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There is no reference to a ninth sphere in the I Almagest i but a number of Arabic and Jewish scholars believed that Ptolemy thought there were nine spheres. In his lead-in paper, "The Ancient Ptolemy", Alexander Jones seeks to present Ptolemy "in the round" and begins by asking which "Ptolemaic" works Ptolemy wrote. But when Ptolemy criticizes some astrological theories Pico uses Ptolemy the astronomer to add weight to the criticisms. The section on Greek and Near Eastern Traditions closes with Boyadar Dimitrov's "'Fort.recte': Witnesses to the Text of Ptolemy's I Tetrabiblos i in Its Near Eastern Transmission", which considers a "fragmentarily preserved, possibly pre-Islamic Syriac translation" of Ptolemy's classic work on astrology (p. 97). [Extracted from the article]