calculated Hebrew (Jewish) calendar). Greece and Hellenistic Egypt Thereafter, from Hipparchus and Ptolemy in the Bithynian and Ptolemaic epochs down to the time of Newton's work in the seventeenth century, lunar theories were composed mainly with the help of geometrical ideas, inspired more or less directly by long series of positional observations of the moon. Prominent in these geometrical lunar theories were combinations of circular motions – applications of the theory of epicycles. Hipparchus Hipparchus, whose works are mostly lost and known mainly from quotations by other authors, assumed that the Moon moved in a circle inclined at 5° to the ecliptic, rotating in a retrograde direction (i.e. opposite to the direction of annual and monthly apparent movements of the Sun and Moon relative to the fixed stars) once in 18 years. The circle acted as a deferent, carrying an epicycle along which the Moon was assumed to move in a retrograde direction. The center of the epicycle moved at a rate corresponding to the mean change in Moon's longitude, while the period of the Moon around the epicycle was an anomalistic month. This epicycle approximately provided for what was later recognized as the elliptical inequality, the equation of the center, and its size approximated to an equation of the center of about 5° 1'. This figure is much smaller than the modern value: but it is close to the difference between the modern coefficients of the equation of the center (1st term) and that of the evection: the difference is accounted for by the fact that the ancient measurements were taken at times of eclipses, and the effect of the evection (which subtracts under those conditions from the equation of the center) was at that time unknown and overlooked. For further information see also separate article Evection. Ptolemy Ptolemy's work the Almagest had wide and long-lasting acceptance and influence for over a millennium. He gave a geometrical lunar theory that improved on that of Hipparchus by providing for a second inequality of the Moon's motion, using a device that made the apparent apogee oscillate a little – prosneusis of the epicycle. This second inequality or second anomaly accounted rather approximately, not only for the equation of the center, but also for what became known (much later) as the evection. But this theory, applied to its logical conclusion, would make the distance (and apparent diameter) of the Moon appear to