Pliny
(Apostrophe to Thales and Hipparchus.)
1. HOMERIC GREECE.
To turn from the astronomy of Egypt and Assyria to the astronomy of the Greeks is like coming to a sudden bend in a river which has flowed through level country for many miles in a slow majestic course, and finding beyond the bend a series of rapids and waterfalls. Instead of patient age-long accumulation of observations, instead of a mystical adoration of stars, supposed to be beyond man’s power to understand, we find that the Greek’s first instinct is to inquire into the meaning and the origin of what he saw, even before he had taken time to investigate. Behind the varied splendours of earth and skies which fascinated his bodily eyes, his intellect divined laws and forces which held the whole together in a wonderful harmony. Then, as fresh facts, or a fresh point of view, thrust itself upon him, a new explanation must be attempted, and thus many complete systems of the universe were evolved. Not the name only, the idea of Cosmos was Greek.
Homer c. 900 b.c.
Hesiod c. 800 b.c.
The first ideas of astronomy among the Greeks were as primitive as those of any other race in its early stages. They evidently had no conception of the sky as a sphere, or of the revolution of the stars as a whole, round fixed poles, though they watched the motions of certain bright star-groups, and called them by the names that we use now (however these names may have reached them), as we see in Homer and Hesiod. Ulysses, guiding his raft cunningly by night, keeps on his left the Bear, also called the Wain, which turns round in her place and keeps watch on Orion, and never bathes in ocean; he watches also the Pleiades and the “slow-setting Ploughman” (Boötes)—an apt description, as anyone may see who watches Arcturus, the brightest star of Boötes, when low on the western horizon. Being a northern star, its motion seems very slow, and makes so small an angle with the horizon that for a long time Arcturus glides above it before finally dropping below; whereas the Pleiades, or any other stars near the equator, move very quickly and almost at right angles to the horizon, and so drop below it quite suddenly. It is Ulysses also who warns his companion, when they are setting out to spy upon the Trojan camp, that two watches of the night are already past, “for the stars have gone forward.” The stars also announced the seasons, for Hesiod says that the time of harvest is indicated by the heliacal rising of the Pleiades, and when Orion with Sirius stands in mid-heaven, and Arcturus rises in morning twilight, it is time for the vintage.
Homer and Hesiod both mention Venus, as a morning star “the brightest of all the stars, which comes to herald the light of dawn,” and also as an evening star, apparently without recognizing that it was the same star; as they do not mention any other planet we do not know if the others were known to the ancient Greeks.
The first appearance of the new moon’s slender crescent was watched for from hill-tops, and celebrated by sacrifices, and this—as with other ancient nations—fixed the first day of their month.
Mimnermus c. 580 b.c.