Introduction

SYLLECTA CLASSICA 17 (2006) 3 INTRODUCTION I. COMPARISON OF THIS CATALOGUE WITH ITS PREDECESSORS A work of this type inevitably builds upon a foundation that has been laid by its predecessors, and so this new catalogue tries to make it plain where it agrees with, and where it departs from, previous collections of this material. These earlier catalogues have served as standard works of reference for both astronomers and ancient historians for many years, and it is important, therefore, to show how the incorporation of new material and the revisions of old conclusions alter a fabric that may already be familiar to some readers. The previous catalogues taken into account in the present work are the following: (1) Alexandre-Guy Pingré, Cométographie, vol. 1 (1783), pp. 255–307 and pp. 574–98 of the appendix, for the period covered here. Despite its age, Pingré’s work is still very worth consulting because the author, a French cleric, was both well-versed in classical languages1 and a brilliant astronomer of his age.2 Where new information has come to light, we can sometimes improve on Pingré’s conclusions (see, for example, A.D. 191), but in other instances, his report of the evidence is far superior to that given by some of the more standard, modern authorities (see, for example, A.D. 117?). (2) Wilhelm Gundel, who lists ancient comets on pp. 1183–90 of the article “Kometen” in Pauly-Wissowa’s Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (vol. 11.1) published in 1921.3 1 Pingré’s 1786 edition and French translation of the Latin astronomical poet Manilius earns this high praise from A.E. Housman, a critic not noted for handing out accolades: “in no edition of Manilius is there so little that calls for censure” (p. xii of Housman’s 1903 ed. of Manilius, bk. 1). 2 See the excellent short biography of Pingré (1711–1796) by Colin Ronan in The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. by Charles Gillispie, vol. 10 (1974), 614–16. 3 No catalogue of this type was included in the recent article on “Kometen” by Wolf- 4 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 17 (2006) (3) Anthony Barrett, “Observations of Comets in Greek and Roman Sources before A.D. 410,” in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (vol. 72) on pp. 81–106 for 1978. (4) Donald Yeomans, “List of Naked-eye Comets Reported Through A.D. 1700”, which forms an appendix (pp. 361–424) in his Comet: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore (1991). (5) Gary Kronk, Cometography, vol. 1 (1999) covering the period from antiquity to A.D. 1799. Yeomans and Kronk rely upon Barrett for their knowledge of the Greco-Roman sources, Kronk providing a convenient, up-to-date (but unfortunately not always reliable4) synthesis of the full range of relevant evidence for ancient comet sightings. His treatment takes into account reports from Babylonia and the Far East, as well as modern scholarship in the field of astronomy. The two most recent collections of the Greco-Roman evidence, the lists compiled by Barrett and Gundel, agree on most points, but whereas Gundel treats 62 items in his catalogue for the period 500 B.C. to A.D. 410, Barrett has 65 items, 62 of which are numbered, while 3 are not.5 This slight discrepancy in the overall number of objects covered by Gundel and Barrett results from the fact that Barrett lists texts under six years not included by Gundel (372/1, 174, 169, 76 and 49 B.C. and gang Hübner in Der Neue Pauly, vol. 15 (2001) 847–52. This article is, unfortunately, not to be found under the heading “Kometen” in vol. 6 (1999), p. 678 (or in vol. 3 [2003], p. 618 of the Eng. ed.), where the cross reference “s. Metereologie” is of no help because the treatment of comets was eventually published not under “Metereologie” but much later under “Naturwissenschaften,” in the volumes devoted to Rezeptionsund Wissenschaftsgeschichte. None of the indices makes it possible for the reader to discover the existence of Hübner’s article. 4 E.g., p. 48 he asserts that “there was no ‘very distinct...