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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and this week I'm

talking to Claire Hall, who lectures on ancient Greek science at Oxford, and has a piece in the

current issue of the paper on ancient astrology. It's a review of a book called A Scheme of Heaven, Astrology and the Birth of Science by Alexander Boxer. Hello, Claire, and thank you very much for joining me. Hi. So to get the silly, obvious question out of the way, what star sign are you? I'm an Aquarius. I'm an Ares, very dominant. And as you say in the piece, that's sort of everyone, everyone knows that, even, you know, no one believes it, but everyone knows it. And those signs of the zodiac are very ancient, but they go back to Greece and to Babylon. But for sorts of reasons, that, what star sign are you, isn't a question that an ancient astrologer is likely to have asked of somebody. No, that's right, because the concept of the star sign are you isn't a question that an agent astrologer is likely to have asked of somebody.

No, that's right, because the concept of the star sign as being the kind of the most important

bit of astrology is really quite a modern invention, sort of, I think, post-19th century.

And, well, when we say star sign, what we really mean is the sun sign, the sign that the sun is in at the time of your birth. And so those are kind of month by month segments. But for Greek astrologers, that's not as important. They're much more interested in the kind of whole array of the planets and all the different planets signs. And particularly they're interested in what's coming up over the eastern horizon

at the time of your birth, which is not the same or not necessarily the same as the sign

that the sun is in.

So they certainly wouldn't define themselves by their star signs in that way.

It was usually a bit more of a complicated picture.

So the zodiac, there are the, that as we look up into the night sky,

those 12 signs, Capricorn Aquarius, are the constellations that we see around the horizon?

They're the ones that the planets, so we're on a tilt, Earth is on a 23 degree tilt,

and if you think of the solar system as a kind of flat plane, all of the planets are travelling around the sun in a flat

plane and we're at a 23 degree angle to that. But of course, for the ancients, they thought

...