[172] εἰς ἐννάδα here appears in the text apparently as an alternative reading. Cruice suggests “with an ennead deducted.”
[173] Meaning that some reckon the numerical value of all the letters in a name, others that of the vowels only.
[174] What follows has nothing to do with divination, but treats of the celestial map as a symbolical representation of the Christian scheme of salvation. Hippolytus condemns the notion as a “heresy,” but if so, its place ought to be in Book V. It is doubtful from what author or teacher he derived his account of it; but all the quotations from Aratus’ Phænomena which he gives are to be found in Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 41, where they make, as they do not here, a connected story.
[175] One of the passages favouring the conjecture that the book was originally in the form of lectures.
[176] οἱ ἐντυγχάνοντες, legentibus, Cr. It may just as easily mean “those who come across this.”
[177] “Catasterisms” was the technical term for these transfers, of which the Coma Berenices is the best-known example. Cf. Bouché-Leclercq, op. cit., p. 23.
[178] The long-eared owl (strix otus). According to Ælian it had a reputation for stupidity, and was therefore a type of the easy dupe, Athenæus, Deipnosophistæ, IX, 44, 45, tells a similar story to that in the text about the bustard.
[179] Reading μετανάσσεται for μετανίσσεται or μετανείσεται.
[180] στρεπτούς, volventes, Cr. An attempt to pun on πόλος, the Pole.
[181] Job i. 7. The Book of Job according to some writers comes from an Essene school, which may give us some clue to the origin of these ideas. The Enochian literature to which the same tendency is assigned is full of speculations about the heavenly bodies. See Forerunners, I, p. 159, for references.