‘Saving the appearances’, , is a slogan that, in its time, stood or was made to stand for many different methodological positions in many different branches of ancient natural science. It is not my aim, in this paper, to attempt to tackle the subject as a whole. I shall concentrate on just one inquiry, astronomy. Nor, with astronomy, can I do justice to all the complexities of what was certainly one of the central methodological issues, if not the central issue, (...) in the history of ancient theoretical astronomy. I have a quite limited aim, to examine the foundations, and test the applicability, of a widespread and influential line of interpretation of ancient Greek astronomy according to which it was essentially, or at least predominantly, what we may call ‘instrumentalist’ in character—that is, broadly speaking, that Greek astronomical theories were devices or fictions put forward purely for the sake of calculations with no claims to correspond with physical reality. (shrink)

Since 1944, attempts at progress in the interpretation of the text of the Bacchae must inevitably express themselves mainly in terms of respectful disagreement with Professor Dodds's edition published in that year. 20–24. Dodds's text was justly called in question by Kitto , 65), but there is only one available remedy for this complex; those who work it out for themselves will find that they had been anticipated by Wecklein in his text and school edition.