Great Beasts of Legend: Beasts in the Night Sky: The Constellation Myths of Greece and Rome

[Music] good evening everybody my name is as always Steve Sydney and I'm still the deputy director of the Penn Museum many thanks to your gang for coming out to sites installment of the Penn museums great lectures this year of course our theme is great beasts of legend and the next lecture in our series will be on May 3rd and will feature dr. devon patel of Penn's department of South Asian Studies we will be talking about get this Manor lions blood seed demons and wish-fulfilling cows sounds amazing right as usual after our presentation there'll be some time for Q&A and if you'd like to ask a question again as usual we'd like you to come to one of the mics at either side in the aisle to ask the question from there so that everybody can hear the question as well as the speaker's answer so it's as a knife speaker Patrick cloth Gloria heartlessly gloating patrick la vía is a lecturer in the Department of classical studies here at Penn and receives his PhD from Columbia University with a dissertation entitled science and poetry in Imperial Rome Reni leus Lucan and B Edna dr. Clough years of research focuses on Latin literature and the cultural and intellectual history of the late Republic and early empire he is particularly interested in Roman constructions and representations of knowledge about the natural world so you can imagine that fits well with tonight's topic probably his current book project which is based on his dissertation is called the scientific sublime in Imperial Rome Manila Seneca Lucan and the Edna Patrick lists his research interests as Latin literature especially postal Gustin poetry didactic poetry and its influence relationship sorry two epic ancient science and intellectual history ancient literary criticism including ancient scholarship very broad range you see and rhetorical theory and finally my personal favorite the sublime something we should all be interested in I think here at Penn Patrick teaches a wide range of classes in Greek and Latin language and literature and I'm very grateful we're very grateful that he's agreed to give of his time and expertise to join us here tonight so please join me in welcoming dr. Patrick Mafia who will speak on beasts in the night sky the constellation myths of Greece and Rome [Applause] thank you for that introduction thank you all for coming out and volume sound okay yeah all right Oh louder yeah okay oh I'll try to project so basically what I want to do today is to use this as an opportunity to talk a little bit and think a little bit about the history of the greco-roman constellations the start in your kiuic period with homer and then move all the way to the early first century CE II with the Emperor Augustus which a lot of ground to cover in there so as I was putting this talk together I found myself wondering why I offered to talk about to the ancient constellations at all what I mean by that is why I find a why do I find the constellations interesting in my role as a professional classicist here's what I've decided the constellations straddle the modern divide between scientific analysis and artistic creation they're deeply embedded in the history of mathematical astronomy and yet they're fundamentally aesthetic stubbornly playful and very much alive to the imagination a dynamic tension between scientifically imposed order and chaotic centrifugal flight of associative thinking and means the Greek sky makes the constellations fascinating and forces us to think about the ways in which scientific discourse interacts with other areas of cultural production and meaning so I hope over the next 45 minutes or so and try to unpack what that really means a little bit allow me to set the stage the stars in the sky are continually moving see this works ah okay although there means fixed in place relative to one another it looks like they all circle around a common point throughout the night most stars emerge from the eastern horizon and journey westward and a long arc before slipping out of view others rotate in a short circle and always remain visible so this is the time last time lapse photograph right the stars emerge and go in a big circle these ones here you can always see them if you stay out all night long these are called circumpolar stars the natural conclusion if you've got a keen sense of spatial reasoning it's at the sides themselves are set on a giant sphere that the spear itself rotates around the earth from east to west the slight angle completing one rotation every 24 hours the star is closest to the top of the sphere right so the sphere sort of rotates in this direction the Stiles up here are circumpolar they never set most of the stars exist in this sort of area they rise here and then set the course of the night and then depending on where you want are the stars that are down here you can never see them right they just don't rise and what this looks like and what stars are where changes that depending on where you are on earth so here's another example this is what we call the celestial sphere right and again it rotates sort of eastward in this direction so here height is the constellation Orion and you have to imagine looking at the sky or this is circling around you I don't like this so these are what we call the fixed stars in addition to the fixed stars they're also the