motions by means of epicycles, but whether these attempts marked any advance on what had been done by Apollonius and Hipparchus is uncertain.
It is interesting also to find in Pliny (A.D. 23–79) the well-known modern argument for the spherical form of the earth, that when a ship sails away the masts, etc., remain visible after the hull has disappeared from view.
A new measurement of the circumference of the earth by Posidonius (born about the end of Hipparchus's life) may also be noticed; he adopted a method similar to that of Eratosthenes (§ 36), and arrived at two different results. The later estimate, to which he seems to have attached most weight, was 180,000 stadia, a result which was about as much below the truth as that of Eratosthenes was above it.
46. The last great name in Greek astronomy is that of Claudius Ptolemaeus, commonly known as Ptolemy, of whose life nothing is known except that he lived in Alexandria about the middle of the 2nd century A.D. His reputation rests chiefly on his great astronomical treatise, known as the Almagest[1], which is the source from which by far the greater part of our knowledge of Greek astronomy is derived, and which may be fairly regarded as the astronomical Bible of the Middle Ages. Several other minor astronomical and astrological treatises are attributed to him, some of which are probably not genuine, and he was also the author of an important work on geography, and possibly of a treatise on Optics, which is, however, not certainly authentic and maybe of Arabian origin. The Optics discusses, among other topics, the refraction or bending of light, by the atmosphere on the earth: it is pointed out that the light of a star or other heavenly body s, on entering our atmosphere (at a) and on penetrating to the lower and denser portions of it, must be gradually bent or refracted, the result being that the
- ↑ The chief MS. bears the title μεγάλη σύνταξις, or great composition though the author refers to his book elsewhere as μαθηματιὴ σύνταξις (mathematical composition). The Arabian translators, either through admiration or carelessness, converted μεγάλη, great, into μεγἰστη, greatest, and hence it became known by the Arabs as Al Magisti, whence the Latin Almagestum and our Almagest.
