Sad Kassiepeia; nor seemly still
Show from her seat her feet and knees above;
But she head foremost like a tumbler sits:
With knees divided: since a doom must fall
On boasts to equal Panopê and Doris.”[123]
[123] The Phainomena or “Heavenly Display” of Aratos, ub. supr.
Now in Eudoxos’ time and in his latitude, though Cassiopeia’s head did by a few degrees extend into the southern heavens, yet her position was not so deplorably ignominious as the poem would suggest. Three thousand years earlier the pity for her expressed by Aratos would have been more appropriate, for then her whole figure for observers in lat. 35° N. would have been visible in the southern quarter of the sky, and her feet, not her head (as at Lat. 23° N.), would have been on the zenith.
These considerations may lead us to suppose that the idea of Cassiopeia’s pride, and the fit punishment of it—i.e., her reversed position in the heavens, must have assumed form in northern latitudes almost at as early a date as the constellation figures were first imagined in tropical latitudes.
If this be so, it is indeed curious to find a legend which embodied the animus of astronomic rivalry 3500 B.C. handed down for thousands of years, and repeated in what professed to be a somewhat scientific treatise at a date between 400 and 300 B.C., when the astronomic facts no longer tallied with those narrated in the legend.
As to Andromeda, the classic story describes her as the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia; but the constellation itself—except on legendary grounds—might equally well have marked the beginning of a solstitial year 6000 B.C., or of a non-solstitial and calendrical year 3500 B.C.