Hi Levente, Paul, and anyone else who may be following this thread: I have just returned from a conference at Yale (speaking on a wholly different aspect of the history of astrology) and have a mountain of accumulated work to deal with. I will thus not have time to address the many and rather long questions/objections listed here until, hopefully, later this month.

For now, let me just say that I'm happy, in principle, to have an open discussion, but I do not have unlimited resources of either time or energy, so let's try to keep to essentials. I won't be doing seven-hour refutation videos or correspondingly long text posts, trying to wear anyone down by sheer force of repetition and/or examination of irrelevant minutiae (which I consider bad manners as well as bad scholarship), and I hope others won't either.

Also, this issue does not carry the emotional weight for me that is seems to do for many. So I am not interested in defending myself as if before a grand inquisitional tribunal, accused of heresy. In other words, let's try to keep a sense of proportion.

More, hopefully, within a few weeks.

james_m wrote:thanks levente laszlo,

i appreciate all the work you've done here and more generally... i with hold comment on all of this, but i appreciate and have read all your state here... i don't know if and when martin will find time to respond, but i am curious on it all.. cheers james

Thank you, James! I also look forward to his response.

Hi Paul,

First, I’d like to thank you for responding to (some of) my questions, which I wanted to address to any readers regardless of their background. As a matter of fact, a few of my questions were intended to check whether other, native or (like me) non-native, speakers of English will understand some expressions differently. Obviously, answering these require no other skills than some command of English.

Let me reply to some of your points.

Paul wrote:

RQ2: Do you find knowing the precise meaning of platikos in Valens and Firmicus relevant to the understanding of the intentions of these authors? If you do, do you think that Dr. Gansten presented you with the relevant evidence to justify his choice of translating and interpreting platikos as “rough????

I am not qualified to address the second question about whether I feel that Gansten presented me with relevant evidence in how he translated platikos - I will leave that one to other people who do indeed understand ancient Greek or have more experience with translation.

I believe you, like anyone else, are perfectly qualified to speak about what you feel since feelings, just like preferences, don’t require justifications. Still, I accept if you don’t want to talk about this.

Paul wrote:In that kind of contrast, I see the use of Gansten’s “rough??? to be used as a juxtaposition against “precise to the degree???. Do you think that Platikos doesn’t mean in this context “general???? You linked to the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon which I assume is considered an authoritative source. But even it says “broadly speaking???, and I honestly believe that “broadly speaking??? and “roughly speaking??? are synonymous.

I do think it means something like “general.??? As I wrote (emphases added),

I understand platikos, deriving from πλάτος platos, “breath??? or “width,??? means something like “broad,??? “general,??? “overall,??? or “summary??? in the sense of “not narrow, particular, focused, or detailed??? but not “rough??? in the sense of “inexact, imprecise, inaccurate, or approximate??? and thus “inferior to the exact, precise, or accurate.???

As for a good translation, I think that if the underlined notions are appropriately reflected, the choice of the English word doesn’t matter. As you also write,

Paul wrote:[…] if I were drawing something, I may first make a rough sketch, which would not be indicative of all the levels of detail that one may expect from a, relatively, more precise oil painting.

Of course, we still must remind ourselves that, to use your metaphor, astrological authors, with the exception of Valens and Firmicus (and maybe, Manilius and Ptolemy) don’t show any knowledge of oil painting, and the most economical evaluation of this lack of awareness is that their art was pencil drawing, which, from their perspective, can no longer be called “a rough sketch.???

Paul wrote:In her [sc. Francesca Rochberg’s—LL] collection of works, The Path of The Moon, one of the chapters deals with the idea that the translation of ‘zodiacal sign’ in Greek and its corresponding term in Akkadian, in many ways connote different ideas and different viewpoints on the world. […] Now to be clear I’m not suggesting Rochberg is arguing what Gansten is, just the idea occurred to me as well having read this.

I think this is completely unrelated to Gansten’s hypothesis. What Rochberg appears to say is that Babylonians regarded zodiacal signs as arithmetic units corresponding to the ideal month of 30 days while for the Greeks, they were a geometrical construct resulting from the 12-division of the ecliptic circle. In the paragraph preceding your quote, she writes,

“The point […] was to underscore the nature of the Babylonian astronomical methodology that addressed the recurrence of celestial phenomena with respect to time and position and did so in a thoroughly arithmetic way. The very conception of position in the zodiac was tied to corresponding dates. The 30 degrees per zodiacal sign provided an arithmetic standard of reference not tied to a geometrical cosmological framework as they were in Greek astronomy, where positions meant longitudes on a continuously moving ecliptic envisioned as a great circle bisecting the celestial sphere. In other words, each system, the Babylonian and the Greek, had a zodiac, i.e., 12 30° segments of the sun’s path against the background of the fixed stars. But what the zodiac referred to in terms of the physical world was different in each system.???

Paul wrote:

RQ6 (please answer this question before reading on): In light of the phrases highlighted in the quotations from Dr. Gansten—“alternates repeatedly??? and “enough to quote one???—how many occurrences do you expect?

Not sure I fully understand what the question is.

Then let me rephrase. Let’s assume that for an experiment, someone tosses a coin 12 times. Later, he tells you that tails “alternated repeatedly??? with heads and assures you that it’s enough to show you a video of one occurrence of a tail. By this characterization of the experiment, how many tails do you imagine?

Martin Gansten wrote:More, hopefully, within a few weeks.

I haven't forgotten this, but due to pressing family and other obligations it will have to wait a while longer.

i am bumping this thread up to the top, as it is still a very interesting thread for consideration and for a possible response that has been left hanging..