Centiloquium

thumb|Interlinear Greek–Latin text from a 15th-century manuscript thumb|Start of the Arabic text thumb|Hugo of Santalla's Latin translation of Ahmad ibn Yusuf's commentary The Centiloquium ("one hundred sayings") is a Pseudo-Ptolemaic collection of one hundred aphorisms about astrology and astrological rules. It is first recorded at the start of the tenth century CE, when a commentary was written on it by the Egyptian mathematician Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Misri (later sometimes confounded with his namesake Ali ibn Ridwan ibn Ali ibn Ja'far al-Misri, who lived a century later and wrote a commentary on Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos).

== Influence and authorship == The Centiloquium opens with a dedication to Syrus, like the classical astronomer Ptolemy's astrological treatise the Tetrabiblos ("Four books"). Ptolemy was indeed accepted as its author by medieval Arabic, Hebrew and Latin scholars, and the book was widely taken up and quoted. In Arabic it was known as the Kitab al-Thamara ("Book of the Fruit"), the name supposedly a translation of the Greek meaning "fruit", the book's aphorisms being seen as standing as the fruit or summation of the earlier treatise. It was translated at least four times into Latin, in which it was also known as the Liber Fructus, including by John of Seville in Toledo in 1136 and by Plato of Tivoli in Barcelona in 1138 (printed in Venice in 1493). In Hebrew it was translated at the same time by Tivoli's collaborator Abraham bar Hiyya, and again in 1314 by Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, as the Sefer ha-Peri ("Book of the fruit") or Sefer ha-Ilan ("Book of the tree").