Sleeping beauty in the Dark Ages

Abstract

Much like today’s investor turns to the stockbroker to predict the performance of shares — a wildly inaccurate science at best — so the Alexandrian merchant used to call on a soothsayer to foretell his gains. Fortune-tellers appear to have been ubiquitous in Alexandria: they were of all faiths and could be found on every proverbial street corner. While most were merely concerned with making a decent living, some of Alexandria’s finest minds aspired to bringing science into astrology. To be able to practise astrology on a supposedly sound basis, one needed to understand the movement of the planets and stars, which in turn required complex calculations. An astrologer could not but be a mathematician and, conversely, the best mathematicians of the era were also astrologers. In fourth-century Alexandria, as in the Roman Empire, the two words actually became synonymous1.