A Working Astrologer of Roman Antioch

Vettius Valens was born around 120 CE, most likely in Antioch, and was a slightly younger contemporary of Claudius Ptolemy, though the two astrologers show no sign of having known each other's work and represent two quite different traditions within Hellenistic astrology, Ptolemy the philosophically minded systematizer and Valens the practicing technician. Valens describes travelling widely through Egypt in search of specific astrological doctrines and teachers he judged worth learning from, gathering techniques into his own practice rather than working from a single inherited system.

He wrote his major work, conventionally called the Anthology, across roughly 150 to 175 CE, and it is generally judged to be substantially complete by his death around 175. Almost nothing else of his biography survives independently of what he says of himself in the text, which is itself unusually candid by the standards of ancient technical writing, including passages of personal reflection on the astrologer's craft and its difficulties. Nothing is known of any formal training he received, and unlike several later Hellenistic astrologers he claims no divine or legendary transmission for his method, presenting it instead as a working technician's accumulated craft, refined through practice and correction over a working lifetime rather than received from any authoritative source.