Moreover, it is not true, neither, that Jupiter put Saturn in chaines or threw him into Tartarus or otherwise mistreated him as men credit. Nay, Saturn moveth in the extream orbe, far away from us, and his motion is sluggish and not easy to be apprehended ocularly by human kind, whence they say that he holdeth still as if fettered; and the vast abyss of the ayr is called Tartarus.

’Tis chiefly from the verses of Homer the poet and of Hesiod that we may learn that antiquity holdeth with the astrologers. When he describeth the chain of Jupiter

Homer, in the Iliad, VIII, 18-26: Zeus, boasting of his strength, says that if a golden “chain should be let down from heaven and all the other gods and ni agi should lay hold of it, they could not pull him down, but he could pull them up, along with the earth and the sea, fasten the chain about the peak of Olympus, and leave everything hanging. Socrates in the Theaetetus, 153A, says that by the golden chain Homer means nothing else than the sun; others, according to Hysteria (695, 9), took him to mean the orbits of the planets.

and the kine of the Sun, which I con- ceive to be daies,

Odyssey, XI, 104 ff.; XII, 260 ff.

and the cities that Vulcan made upon the shield, and the choir, and the vineyard

Iliad, XVII, 490 (the cities); 561 (the vineyard); 590 (the chorus). Following these words there appears to be a break in the text which very probably has deprived us of Lucian’s allegorical explanation. It is easy to see that the chorus would be the planetary song and dance (cf. Dance, § 7), but the astronomical significance of the cities and the vineyard is just a bit obscure.

... All that he hath said of Venus and of Mars his passion, is also manifestly composed from no other source than this science. Indeed, it is the conjunction of Venus and Mars that createth the poetry of Homer. And in other verses he distinguished the duties of each, saying unto Venus, Nay, be it thine to control the delightsome duties of wedlock, and anent those of warfare, These shall all be the care of impetuous Mars and Minerva.Iliad, V, 429, 430.

Discerning all these things, the ancients had divination in very great use and counted it no parergy, but would found no cities, invest themselves with no ramparts, slay no men, wed no women, untill they had been advised in all particulars by diviners. And certainly their oracles were not aloof from astrology, but at Delphi a virgin hath the office of prophet in token of the celestial Virgin, and a serpent giveth voice beneath the tripod because a Serpent giveth light among the stars, and at Didymi also the oracle of Apollo hath its name, methinks, from the heavenly Twins.

Modern philology soberly rejects the happy thought that Didyma (Dids i) owes its name to the constellation Didymi (Gemini), and explains that the name is Carian, like Idyma, Sidyma, Loryma, etc. (Birchner, in Pauly-Wissowa, 3.v.).

So firmly did they believe divination a thing most sacred, that when Ulysses, wearied of wandering, took a phansie to learn the truth as touching his affaires, he went off unto Hell, not “to behold dead men and a land that is joyless,”

Odyssey, XI, 94.

but because he would come to speech with Tiresias. And when he was come to the place whereunto Circe directed him, and had dug his pit and slain his sheep, although many dead that were by, and amongst them his own mother, were fain to drink of the blood, he suffered none of them, not even his very mother, until he had wet the throstle of Tiresias and constrained him to deliver the prophecy, verily enduring to behold his mother’s shadow athirst.

For the Spartans, Lycurgus drew from the skye his ordering of their whole polity and made it their law never to leave their country, even to go to the wars, before the moon should be at her full, for he conceited that the potency of the moon is not the same when she waxeth and when she waneth, and that all things are subject unto her sway.