How do you see Susan?

Mary Beard: No Asp for Zenobia, 20 March 2003

Cleopatra: Beyond the Myth 
by Michel Chauveau, translated by David Lorton.
Cornell, 104 pp., £14.95, April 2002, 0 8014 3867 5
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The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations 
by Maria Wyke.
Oxford, 452 pp., £40, March 2002, 9780198150756
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... in standard royal Egyptian mode; the earliest preserved image, presumably designed for her father Ptolemy XII before his death, represents her as a man. There is also a handful of coins, including one very crude issue from Cyprus, which Wyke optimistically identifies as ‘Cleopatra suckling Caesarion’. But by and large Cleopatra is, as André Malraux once ...

Balloons and Counter-Balloons

Susan Eilenberg: ‘The Age of Wonder’, 7 January 2010

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science 
by Richard Holmes.
HarperPress, 380 pp., £9.99, September 2009, 978 0 00 714953 7
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... not one star but two; discovered Uranus, the first addition to the known planets since the time of Ptolemy; showed our solar system (now, with Uranus, understood to be twice as big as had been thought) to be located not at the fixed centre of the universe but somewhere within a spiral galaxy outside which other galaxies stretched, vast and unimaginably ...

Not Dead Yet

Anthony Grafton: Latin, 8 January 2015

Latin: Story of a World Language 
by Jürgen Leonhardt, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg.
Harvard, 352 pp., £22.95, November 2013, 978 0 674 05807 1
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... Hamburg, Johann Albrecht Fabricius, brought Logan not only cordial greetings but a rare edition of Ptolemy and seven other books – a generous gift that he repaid by sending the German scholar ‘an Indian drest Buffalo skin’. Logan’s articles in Latin appeared in European scholarly journals and established his reputation for encyclopedic, precise ...

Such Matters as the Soul

Dmitri Levitin: ‘The Invention of Science’, 22 September 2016

The Invention of Science: a New History of the Scientific Revolution 
by David Wootton.
Penguin, 784 pp., £12.99, September 2016, 978 0 14 104083 7
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... from astrology) and medicine. Islamic astronomers such as al-Battani made many improvements to Ptolemy’s findings and methods. Later, they built observatories that functioned not unlike modern research institutes; the most famous of these were at Maragha, in present-day north-eastern Iran, which may even have housed visiting Chinese astronomers, and at ...

Middle Positions

John Hedley Brooke, 21 July 1983

Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875 
by Adrian Desmond.
Blond and Briggs, 287 pp., £15.95, October 1982, 0 85634 121 5
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Evolution without Evidence: Charles Darwin and ‘The Origin Species’ 
by Barry Gale.
Harvester, 238 pp., £18.95, January 1983, 0 7108 0442 3
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The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography 
by Janet Browne.
Yale, 273 pp., £21, May 1983, 0 300 02460 6
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The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinsm 
by Brain Leith.
Collins, 174 pp., £7.95, December 1982, 0 00 219548 8
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... with it, was an option sufficiently attractive to block the proof of Copernicus by the disproof of Ptolemy. In Darwin’s case, the contrast between transmutation of species and ‘separate creation’ takes on a different aspect according to whether the stress is placed on ‘separate’ or ‘creation’. Again, the two stereotypes of Darwinism and ...

Himbo

James Davidson: Apollonios Rhodios, 5 March 1998

Apollonios Rhodios: The Argonautika 
translated by Peter Green.
California, 480 pp., £45, November 1997, 0 520 07686 9
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... heirs. The Queen of Heraclea was murdered by her own sons and Arsinoë saw her second husband, Ptolemy Thunderbolt, murder the children by her first. Many a Hellenistic princess must have approached her bridal bed like Medea, thinking more of realpolitik than of the delights of love. The Greeks seem never to have doubted that the voyage of the Argo took ...

Other Lives

M.F. Burnyeat: The Truth about Pythagoras, 22 February 2007

Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching and Influence 
by Christoph Riedweg, translated by Steven Rendall.
Cornell, 216 pp., £9.95, May 2005, 0 8014 4240 0
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Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History 
by Charles Kahn.
Hackett, 193 pp., £10.95, October 2001, 0 87220 575 4
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... Pythagorean philosophy, a way of thinking that deserves to be tracked through the centuries from Ptolemy’s Harmonics through Copernicus to Kepler.Riedweg half-agrees with this, and has a parallel section in his book entitled ‘Pythagoras as an Idea in the Middle Ages and Modernity – A Prospect’, beginning:Had Pythagoras and his teachings not been ...

Going Up

Tobias Gregory: The View from Above, 18 May 2023

Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art 
by Philip Hardie.
Princeton, 353 pp., £38, April 2022, 978 0 691 19786 9
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... findings drew opposition from university men affronted at the challenge to Aristotle and Ptolemy, and from clergy who objected that the new view of the heavens contradicted scriptural passages such as Joshua 10:12-13, in which Joshua commanded the Sun not to set until the Israelites could complete a massacre:Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day ...

See you in hell, punk

Thomas Jones: Kai su, Brutus, 6 December 2018

Brutus: The Noble Conspirator 
by Kathryn Tempest.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 300 18009 1
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... Pompey fled, making his way eventually to Egypt. Advisers to the 13-year-old Egyptian king, Ptolemy XIII, not wanting to make an enemy of either Roman leader, determined that the best course of action would be to kill Pompey immediately: that way, as Plutarch puts it, ‘they would gratify Caesar and have no reason to fear Pompey.’ He was stabbed in ...