This article was published as the introduction to the edition of Dorotheus of Sidon's text book, the Carmen Astrologicum, translated by David Pingree and republished by Ascella Books in 1993.

Dorotheus of Sidon's text book of judicial astrology, the Carmen Astrologicum, has only recently become known to modern astrologers. The first modern English translation, by David Pingree, was published in East Germany in 1976, and it is translation which has now been reprinted. It was not until 1992 that the existence of this translation became known to British astrologers, mainly a brief citation in Anthony Louis' Horary Astrology. It's reissue by Ascella publications is an important step towards making the Hellenistic astrology of the early Roman Empire available and, together with the Loeb translations of Manilius' Astronomica and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, it gives us a comprehensive idea of the sort of astrology which would have been practised by the scholars of Alexandria, the astrologers of the Roman court and which would have been familiar to the Hellenised Jews of Palestine at the time of Christ. It is therefore of considerable historical interest, as well as being essential to contemporary astrologers who wish to understand the origins of current astrological rules.

The book's importance can be understood by defining its differences with the Astronomica and the Tetrabiblos. The former comprehensively describes the significance for human beings of various astronomical phenomena while the latter gives guidelines for such predictive matters as forecasting the length of life. However, only the Carmen Astrologicum contains detailed and well organised rules for establishing the outcome to almost any situation facing a citizen of the Greek world and the Roman Empire.

Dorotheus (Dorotheos in the Greek) is generally believed to have lived before Balbillus (Nero's astrologer) and hence would have thrived in the first part of the first century, probably before 65 AD, after Manilius (c. 14 AD) but before Ptolemy (c.120 AD). Some doubt over the dating developed when Deborah Houlding pointed out that in V.15 Dorotheus refers to the first century astrologer, Vettius Valens. She also pointed out that Professor Liebeschuetz of Nottingham University referred to the opening citation of Vettius Valens' D'Autioche Antologies, (trans. J.F.Bara, Brill 1989), in which Dorotheus is said to be a contemporary of Valens (1).

However, David Pingree points out that the current English translation is taken from an Arabic translation made around 800 by Al-Tarabi, itself a translation from a 3rd century Persian translation of the original Greek, possibly taking Indian ideas into account. It is more than likely that insertions and adaptations were made on translation to the Persian and Arabic (2). The mention of Valens may therefore have been a later insertion. In addition, we cannot be sure which sections of the current translation are later additions and hence which represent the astrology practised in the first century. Only extensive cross-checking with other contemporary texts isolate possible Persian, Indian and Arabic additions.

Dorotheus was recognised as a major authority by classical and medieval astrologers both in the Christian and Islamic worlds. He influenced Hephaestion of Thebes (Egypt, late fourth - early fifth centuries) and in the fourth century was described by Firmicus Maternus as 'a very wise man who wrote about forecasting by the stars in very accurate and learned verses' (3). He was also cited as an authority by Abu Ma'shar in the eighth century and Michael Scot in the thirteenth century. Abu Ma'shar was one of the founders of Islamic astrology and a major influence on medieval mundane astrology, while Michael Scot was one of the foremost scholars of his day and astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (4).

According to Jim Tester Dorotheus' principle impact on Hellenistic astrology was to irrevocably shift the emphasis from the character analysis from birth charts to the study of katarchai, or interrogations (5). These were horoscopes cast for the asking of questions, or what have come to be known as horary charts. It would be more correct to say that Dorotheus is the first Greek known to have written extensively on such matters. His work must have been proceeded by earlier studies which have been lost. However, the very fact that his work was influential in medieval Europe is a corrective to the common idea that the astrology of the 12th - 15th centuries was heavily Ptolemaic, that is, concerned with physical affects and causes and antipathetic to horary astrology, which is omitted from the Tetrabiblos. Through Dorotheus and his successors, the rules of horary astrology were available to medieval European astrologers. Michael Scot, for example, cast horary charts for his master, Frederick II. Thus the foremost scholar in Europe was advising the most powerful man on the basis of the rules for celestial analysis set down twelve hundred years earlier by Dorotheus of Sidon.

Sidon, we should remember is on the Levantine coast, at the northern tip of what was once Solomon's empire. It is from this region during Dorotheus' lifetime, that Christianity emerged, and he would undoubtedly have been familiar with this new and truculent branch of Judaism. Yet he was a member of an entirely different ideological tradition, one which was to find itself in dispute with Christianity, yet which was to find its place at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor himself, the secular guardian of Christ's people on Earth.

The current republication of Dorotheus' text therefore offers us more than historical interest, or additions to the already extensive canon of astrological rules. It offers us a view of an ideological alternative open to the inhabitants of the Greek world of two thousand years ago, in which simple obedience to a monotheistic god was replaced by individual participation, through the rules of horoscope interpretation, in a universe of immense complexity.

St. Paul preached the existence of a God for whom no human activity was beneath attention. (St. Paul's journey to Rome almost certainly took him through Sidon). In Dorotheus' astrology every human activity, down to how one handled one's runaway slave was taken account of by the positions of the planets. In St. Paul's Christianity one prayed to God, In Dorotheus' astrology one consulted the stars. The Carmen Astrologicum, then, is far more than a historical curiosity. It represents a theology and cosmology which formed a major rival to first century Christianity and underpinned the great religions of the Roman Empire, Mithraism and the cult of Sol Invictus.

1. See Deborah Houlding, 'Dorotheus and Vettius Valens', Astrology Quarterly, Vol. 62 no 4, p 56, with response from Norman Berry, Astrology Quarterly, Vol. 63 no 1, p 52 - 3. See Jean Rhys Bram, Ancient Astrology, Theory and Practice: The Mathesis of Firmicus Maternus, p 323 (Noyes Press, new Jersey, 1976) for the conventional dating of Dorotheus to the first century. Jim Tester, A History of Western Astrology, (Boydell, Suffolk, 1987) pp 80, 88, accepts the first century.

2. Tester, A History of Western Astrology, p 156.

3. Tester, p 80, Firmicus Maternus, II.xxix.2, in Rhys Bram, p 60.

4. Tester, pp 171, 192.

5. Tester, p 89.