“... not – as one might imagine of such a daringly modish compilation – the moderns, but Pliny, Ptolemy and Cicero. Notwithstanding his partisanship on behalf of the Enlightenment, Pagden never resorts to caricature. But he does indulge in synecdoche, presenting a part of the phenomenon – perhaps, to be fair, the most significant part – as the ...”

“... didn’t prove that the universe was Copernican (as Kepler would soon show), but they did prove Ptolemy and the university professors wrong. The fixed points in Galileo’s life are firmly established: a move from Pisa to Padua in 1592, the telescopic discoveries and publication of the Sidereus Nuncius in 1609-10, the banning of Copernicus in 1616, the ...”

“... it had become painfully evident to savants that the best minds of Antiquity – Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen – had erred. They tried to immunise themselves against further intellectual debacles by proceeding slowly and methodically, gathering up fragments of fact in preparation for a grand synthesis postponed to some remote future date. Kenny quotes ...”

“... meant ‘inclination’ or ‘latitude’, and later ‘region’). Aristotle, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and other ancient authorities carved up the Earth into horizontal bands (the number varied from five to seven), positing that the angle of the sun and the length of a day were the most important proxies for climate – hottest at ...”

“... is the great library at Alexandria, the Museion or ‘temple of the Muses’ established by Ptolemy I Soter around 300 BC, and expanded by his son. This had a director, a catalogue and a very large budget, together with the beginnings of a compulsory copyright act: any ship docking in Alexandria had its books impounded for copying. Almost fifteen ...”

“... ghostly and prophetic way’. Stroud is a connoisseur of Moon spells and werewolves, a student of Ptolemy and Democritus, and through him you come to see how the life of the Moon accords with our deepest humours. For my generation, born as Apollo 11 cleared the launch pad, the attempt to reach the Moon seemed like the definition of human adventure. The ...”

“... is an unglamorous activity. One last story makes this point neatly. Euclid was once asked by Ptolemy, king of Alexandria, for an easier way to learn mathematics. ‘There is no royal road to geometry,’ he replied. At least in this anecdote the scientist has the last ...”

“... of which so disturbed Pascal’s peace of mind. Hence, for instance, the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (d. 168 ce) accounted for the anomalies of planetary orbits as viewed from Earth by adding epicycles to them, and epicycles to epicycles, so that in his model of the world the planets were made to perform impossibly complicated loop-the-loops. All the ...”

“... rooflines recede from view, but they had no conceptual back-up from theorists. Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy were fixated on the active, probing aspects of vision: the way we peer out and construe the world before us. Their formulation, which now seems at once kooky and clunky, described eyesight as ‘extramission’ – a kind of radar. The eyes send out rays ...”

“... To sustain this happy state of affairs meant cultivating the native Egyptian populace like no Ptolemy had ever done before and also ensuring that no one in Italy could forget how valuable she was as an ally. She was in or near Rome at the time of Caesar’s assassination, but got herself out of the way before she became collateral damage. Then, in the ...”

“... unfold it to know it could be significant. Philadelphia, founded in the early third century bce by Ptolemy II, had already yielded another remarkable cache of papyri: Zenon’s archive, which consists of two thousand documents that attest in extraordinary detail to the finances and logistics of a large estate between 261 and 229 BCE. The cemetery sits to the ...”

“... interest in the Ptolemaic Monument, two free-standing marble columns supporting statues of Ptolemy II, ruler of Egypt from the 280s BC, and his sister/wife, the much revered queen Arsinoë II. The statues were placed to mirror those of the Philippeion, ‘perhaps … to draw a visual parallel’, reflecting the enduring power of Alexander the Great to ...”

“... ancient sources relate that his mummified body, en route to Aegae for burial, was hijacked by Ptolemy, one of his generals, and taken to Egypt, where it was displayed for centuries as a symbol of power and authority. Ultimately it disappeared. This helps to explain the huge impact of Andronikos’s discovery of an unplundered tomb which, as he ...”

“... are versions in triplicate of a decree instituting a cult of the then – 196 BC – reigning Ptolemy. But because the Greek version could be read without difficulty, it served as an invaluable prompt to the decipherment of the cursive and the (damaged) hieroglyphic versions. The decipherers of obsolete forms of writing needn’t concern themselves with ...”

“... is to turn from the biological to the physical sciences and recall two important episodes. From Ptolemy to the early Renaissance, astronomers thought they were making progress in understanding the solar system. As the years went by, their models became more complex but their predictions were more accurate. Yet, from our post-Copernican point of view, they ...”