wandering mass stars and these are the son of the moon in the five visible planets Jupiter Saturn Mercury Mars and Venus now the wandering stars move more or less on an imaginary line on the celestial sphere called the ecliptic so this is sort of the ecliptic here you've got the Sun the moon couple planets so they move more or less along the ecliptic and as the celestial sphere turns from east to west it appears to carry the wandering stars with it and so they move in this direction now the ecliptic is marked by the signs of the zodiac all right so here again is the ecliptic traversing the sky and you see the signs like here's a outline of Capricorn aquarius pisces tourists over here all right and this whole thing moves collectively in this direction as the thrust really returns westward the wandering stars such as the Sun appear to move slowly in the opposite direction eastward periodically making one complete trip around the celestial sphere so when the Sun is in Pisces this is mid-february right and if you come out again at the same time of day the same spot you look up in the air right if you could see the stars in the background in March the Sun wouldn't be in Pisces right it'd be in Aries right the whole background would have shifted so the stars that are around the Sun change or the course of the year so it in the case of the fund this journey is periodic journey takes roughly 12 months the sun's annual journey around the celestial sphere has two important consequences first it means the different constellations are at different times of the year from ancient perspective it was particularly significant it Dupree don and post sunset horizons were continually changing and to give it like this at the eastern horizon just before the Sun rises you'll see Aquarius and Aquarius will come up over the horizon then the Sun rises and you can't see Aquarius anymore but as the Sun is continually moving in this direction the stars that are rising in front of it are going to change when a constellation first becomes visible on the eastern horizon just before dawn it's said to rise it has a rising and when it begins to vanish below the western horizon at the same time it's said to set and second the second important consequence of this is that because the ecliptic lies in an oblique angle to the earth's equator the Sun appears to shuffle continuously between north and south as it moves the ratio of ding tonight changes and so does the weather and all these changes are regular but it takes time and a lot of careful observation to notice it the point of this is just that if you go out and look at where the Sun rises in December it's going to rise over here are sorry in June it's going to rise here it's going to be in the sunshine for a long time before it sets all right in spring it's going to rise here you go tomorrow morning you're going to see it right over here whereas in in December right it's going to be here so the Sun continually seems to move back and forth another way to picture it right this is the ecliptic all right this is just span where the Sun moves in this direction around the Earth and these are all the constellations of the zodiac are all right so you've got a cancer is up here Capricorn is down here and so on I promise this is the last astronomical slide to copy okay for us Greek literature begins in the middle of the 8th century BCE with the two Homeric poems the Iliad and the Odyssey homer only mentions a small number of constellations and named stars but many of the key features of later greco-roman star discourse are already operative I'm going to look at the 18th book of the Iliad here the metalworking god Hephaestus craft a massive shield for the Greek hero Achilles whose tragic depth is never far from audience's mind this is what scholars think the shield that's being described probably looked like it's a big circle it's got all these designs on it the shield famously contains intricate lifelike images that at the very least symbolized the often difficult realities of human life I had a city of peace a city at war legal proceedings in a capital case the main agricultural activities of the four seasons just to name a few the river ocean runs around the shield's outer rim and the center contains the earth a variety of celestial bodies homer pathetically foreground the images at the center this is how the passage begins right so these images right here he I got a feisty he made upon it he made the earth upon it and the sky and the Seas water and the tireless Sun and the moon waxing into her fullness and on it all the constellations that the student heavens the Pleiades in the Hyades in the strength of Orion and the bear who men give also the name of the Lagon who turns about the fixed place and looks Orien and she alone is never plunged into the wash of ocean what we have here is the essential backdrop against which the whole of human life unfolds and central to this backdrop are the heavenly bodies but why these bodies the Sun Moon Pleiades and Hyades all marked the progression of time the movement of the Sun in particular sorry the movement of the Sun measures the day in the year those of the moon that keep track of the month the Pleiades and Hyades are star clusters in what's now the constellation Taurus you can see them here Tarsus horns right and sort of go down with four legs the Pleiades are in what is now his his shoulder