[30]. Works and Days, 564-70.
There is reason to believe that the stars enumerated in the Iliad and Odyssey constituted the whole of those known by name to the early Greeks. This view is strongly favoured by the identity of the Homeric and Hesiodic stars. It is difficult to believe that, had there been room for choice, the same list precisely would have been picked out for presentation in poems so widely diverse in scope and origin as the Iliad and Odyssey on the one side, and the Works and Days on the other. As regards the polar constellations, we have positive proof that none besides Ursa Major had been distinguished. For the statement repeated in both the Homeric epics, that the Bear alone was without part in the baths of Ocean, implies, not that the poet veritably ignored the unnumbered stars revolving within the circle traced out round the pole by the seven of the Plough, but that they still remained a nameless crowd, unassociated with any terrestrial object, and therefore attracting no popular observation.
The Greeks, according to a well-attested tradition, made acquaintance with the Lesser Bear through Phœnician communication, of which Thales was the medium. Hence the designation of the group as Phoinike. Aratus (who versified the prose of Eudoxus) has accordingly two Bears, lying (in sailors’ phrase) ‘heads and points’ on the sphere; while he expressly states that the Greeks still (about 270 B.C.) continued to steer by Helike (the Twister, Ursa Major), while the expert Phœnicians directed their course by the less mobile Kynosoura (Ursa Minor). The absence of any mention of a Pole-star seems at first sight surprising. Even the Iroquois Indians directed their wanderings from of old by the one celestial luminary of which the position remained sensibly invariable.[[31]] Yet not the gods themselves, in Homer’s time, were aware of such a guide. It must be remembered, however, that the axis of the earth’s rotation pointed, 2800 years ago, towards a considerably different part of the heavens from that now met by its imaginary prolongation. The precession of the equinoxes has been at work in the interval, slowly but unremittingly shifting the situation of this point among the stars. Some 600 years before the Great Pyramid was built, it was marked by the close vicinity of the brightest star in the Dragon. But this in the course of ages was left behind by the onward-travelling pole, and further ages elapsed before the star at the tip of the Little Bear’s tail approached its present position. Thus the entire millennium before the Christian era may count for an interregnum as regards Pole-stars. Alpha Draconis had ceased to exercise that office; Alruccabah had not yet assumed it.
[31]. Lafitau, Mœurs des Sauvages Américains, p. 240.
The most ancient of all the constellations is probably that which Homer distinguishes as never-setting (it then lay much nearer to the pole than it now does). In his time, as in ours, it went by two appellations—the Bear and the Wain. Homer’s Bear, however, included the same seven bright stars constituting the Wain, and no more; whereas our Great Bear stretches over a sky-space of which the Wain is only a small part, three of the striding monster’s far-apart paws being marked by the three pairs of stars known to the Arabs as the ‘gazelle’s springs.’ How this extension came about, we can only conjecture; but there is evidence that it was fairly well established when Aratus wrote his description of the constellations. Aratus, however, copied Eudoxus, and Eudoxus used observations made—doubtless by Accad or Chaldean astrologers—above 2000 B.C.[[32]] We infer, then, that the Babylonian Bear was no other than the modern Ursa Major.[[33]]
[32]. According to Mr. Proctor’s calculation. See R. Brown, Eridanus: River and Constellation, p. 3.
[33]. See Houghton, Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch. vol. v. p. 333.
But the primitive asterism—the Seven Rishis of the old Hindus, the Septem Triones of the Latins, the Arktos of Homer—included no more than seven stars. And this is important as regards the origin of the name. For it is impossible to suppose a likeness to any animal suggested by the more restricted group. Scarcely the acquiescent fancy of Polonius could find it ‘backed like a weasel,’ or ‘very like a whale.’ Yet a weasel or a whale would match the figure equally well with, or better than, a bear. Probably the growing sense of incongruity between the name and the object it signified may have induced the attempt to soften it down by gathering a number of additional stars into a group presenting a distant resemblance to a four-legged monster.
The name of the Bear, this initial difficulty notwithstanding, is prehistoric and quasi-universal. It was traditional amongst the American-Indian tribes, who, however, sensible of the absurdity of attributing a conspicuous protruding tail to an animal almost destitute of such an appendage, turned the three stars composing it into three pursuing hunters. No such difficulty, however, presented itself to the Aztecs. They recognised in the seven ‘Arctic’ stars the image of a Scorpion,[[34]] and named them accordingly. No Bear seems to have bestridden their sky.
[34]. Bollaert, Memoirs Anthrop. Society, vol. i. p. 216.