We as Classical scholars need to (re)learn what most of our nineteenth and early twentieth century colleagues used to know about e. g. the phases of the moon. If we do not we may totally miss essential points of some texts, or fail to understand the nature of problems pointed out by former generations, as in the case of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. We also ought to go further than our predecessors: knowing some basic facts about the heavenly bodies, (...) e. g. about the visibility of the planet Venus, can make us see some Greek poems in a (to us, at least) new light. (shrink)

Aristotle thought that the albumen of bird’s eggs was hotter than the yolk. As he was convinced that the principle of life is located in the hotter substance, he located the proto-heart, not in the germinal disc near the surface of the yolk, but in the albumen. The early modern biologists Aldrovandi, Coiter, and Harvey, blinded the albumen. The early modern biologists Aldrovandi, Coiter, and Harvey, blinded by the halo effect, tried to explain away this mistake by overinterpretation, thus creating (...) or contributing to the creation of an availability cascade which has rendered Aristotle’s mistake invisible to most Aristotelian scholars. (shrink)

The meteorite of the year 467/466 BC whose fall was observed near Aigospotamoi cannot be identical with the object described by Pliny in NH 2, 149.