ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Between Stars and Stones: Public Weather Reporting in Antiquity

• In Event: Mediating Meteorology: Communicating Climate and Weather Knowledge from Antiquity to the Present

English Abstract

Meteorology played a vital role in the daily lives of inhabitants of ancient cities, perhaps even more so than in modern societies. Yet identifying precise, shared ways of communicating weather and climate from surviving Greco-Roman texts remains challenging. Although numerous works on weather forecasting in Latin and Greek survive, their practical contexts often remain elusive, encouraging their consideration as just part of a long literary tradition. At the same time, we have scattered evidence of public ways of weather reporting: the Miletus parapegma, for example, is a fragment of what seems to be a public astro-meteorological calendar inscribed on stone for Milesian citizens, while the Tower of the Winds in Athens is a monumental building which, among other functions, provides information about winds blowing in a given moment. Such examples invite a reconsideration of how weather observation and prediction were communicated in everyday life in the area of the Roman Empire.
This presentation is, therefore, developed on a twofold level: on one side it explores how weather-prediction texts from the classical age (from the 3rd century BC to 2nd AD) was possibly reflective of public practices. On the other side, it presents the heterogeneous remains of the materiality of weather reports and predictions in the ancient world. The aim is to get as close as possible to the common practices of observing, predicting, describing, and explaining meteorological phenomena that likely shaped the experiences of ancient populations in the Mediterranean world.

Author

• Angelo Gargiulo, Ghent University