Trattato della sfera celeste: Sulla costruzione di una sfera aratea

This book is the first commented edition of this Greek astronomical text, which was hitherto available to scholars only in the 1898 edition by Ernst Maass and in a French translation published in 1821 by Nicolas Halma. Unfortunately, both Maass and Halma had serious problems in understanding the historical context and scientific content of Leontius’ treatise: as a consequence, the versions of the text published by them were fairly nonsensical, and this work has remained until now virtually unknown to the scholarly community. In my book I offer a new edition of the text, differing from that of Maass in several points, and I contextualise its production within the philosophical school of Alexandria in the mid-sixth century AD: thanks to this new treatment, the text offers new insights into the cultural history of late antiquity, especially in what concerns the teaching activity in the school of Alexandria and the relation between written and visual media in the transmission of scientific knowledge.