Carmen Astrologicum

Carmen Astrologicum, by Dorotheus of Sidon and dated to roughly the first century, is the primary text itself, one of the earliest surviving systematic treatises on Hellenistic astrology, transmitted to the present largely through an eighth century Arabic translation since the original Greek verse is mostly lost, and foundational to the technical vocabulary later Hellenistic, Persian, Arabic and medieval European astrology all built on. Its strength is that it is the actual primary source for early Hellenistic astrological method, essential for any claim about how ancient astrology technically worked rather than a later system's retrospective account of it. Its limit is the transmission itself, the surviving text is a translation of a translation with known gaps and later interpolations, so a claim resting on a precise technical point of Dorotheus's original method should account for that layered manuscript history rather than treating the surviving Arabic derived text as identical to what Dorotheus originally wrote in Greek.