’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.