On dating Hero of Alexandria

Archive for History of Exact Sciences 69 (3):231-255 (2015)
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Abstract

The dating of Hero of Alexandria has been linked with the lunar eclipse of March 13, ad 62, since Otto Neugebauer discovered that this eclipse is the only one that can fit the one described in Hero’s Dioptra 35. Although only a number of scholars claim that Hero himself observed the eclipse, almost all of them take Neugebauer’s identification for granted. We use statistical and linguistic methods to criticize this assumption: all indices we have found point to the fact that the eclipse was merely invented as an example and, for that reason, that it cannot be used to determine Hero’s life span

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Citations of this work

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References found in this work

Heron and ptolemaios.A. G. Drachman - 1950 - Centaurus 1 (2):117-131.
Beginning of the Greek Day.George Melville Bolling - 1902 - American Journal of Philology 23 (4):428.

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