Is Eudoxus the founder of Hellenistic astrology?

[FONT=&quot] What's your take on this?
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]"I have an announcement that should be of general interest to the astrological community. It concerns the origins of Western astrology in the Greek world, and the new beginning it was given at this time.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] For about twenty years now, I have been talking about the highly systematic character of Greek astrology. For me this was an almost certain sign that there was one guiding intelligence behind the initial development of this astrology, meaning that it must have been the work of one man or a small group of men pursuing a common program. We here at Project Hindsight—I, Robert Schmidt and my wife Ellen Black—believe we have found that man. He was the celebrated Greek polymath Eudoxus of Knidos, who in fact had a large following of students."[/FONT]


More here: http://www.projecthindsight.com/

It is a definite possibility. In addition to being an "astronomer", Eudoxus was also a prominent student of Plato, which could well account for the many traces of Platonic concepts and perspectives in Hellenist astrology.

I do believe, though, that Hellenic astrology was later (circa 250 BCE) influenced by neo-Babylonian astrology via Berossus of Cos, and that it was further modified by an "Egyptian" infusion (Ptolemy dynasty "Egyptian") through the great "Handbook" of Alexandria (attributed to Nechepso and Petosiris) circa 200 BCE.

I don't know that Schmidt has had a lot of takers. The bits of information are enticing, but there is no direct evidence. For one thing Eudoxus lived during the 4th century BCE, prior to the introduction of astrology from Babylon to Greece. No doubt he was a major influence, if not the sole inventor.

Ancient Hellenistic astrologers themselves tended to credit the god Mercury, or two legendary Egyptians, Nechepso and Petosiris, with the invention of horoscopic astrology. It seems unlikely that the ancient pharoah Nekko and scribe Petosiris, who also lived long before our first records of horoscopic astrology, invented it. But in ancient times, it was common for more recent authors to take up pen names of ancient authorities. Astrology does seem to have had a hearth in Alexandria, Egypt, which was a crossroads of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, and other cultures in ancient times.

By the time Ptolemy wrote his major astrological treatise, Tetrabiblos, ca. 150 CE, horoscopic astrology was already well established.

According to Erastosthenes, Eudoxos was the author of the Corpus Hermeticum and if he is also the founder of Hellenistic Astrology it will connect the history of Western Esoterism nicely.

There are some tantalizing nibbles, but I couldn't say there was only one founder of Hellenistic astrology. It's interesting that none of the earliest extant astrology texts (Manilius, Dorotheus, Valens, Ptolemy) credit Eudoxus as the sole founder, whereas they do credit other early sources. The ancient astrologers themselves most often listed other founders, like Nechepso and Petosiris, which are both Egyptian names. Probably they were pseudonyms or pen-names, and the Greeks did see the Egyptians as the source of ancient knowledge, rightly or wrongly.

Also, my reading of these and slightly later Hellenistic sources (Firmicus Maturnus, Rhetorius, Porphyry) show a fair bit of variation as to what were the meanings of houses, how to calculate various themes like length-of-life, and how to deal with unknown birth times.

waybread said:

The ancient astrologers themselves most often listed other founders, like Nechepso and Petosiris, which are both Egyptian names.

Click to expand...

The Corpus Hermeticum contains dialogues with Egyptian gods, sound familiar? If the author of both this writing and Hellenistic astrology was Eudoxus, it could explain a lot.

Until more valid historical evidence is discovered, I think the idea of a single founder of horoscopic astrology is intriguing but unsupported. Going to Egypt became almost a parable in Antiquity for someone attaining enlightenment. (Cf Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the Hebrew people in Exodus, and Herodotus, whose Egyptian history was notoriously inaccurate.)

One thing you might want to get into is the field of historiography and historical methods, or how history is written.

Normally bodies of information tend to get more unified and streamlined over time. Initially there is apt to be a lot of diversity in beliefs, which is what we see with Hellenistic astrology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method