De astrologia

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 5. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.

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-

v.5.p.365
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,
  1. Nay, be it thine to control the delightsome duties of wedlock,
and anent those of warfare,
  1. These shall all be the care of impetuous Mars and Minerva.
Iliad, V, 429, 430.