PTOLEMY IN PERSPECTIVE Ptolemy in Perspective: Use and Criticism of his Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Alexander Jones Archimedes, xxiii; Springer, Berlin, 2010). Pp. xvi + 229. $189. ISBN 978-90-481-2787-0.Here we have a collection of research articles by eight authors, all well known professionals. The subject is Ptolemy and his legacy in astronomy, geography and astrology. One theme that runs through a number of articles is the way in which Ptolemy's so-called observations of the equinoxes posed insoluble problems for all the later theories of precession.The volume opens with a report by Anne Tihon of a newly discovered and exciting text, written by an anonymous contemporary of Ptolemy. This is a report of work in progress, as we await with great interest the eventual edition by Tihon and her colleague, the papyrologist Jean-Luc Fournet. The text presents not only a calculation of the Sun in A.D. 130 according to both sidereal and tropical theories, but also testifies to a hitherto unknown observation by Hipparchus of the summer solstice of -157 June 26. Although brief and disturbed by some lacunae, the text is fairly clear and deepens our understanding of tropical and sidereal coordinates and precession, since we are given precise values for the sidereal and tropical motions of the Sun, as well as an implied apogee of the Sun in the sidereal frame.The second study in the collection, by Alexander Jones, is an ambitious study of the use of sidereal coordinates in a number of Greek horoscopes and other Greek texts. A famous passage in Theon's Small commentary on the Handy tables presents a model of precession used by astrologers of his time. Jones compares the solar andlunar longitudes in a good number of horoscopes (mainly those gathered by Neugebauer and van Hoesen) from which he subtracts the Ptolemaic tropical longitude. In spite of the inevitable scatter in the values he finds a fair clustering around Theon's precession, and concludes that the majority of astrologers obtained sidereal coordinates in this way. This is however a purely statistical argument, based on horoscopes where positions are given in degrees only, without minutes. Those horoscopes where the minutes are given are so close to the year 483, when that precession vanishes, that they add little to the argument; Jones argues in any case that after about the year 350 astrologers no longer corrected for precession. This is not the first time that this point has been made about such calculations in the Greek horoscopes, not least by Jones himself, but here the context of the discussion is much wider and includes the Standard Model of the Moon, Vettius Valens, and the Stobart tablets (not that the latter two add anything very convincing to the argument). As to the Standard Model, it is shown here that the mean moon differed from that of the Handy tables by precisely Theon's precession. The difficulty with these horoscopes is that recalculation from Ptolemy's parameters never yields complete agreement with the text, and this makes it hard to be sure whether the Almagest or the Handy tables had been used, since these yield practically the same results. Beyond such questions bearing on the usage of the sidereal frame there is the as yet unanswered question as to just what is 'sidereal' about the sidereal longitude, that is, How is it anchored to the fixed stars? Jones is content to remark that the astrologers who used sidereal rather than tropical longitudes were hardly aware of the scientific distinction, but surely there is more to it than that.Florian Mittenhuber discusses the origin of the maps in Ptolemy's Geography. The earliest extant maps are of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it has been argued that these were reconstructed from the text by Planudes in the thirteenth century. Now Mittenhuber, who was one of the team in Switzerland who produced the new edition of the Geography (Basel, 2006), argues that the maps designated U, K, F (Vatican, Istanbul, Copenhagen) have a hypothetical common ancestor in a group designed ? …