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I will use Ὁ Καρπός, the Greek version of ps.-Ptolemy’s collection of astrological aphorisms, as an opportunity to reflect on some of the challenges one encounters in translating texts. Some of these challenges are linguistic, e.g., technical vocabulary, ambiguous terms, conceptual distinctions that we have lost or now impose on words, while others arise from the aphoristic form that provides little context. Some challenges stem from the variations in the surviving copies of the text, variations we often consider errors, corruptions, omissions, or accretions, variations that are sometimes noted in the manuscripts but rarely resolved. It is tempting to throw up our hands and either avoid translating a text or outsource our decisions to the editor of a critical edition. I want to discourage taking either approach and, instead, think about how struggling to make sense of and to translate the texts we encounter enriches our historiographic project.