Summary

Greek and Roman astrology was a culturally significant system of understanding the cosmos and people’s place in it. Astrology believed (and indeed, argued) that human destinies could be predicted, explained, or understood by looking at the positions of the planets and the orientation of the zodiac relative to the moment of an individual’s birth. Astrology was widely practiced and consumed at all levels of Greco-Roman society from approximately the first century bce onward. Details of how the system worked could vary from author to author, sometimes reaching impressive levels of computational or interpretative complexity. Astrology is one of the more prominent cultural exports of classical antiquity, still widely consumed, often in the form of (much simplified) daily horoscopes in newspapers or online.