right answer over here and the Hyades aren't labeled but they're in here sort of right around like this in homers day towers didn't exist but these things right we're still still there and had names in the eighth century the Pleiades in Hyades rows right they became visible just before Sun just before done at the beginning of summer which is the time to start a start reaping and they sat in the late fall which is the time for plowing and sowing the presence of all these constellations Sun Moon Clea teas and Hyades on the shield suggest the regular rhythms and fundamental continuity of human life even in the most even in the midst of a conflict is seemingly unendurable as the Trojan War the real stars of these lines though or Orion in the bear and the two most conspicuous objects in the night sky Orion is a shadowy figure in the Odyssey Odysseus mentions how he once saw gigantic Orion and the Land of the Dead where he was driving together wild animals he himself had killed a lonely Mouse this is book 11 avianna see the shield implies Orion's identity is a hunter too for the bare eyes him wearily she reels about forever visible at the top of the celestial sphere when she's circumpolar the neverending dance and which arrived in the Bear engaged mirrors the deadly conflict in which all the heroes of the Iliad take part and it subtly suggests the looming showdown between Achilles and his trojan counterpart detector so here's another example conceding right the bear or some major our Big Dipper trite as part of it it's a major sort of looking at a Ryan right instead of watching him based on passages like this it's clear that Homer was aware of the practical function that certain constellations served by keeping track of the annual movements of such stars you could measure the progress of the seasons and predict what kind of weather was in store such knowledge was essential not only for agriculture but for seafaring too when Odysseus set sail from Calypso's Island and book five the Odyssey he cleverly guides his course by the Pleiades boaties Orion and the bear one reason the bear is useful for sailing is that these two stars point to the pole star right to the the star to center of the night sky they help orient sailors the idea that astronomical knowledge constituted a fundamental prerequisite for the ability to farm and sail persisted throughout the whole of antiquity even after to develop better calendars people still talk like this there's a close connection then between that which happens up above and that which happens down below here on earth the stars in some sense are communicative in ways both practical and symbolic but not as alien or the Odyssey shows any awareness the complex astral mythology familiar from later greco-roman literature and art it's just not there one group of constellations that Homer doesn't mention but it seems unlikely to predate the Iliad the Odyssey are those that illustrate the story of Perseus and Andromeda so here you've got a capias who and his wife Cassiopeia you got Andromeda right here Perseus and the sea monster Cadis and here's a little fancier version what they look like according to legend capias and Cassiopeia were the king and queen of Ethiopia when Cassiopeia boasted that she was more beautiful than the cement the offended nymphs complained to their father Poseidon who promptly sent a giant SEMA to harass the Ethiopian toast in playing the land inhabitants distraught the king consulted oracle of zeus asking what he ought to do when the oracle commanded in two sacrifices daughter Andromeda to the ravenous beast the king electively complied chained to a giant rock by the seizure enter Perseus soaring aloft with his winged sandals and deadly scimitar gift of Athena and Hermes a young hero had just killed the Gorgon Medusa and was journeying back to Greece with her severed head in hand when all of a sudden he spotted in dromeda fastened helplessly or to her rock and the giant Leviathan charging towards her at full steam Perseus still instantly loved slew the monter and married the girl so all the major figures are represented in the night sky but what's more they're strategically arranged happiest in Cassiopeia see this better here Cathy us and Cassiopeia are in the background and in the iconography she starts sitting down watching Andromeda is out here right sort of their arms blade her rock Perseus is swooping in and I and the monster is looming up from the south right making for her she's going to sort of come in right and stop it so the arrangement is effective and dramatic even but for us the coherence of the scene is obscured obscured by the fact that a few constellations are often replaced in the middle right especially Pisces Aries and Taurus I'm to mention little triangle here right what are these guys doing in the middle they sort of spoil or their photobombing it these constellations of course belong to the zodiac as we'll see in a minute the Greek zodiac did not exist before the late 5th century at the earliest that these the dive of constellations dramatically disrupted Perseus the Perseus in Andromeda group strongly suggests that the group itself antedates the formation the zodiac can all likelihood means that Perseus and friends merged in the mid 50 on like many constellations there's never any doubt to the ancient sources but who these constellations represent and while ancient