And alone it hath no share in the baths of the Ocean-stream:—
For Calypso, the Goddess divine, had bidden him still to keep
Over his left that sign as he fared on the face of the deep”.
The Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion are also mentioned, but not in any special connexion with the indication of time[476]. The morning-star helps to determine time on a night journey[477].
Hesiod says that at the time when the thistle blooms and the cricket chirps Sirius burns heads and knees[478], and that when the late autumn rains come men feel relieved, since the star Sirius is not passing over their heads for so long a time but uses the night more[479]. Commentators of classical times have indeed here taken Sirius to mean the sun. But wrongly; for Sirius, whose rising introduces the time of greatest heat, is for the Greeks the cause of the heat, just as the Pleiades are for the Australians, and as all stars are held to be the causes of those climatic changes which are connected with any of their risings or settings[480]; when Sirius rises earlier, i. e. remains in the heavens for some hours during the night-time, the heat declines. The other passages are:—vv. 564 ff., evening rising of Arcturus (60 days after the winter solstice, Feb. 24, Julian), followed by the coming of the swallow, messenger of spring, before this time the vines should be pruned; vv. 597 ff., the winnowing of the harvested corn at the morning rising of Orion (July 9); vv. 609 ff., when Orion and Sirius are in the middle of the heavens and the dawn sees Arcturus (morning rising Sept. 18), it is the time of the vine-harvest; vv. 615 ff., at the (morning) setting of the Pleiades (Nov. 3), of the Hyades, and of Orion (Nov. 15) it is time to think about sowing; vv. 619 ff., when the Pleiades, fleeing from Orion, fall into the sea, storms rage, and the ship should be drawn up on land. Alcaeus says:—“Drink wine, for the star (viz. Sirius) revolves”[481].
The time-indications from the stars are therefore much older in Greece than the lunisolar calendar, and always existed alongside of the latter—which was of a religious and civil character—as the calendar of peasants and seamen, who must hold to the natural year and its seasons. The watchman who speaks the prologue of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus says:—
“ ... On elbow bent, watching, as ’twere a dog,
I mark the stars in nightly conclave meet.
And those bright constellations, without peer,