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Updated: May 1, 2025
The Almagest commences with the doctrine that the earth is globular and fixed in space; it describes the construction of a table of chords and instruments for observing the solstices, and deduces the obliquity of the ecliptic.
In this way they obtained a knowledge of the great works of Ptolemy, both in astronomy which they regarded as the more important, and therefore the greatest, Almagest and also in geography, though one can easily understand the great modifications which the strange names of Ptolemy must have undergone in being transcribed, first into Syriac and then into Arabic.
It was translated by the Arabians after the Mohammedan conquest of Egypt; and, under the title of Almagest, was received by them as the highest authority on the mechanism and phenomena of the universe.
He respects himself as akin to that great Self whose perfection shall one day be known; he understands the passion for the ideal through which men die young; he wonders at envy and in the happiness of enfranchisement would have all men free. The pages of this Almagest are for the exceptional hour; but daily, as one bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions.
Hipparchus, a hundred years after Aristotle, calculated the length of the year to within six minutes, discovered the precession of equinoxes and counted all the stars he could see, making a map of them. Seventy years after Christ, Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian, but not of the royal line of Ptolemies, published his great book, "The Almagest."
Gradually philosophic Schools arose, first at Bagdad, and then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on the task of commenting on Aristotle's Logic, and Ptolemy's Megiste Syntaxis which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, by which it was so long known during the Middle Ages. But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or mystic element in their commentaries.
Ptolemy's system of geography in eight books, founded on that of Marinus of Tyre, was scarcely less celebrated throughout the Middle Ages than the Almagest. It contained little, however, that need concern us here, being rather an elaboration of the doctrines to which we have already sufficiently referred.
His principal works most probably were destroyed in the conflagration of the Alexandrian library. His catalogue of the stars is preserved in the Almagest of Ptolemy; and his commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus is still extant. Such is a brief sketch of the advantages which geography, as founded on astronomy, derived from the labours of Hipparchus.
Thus many learned lawyers contributed to the Pandects, many physicians to the Tegni, and it was by this means that Avicenna edited his Canon, and Pliny his great work on Natural History, and Ptolemy the Almagest.
The Almagest treats of all manner of astronomical problems, but the feature of it which gained it widest celebrity was perhaps that which has to do with eccentrics and epicycles. This theory was, of course, but an elaboration of the ideas of Hipparchus; but, owing to the celebrity of the expositor, it has come to be spoken of as the theory of Ptolemy.
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