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Paulus Alexandrinus

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Paulus Alexandrinus was an astrological author from the late Roman Empire. His extant work, Eisagogika, or Introductory Matters (or Introduction), which was written in 378 A.D., is a treatment of major topics in Hellenistic astrology as practiced in the fourth century A.D. Roman Empire.

Little is known about Paulus' life. He lived in Alexandria, a scholarly center of the Roman world, where astrology was also at its most sophisticated, when Rome's power was declining and the capital of the Roman Empire had been moved to Constantinople. We know he was regarded as a considerable authority because we have the record of a series of lectures given on his work by the Neo-Platonist philosopher Olympiodorus some two centuries later (in 564 A.D.), in Alexandria. These lectures were preserved in a work called the Commentary and both Paulus' Introduction and Olympiodorus' Commentary have been translated together [1] to give a rather unique view of the development of astrological technique and attitudes from the tumultuous late Roman Empire through the even more unstable early Byzantine Empire.

The Introduction may be most interesting for its discussion of the eleven phases of the Moon, because it gives us a clear treatment of a topic whose influence on Greek astrological speculation has likely been much underestimated. The Moon's phases appear to be an very influential factor in horoscopic charts of the Hellenistic period, going back beyond Dorotheus of Sidon. Also very important in the Introduction are the Lots, which were at the core of Hellenistic astrological system (see the Anthology of Vettius Valens), although the scientifically-minded Ptolemy avoids them. Paulus also discusses dodekatemoria and monomoiria, and gives an extensive treatment of sect in astrological analysis, and of the influence of planetary aspects as they apply and separate (the Hellenistic understanding of which is considerably at odds with modern practice.)

At the time Paulus wrote, there was notable intellectual consolidation taking place in astrology. Forty years earlier, Firmicus Maternus had written Mathesis, a long and very detailed summary of the astrological technique of his time, which has come down to us intact. Contemporaneous with Paulus, one anonymous writer known as Anonymous of 379 A.D. had produced a Treatise on the Fixed Stars in 379 A.D., which is our best record of how practical astrologers of the Roman period after Ptolemy dealt with stars in the context of the astrological chart; just a year after that came three books by the Egyptian Hephaistio of Thebes (380 A.D.) integrating Ptolemy with earlier traditions.

In the several hundred years following Paulus and Hephaistio, there continued to be an active astrological tradition, some works of which have come down to us, including writings by Julian of Laodicea (c.500 A.D.), Rhetorius of Egypt (6th or 7th century), and, in the 10th century, the celebrated Centiloquy (spuriously attributed for many centuries to Ptolemy), which exerted a very considerable influence on the astrological thinking of the Arabs and on European astrologers of the Medieval and Early Modern periods. (For example see William Lilly.)

Sources

Late Classical Astrology: Paulus Alexandrinus and Olympiodorus (with the Scholia of later Latin Commentators). [Translated by Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum.] Archive for the Retrieval of Historical Astrological Texts [ARHAT] [2], 2001.
Paulus Alexandrinus. INTRODUCTION TO ASTROLOGY. (Complete). 378 A.D. Project Hindsight [3], 1996 (?). [translated by Robert Schmidt.]
Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum's website on Hellenistic astrology: Classical Astrology [4]
Robert Hand, [5] -- excerpt from Introduction to Late Classical Astrology: Paulus Alexandrinus and Olympiodorus
Robert Hand, [6] [7] -- quoting from Paulus
Project Hindsight [8] -- on Paulus.
Wikipedia's article on Paulus Alexandrinus - retrieved 12/3/2005 under the GNU Free Documentation License