Emprosthia and Opisthia

Definition

Emprosthia (Greek ἐμπρόσθια, "front parts") and opisthia (ὀπίσθια, "back parts") are the two halves into which the Michigan Papyrus inv. 1, 149 splits each quarter of the zodiac. Every quadrant holds forty-eight frontpart degrees and forty-two backpart degrees. The cut runs alongside the papyrus's other partition, into "strong" and "daimonic" degrees. Both feed a melothesia built to present, in Greenbaum's phrase, an "image of man" (andrias) keyed to the heavens.

In Tradition

Greenbaum reconstructs the scheme from the single papyrus and treats it as a self-contained Hellenistic experiment, not a shared doctrine. The front/back division interleaves with the strong/daimonic one and with the planetary terms, so that a degree carries both a frontpart-or-backpart role and a strong-or-daimonic one. She declines to generalize beyond the text: by her account no other astrologer is known to have followed the system, and it never carried over into the Arabic tradition.

In Practice

Read this as a localized sub-sign grid layered over the more familiar bounds and faces. To place a degree in the papyrus's terms, note which side of its quadrant it falls on — frontpart or backpart, with frontparts holding the larger share at forty-eight degrees to forty-two. Then note whether the same degree counts as strong or daimonic. The point of the grid is the melothesia: the front and back of the human figure mapped onto front and back regions of the zodiac. The scheme survives only here, so treat it as a window onto one Hellenistic synthesis rather than a technique with wider currency.

Historical Origin

The front/back partition survives only in the Michigan Papyrus inv. 1, 149, the melothesia-and-terms system Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum reconstructs in The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology (2016), p. 180, where she records the forty-eight frontpart and forty-two backpart degrees per quadrant and their interweaving with the strong and daimonic degrees.

Etymology

Origin: Greek. Meaning: front parts; back parts.

Further Reading

• Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology
• Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology