When Night becomes dominant, the Scales fall from her hand, for the sun is in that sign.
Applying this idea to the passage quoted above, it will mean “The nights are going southward,” for the sun in Aquarius is not far from the point where he crosses the equator to the north, therefore Night circling opposite to him is nearing the point where she goes south. Either interpretation is faithful to fact, but perhaps the circumstance that the plural noun is used favours the first.
[To face p. 279.
Fig. 41. The Ram on the Ecliptic.
From the “Cosmi Historia” of Robert Flud, a.d. 1612.
(Reproduced from Brown’s Phainomena of Aratos.)
Conrad Malaspina prophesied to Dante that his favourable opinion of the Malaspina family would be justified “before the sun had come to rest again seven times in the bed which the Ram covers and bestrides with his four feet.”
“Ed egli: Or va, che il Sol non si ricorca Sette volte nel letto che il Montone Con tutti e quattro i pie copre ed inforca Che cotesta cortese opinione ...”[228]
The sun was at the time in the Ram, and Malaspina means that less than seven years would elapse, before his prophecy was fulfilled. The aptness of the description may be seen by the [figure of Aries] as portrayed in an old seventeenth century book in which the Ram is uncomfortably trying to sit on the ecliptic.