Dorotheus of Sidon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dorotheus of Sidon was a first-century Hellenistic astrologer, whose "Carmen Astrologicum," a textbook of judicial astrology, has come down to us mainly from an Arabic translation dating from around 800 AD (itself a translation of a third-century Persian translation from the original Greek, which has been lost.) The text, already fragmentary at times, is therefore not entirely reliable, and is further corrupted by interpolations by later translators. Nevertheless, it remains one of our best sources for the practice of pre-Roman Hellenistic astrology, and it was a work of great influence on later Christian, Persian, Arab and medieval astrologers. The first half of the first century, a time when Dorotheus is believed to have flourished, was a period of intense astrological development, following two millennia of accumulated tradition.
Very little is known about Dorotheus himself. Dorotheus most likely lived and worked in Alexandria, in Egypt, which, in addition to being the most important scholastic center in the Hellenistic world, was also the one place where the oldest Mesopotamian, Greek and Egyptian astrological techniques continued to be maintained, and hence where astrology was most sophisticated.
[edit] External links
- Nicholas Campion on Dorotheus - from the Introduction by Campion to the 1993 Ascella edition (London) of Carmen Astrologicum
- Project Hindsight - on Dorotheus and contemporaries
- Deborah Houlding on Dorotheus' use of aspects
[edit] Publications
- Dorotheus of Sidon, Carmen Astrologicum, tr. by David Pingree. Originally published in Teubner series (Leipzig, 1976). Re-published by Ascella Publications (London, 1993). Re-published by Astrology Classics (Bel Air, MD), 2005.
- Robert Hand, Introduction to The Record of the Early Sages in Greek. Project Hindsight. (Golden Hind Press, Berkeley Springs, WV, 1996.) (Read it online at: [1])
