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acceleration and hoped to use the data provided by Ptolemy in his famous
Almagest
. After
uncovering internal inconsistencies in that text (which had been well known for cen-
turies), Newton devoted years to revealing the “crime” of Ptolemy, who was accused
of deliberately falsifying data: “It is clear that Ptolemy knew what he was doing.”
24
This became part of a larger crusade against the way contemporary astronomers used
ancient eclipse records. He criticized previous investigators as having decided in advance
what the secular acceleration must be and choosing only eclipses that matched their
presumption. He warned that many ancient references are “ambiguous, and many were
almost surely not based on valid observations.”
25
Newton argued that he would be able
to discern which were reliable by studying the ancient texts “from the standpoint of the
texts themselves, their historical settings, and other relevant considerations.”
26
His strategy was to assign each eclipse a reliability number that would be used to
weight its data before it was used in any calculations. This number would be assigned
on the basis of “textual criticism, a task for which I am not well prepared. However,
there is no standard interpretation that can be used for many of the eclipses because
there is frequent disagreement among the authorities who have studied the texts. There-
fore I have had to carry out independent textual criticism for this study.” This criticism
had to include the known habits of the ancient writer, the distance in time between the
event and the writing, and the tendency to dramatize past events.
27
Newton proceeded to wade brutally through the mass of eclipse records, discarding
some as retroactive prophecies, some as magical, some as literary. Perhaps astronomers
were simply reading an ancient equivalent to
A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
,
and the eclipse was wholly invented.
28
“Magical” eclipses were placed in texts simply to
contribute a sense of awe to events, such as one reported in the Gospel of Luke during
the crucifixion. Given that a solar eclipse is physically impossible a week after Passover,
Newton dismissed this as just one more example of people's “remarkable tendency to
die during eclipses. ”
29
He was skeptical that the terms used in Babylonian reports (e.g., “fire in the midst
of heaven”) actually refer to eclipses, or that Xenophon witnessed one. He concluded
that the darkness was clearly caused by a cloud, and that “Only romance could call this
a useable eclipse record, and I shall not calculate it.” Livy's reported eclipses were dis-
carded as magical, since about half of them were accompanied by rains of stones.
30
The plentiful Babylonian records also came under suspicion. There were too many
assumptions underlying the conclusion of their accuracy. First, that human beings record
information in predictable ways: there “are assumptions about uniformity of human
