A couple of years ago the news of the discovery of Hipparchus’s lost star catalog in an ancient manuscript (the so-called Codex Climaci Rescriptus) broke out, appearing in newspapers, magazines, and important scientific journals around the world. What is the importance of this discovery? Which stars did this catalog include? And what was its purpose?

In this talk Professor Francesca Schironi will discuss this fragment together with her own study of the other fragments connected with Hipparchus’s star catalog (i.e., the Latin fragments in the so-called Aratus Latinus, and in a Greek papyrus, P.Aberd. 12). She will put these fragments in their historical and scientific context, analyzing other, different star catalogues and star lists of antiquity, especially those from ancient Mesopotamia and Greece.

Francesca Schironi is a professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Before joining U-M in 2010, she was an associate professor at Harvard University. She is currently working on a translation and commentary of Hipparchus's Exegesis of the Phenomena of Euoxus and Aratus, as well as a monograph on Hipparchus.