On Architecture

Vitruvius Pollio

Vitruvius Pollio, creator; Morgan, M. H. (Morris Hicky), 1859-1910, translator

9. Venus, on becoming free from the hindrance of the sun's rays, crosses the space of a sign in thirty days. Though she thus stays less than forty days in particular signs, she makes good the required amount by delaying in one sign when she comes to a pause. Therefore she completes her total revolution in heaven in four hundred and eighty-five days, and once more enters the sign from which she previously began to move.

10. Mars, after traversing the spaces of the constellations for about six hundred and eighty-three days, arrives at the point from which he had before set out at the beginning of his course,

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and while he passes through some of the signs more rapidly than others, he makes up the required number of days whenever he comes to a pause. Jupiter, climbing with gentler pace against the revolution of the firmament, travels through each sign in about three hundred and sixty days, and finishes in eleven years and three hundred and thirteen days, returning to the sign in which he had been twelve years before. Saturn, traversing the space of one sign in twenty-nine months plus a few days, is restored after twenty-nine years and about one hundred and sixty days to that in which he had been thirty years before. He is, as it appears, slower, because the nearer he is to the outermost part of the firmament, the greater is the orbit through which he has to pass.

11. The three that complete their circuits above the sun's course do not make progress while they are in the triangle which he has entered, but retrograde and pause until the sun has crossed from that triangle into another sign. Some hold that this takes place because, as they say, when the sun is a great distance off, the paths on which these stars wander are without light on account of that distance, and so the darkness retards and hinders them. But I do not think that this is so. The splendour of the sun is clearly to be seen, and manifest without any kind of obscurity, throughout the whole firmament, so that those very retrograde movements and pauses of the stars are visible even to us.

12. If then, at this great distance, our human vision can discern that sight, why, pray, are we to think that the divine splendour of the stars can be cast into darkness? Rather will the following way of accounting for it prove to be correct. Heat summons and attracts everything towards itself; for instance, we see the fruits of the earth growing up high under the influence of heat, and that spring water is vapourised and drawn up to the clouds at sunrise. On the same principle, the mighty influence of the sun, with his rays diverging in the form of a triangle, attracts the stars which follow him, and, as it were, curbs and restrains those that precede, not allowing them to make progress, but obliging them

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to retrograde towards himself until he passes out into the sign that belongs to a different triangle.