Mercury accompany the sun, and may therefore be regarded as on the average performing their revolutions in a year, the test to some extent failed in their case, but Ptolemy again accepted the opinion of the "ancient mathematicians" (i.e probably the Chaldaeans) that Mercury and Venus lie between the sun and moon. Mercury being the nearer to us. (Cf. chapter i., § 15.)
52. There has been much difference of opinion among astronomers as to the merits of Ptolemy. Throughout the Middle Ages his authority was regarded as almost final on astronomical matters, except where it was outweighed by the even greater authority assigned to Aristotle. Modern criticism has made clear, a fact which indeed he never conceals, that his work is to a large extent based on that of Hipparchus; and that his observations, if not actually fictitious, were at any rate in most cases poor. On the other hand his work shews clearly that he was an accomplished and original mathematician.[1] The most important of his positive contributions to astronomy were the discovery of evection and his planetary theory, but we ought probably to rank above these, important as they are, the services which he rendered by preserving and developing the great ideas of Hipparchus—ideas which the other astronomers of the time were probably incapable of appreciating, and which might easily have been lost to us if they had not been embodied in the Almagest.
53. The history of Greek astronomy practically ceases with Ptolemy. The practice of observation died out so completely that only eight observations are known to have been made during the eight and a half centuries which separate him from Albategnius (chapter iii., § 59). The only Greek writers after Ptolemy's time are compilers and commentators, such as Theon (fl. A.D. 365), to none of whom original ideas of any importance can be attributed. The murder of his daughter Hypatia (A.D. 415), herself also a writer on astronomy, marks an epoch in the decay of the Alexandrine school; and the end came in A.D. 640, when Alexandria was captured by the Arabs.[2]
- ↑ De Morgan classes him as a geometer with Archimedes, Euclid, and Apollonius, the three great geometers of antiquity.
- ↑ The legend that the books in the library served for six months as
