, which
is not the case.
How was a ‘first’ or ‘last’ sighting measured? Much later in the first century CE
the Roman encyclopaedist, Pliny the Elder, tells his readers that the sun should be
‘at least three-quarters of an hour’ below the horizon for a star’s first or last sighting
at dawn or dusk (Pliny, Natural History 18. 218; see further, Fox, 2004). Importantly,
he is promoting a measure of time, not brightness of the star (magnitude) for the
observation. This part-hour measure was not available to the eighth century farmer,
or the reader of a farmer’s almanac like Hesiod’s Works and Day, and it is expecting
too much precision to think it might be something of this scale that Hesiod had in
mind. But we know something like this measure was in use in Babylonia by the
sixth century BCE, because it constitutes the equivalent of two lots of 24 min, and
one 24-min measure was six UŠ which waterclocks could measure (Fermor &
Steele, 2000). The same measure of 24 min would continue much later into Indian
astronomy in historical times, and be able to be measured by some remarkably
simple bowls that would sink into buckets of water at this given rate of 24 min
(Sarma, 1994, 2018: 3645–3711). I could accept that some such simple mechanism,
in the form of a small pottery bowl with a hole in its bottom and a larger pottery jar
to hold the requisite water, was available in fifth century BCE Athens, when
Euktemon put his parapegma together. We just have to find them …
Reasonable cause to look for such mechanisms is given by an analysis of the
surviving data from Euktemon’s parapegma. If we take as an example the ‘observations’ ascribed to the ‘month’ when the sun is in Taurus, as preserved in the collation of parapagmata in Geminos’s Introduction to Astronomy from the first century
BCE, we find some interesting results
4
:
Day 13 (= May 7), according to Euktemon Pleiades rise (Pleiades morning rising); beginning of summer; and there is sign of weather.
3 Contrast Sider and Brunschön (2007): 9 n. 26–27, 37 n. 94–95, who seem to regard the parapegmata as inherently impractical on the basis of their perception that Theophrastos’s treatise On
Weather Signs is also impractical. Their comparison confuses different genres.
4 The text used is that published by Aujac (1975). The fact that Geminos organises the parapegmata
according to the zodiacal months indicates that Euktemon’s original parapegma, composed before
the institution of zodiacal months around 300 BCE, has been forced to some extent into a foreign
framework. Such a manoeuvre may mean some accuracy has been sacrificed in the transmission,
but we have no way of knowing.
R. Hannah
hence solar, events related to the agricultural year within the awkwardly mobile
lunar calendar that Greek city-states maintained. In particular, agriculturallyfocussed religious festivals could have benefitted from a more stable calendar to
maintain synchrony between nature and ritual.
3
It is unlikely that this increase was
the result of an attempt to ‘weatherproof’ the observations (i.e. by having more
observations for the same time period the chances of missing the desired moment in
the year because of poor weather conditions may be greatly reduced). Should this
have been the reason for the great increase in the recording of fifth century observations we would expect that the majority of added star phases would have been during the winter months when bad weather conditions are more likely to occur, which
is not the case.
How was a ‘first’ or ‘last’ sighting measured? Much later in the first century CE
the Roman encyclopaedist, Pliny the Elder, tells his readers that the sun should be
‘at least three-quarters of an hour’ below the horizon for a star’s first or last sighting
at dawn or dusk (Pliny, Natural History 18. 218; see further, Fox, 2004). Importantly,
he is promoting a measure of time, not brightness of the star (magnitude) for the
observation. This part-hour measure was not available to the eighth century farmer,
or the reader of a farmer’s almanac like Hesiod’s Works and Day, and it is expecting
too much precision to think it might be something of this scale that Hesiod had in
mind. But we know something like this measure was in use in Babylonia by the
sixth century BCE, because it constitutes the equivalent of two lots of 24 min, and
one 24-min measure was six UŠ which waterclocks could measure (Fermor &
Steele, 2000). The same measure of 24 min would continue much later into Indian
astronomy in historical times, and be able to be measured by some remarkably
simple bowls that would sink into buckets of water at this given rate of 24 min
(Sarma, 1994, 2018: 3645–3711). I could accept that some such simple mechanism,
in the form of a small pottery bowl with a hole in its bottom and a larger pottery jar
to hold the requisite water, was available in fifth century BCE Athens, when
Euktemon put his parapegma together. We just have to find them …
Reasonable cause to look for such mechanisms is given by an analysis of the
surviving data from Euktemon’s parapegma. If we take as an example the ‘observations’ ascribed to the ‘month’ when the sun is in Taurus, as preserved in the collation of parapagmata in Geminos’s Introduction to Astronomy from the first century
BCE, we find some interesting results
4
:
Day 13 (= May 7), according to Euktemon Pleiades rise (Pleiades morning rising); beginning of summer; and there is sign of weather.
3 Contrast Sider and Brunschön (2007): 9 n. 26–27, 37 n. 94–95, who seem to regard the parapegmata as inherently impractical on the basis of their perception that Theophrastos’s treatise On
Weather Signs is also impractical. Their comparison confuses different genres.
4 The text used is that published by Aujac (1975). The fact that Geminos organises the parapegmata
according to the zodiacal months indicates that Euktemon’s original parapegma, composed before
the institution of zodiacal months around 300 BCE, has been forced to some extent into a foreign
framework. Such a manoeuvre may mean some accuracy has been sacrificed in the transmission,
but we have no way of knowing.
R. Hannah