HOBBES

TEN DIALOGUES

FOOTNOTES
  1. A Sicilian historian of the first century BC. He wrote (in Greek) an immense world history from the creation to Caesar’s Gallic Wars, of which rather more than a third survives.

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  2. Probably Ptolemy Philadelphus, who died in 247 BC. The Ptolemies were the Macedonian rulers of Egypt from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC), until Augustus took Egypt from Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, in 30 BC. They are not to be confused with the astronomer Claudius Ptolomaeus (c. 90—168 AD), who was also born and lived in Egypt.

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  3. In fact, it is almost certain that the Ethiopians got their astronomy and geometry from the Egyptians rather than the other way round. Nevertheless, in the light of recent debates as to whether Western European civilisation derived ultimately from Black Africa, it is interesting that some Greeks and Hobbes were happy with this theory. Hobbes was deeply committed to the view that all human beings are potentially equal, and that it is knowledge of geometry which makes the difference between civilisation and barbarism.

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  4. This is probably true as far as it goes, but it overlooks influences from Persia and India to the East (apart from the reference to Assyria in the next sentence).

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  5. Later part of Persia, or the modern Iran.

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  6. Although what Hobbes says is partially true, Chaldaea can be broadly identified with Mesopotamia, or the modern Iraq.

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  7. This term, which is a corruption of ‘Egyptian’, is no longer politically correct; but if I translated it as ‘traveller’, Hobbes’s meaning would not be clear.

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  8. Astrology traditionally had two branches: natural and judicial. Natural astrology is what we would now call astronomy, and judicial astrology is what we would now call astrology without any qualification.

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  9. Hobbes’s word is ‘couples’, which is derived from the Latin copula.

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  10. By ‘orb’, Hobbes means the volume between a sphere and a smaller concentric sphere — like the rings of an onion. If a motion starts outwards in all directions from the centre of an onion, it will have to occupy larger and larger rings.

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