authorities argued endlessly about the identity of the twins who make up the constellation Gemini Perseus is always Perseus and Andromeda always in dromeda their proper names in other words define them so much so that even Cadis whose name in greek just means sea monster is always this particular key monster not some other mythological fee monster of which there are actually several which is my favorite image of cages the sea monster such consistency and continuity imply that all these fingers came into being at the same time in as a late date and that they may even have been invented by the same person we know that in the middle of this century the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides wrote plays about these characters it's tempting to see in the selection of the myths and in the actual staging as it were of the figures to influence of Athenian popular culture on an anonymous fear going astronomer now that's all speculation but it leads us to something a little more concrete our modern zodiac consists of twelve constellations that saddle the ecliptic the path along which the Sun continuously moves all right sorry I lied whoa one more slide with astronomy but no you saw the pictures so it's not really a lie these twelve constellations as well as a handful of others originated in ancient Mesopotamia Greek stargazers adopted the names and iconography of the Near Eastern constellations in the late 5th or early 4th century pretty much wholesale and in one fell swoop Mesopotamian artifacts containing visual representations of animal figures appear as early as late 4th millennium when the year 3200 BCE the earliest artifacts often contained bulls and lions and sometimes scorpions these creatures were pictured in the sky earliest constellations of the zodiac in other words tars the ball Leo the Lion and Scorpio the scorpion this constellations on this belt originally these three star groups along with Aquarius marked the cardinal points of the ecliptic north south east and west which explains why they might have been developed first a cylinder seal from souza slightly later date shows a number of animals and animal human hybrids that suggest the beginning of the dial iconography so here's an impression of the seal from about the year 2500 and a whole bunch of stuff going on here you've got representations right of the Sun the moon and the planet Venus all right telling you that something is going on with the sky you've got this figure who's some kind of a hunting god oh it's got a photo right there and you're standing on unto dogs this might be sort of the origin of the constellation Sagittarius all right the sort of centaurs got a bow you've got down here a goddess standing on a lion for various reasons as goddess seems like a prototype of Ishtar or the constellation of Virgo and Virgo and the night sky is standing next to Leo the Lion so this might be Leo the Lion as well or you might turn into him at some point down here you've got one of these typical combat scenes either some Lions attacking a bull Bulls kind of got like a human head though these are the kinds of figures that turned into Taurus and Leo and you've also got this weird scorpion man he's also got to be human head might be honest my favorite figure here though this guy sort of evil Birdman demon and then this little monkey playing a flute but they didn't make it into the zodiac oh so by the calf a period of roughly a thousand years later the iconography of many of the dipole constellations have been fully formed some of the best evidence come from kassite boundary stones which are essentially legal documents the recorded land grants from the king the big stones you put in your field in addition to the text of establishes the grant many of the stones contain images of gods who out safe the contract the images can be immediately compared with the earliest known visual representations of the greco-roman zodiac so take a couple of examples here so Mesopotamian iconography on this side and curricula Egyptian on this side I'll talk in a minute about where this comes from but bear with me so 1200 BC you got this is Aquarius the god a up or it's going to become Aquarius it's the God yeah who lives in the abyssal waters he is goddess of life and abundance and he's pouring some streams right out of this jar and this eventually becomes this guy who all right he's got this Egyptian headdress on and he's holding some jars he's forming some water into a fish and if you actually look at the night sky Aquarius is pouring out some water and it goes down to the constellation of the southern fish right so there's direct sort of link between these two things you can also compare with we have here Capricorn all right Capricorn is a goat fish right so goat in front fish down here and it's a symbol of the God again so the one good becomes Aquarius and there's also a Rams Head staff pea carries Rams head staff and so this is all put together into one composite and it's a symbol to God a out in the crooked egyptian period right total correspondence you've got a front fish back here but the Rams head staff has been replaced by a person who's like writing the goat fish and just carrying a staff and then one more example you've got Sagittarius right Sagittarius is a centaur do in our minds with a bow originally unless Batavian iconography he's also got wings he's got two tails one of which is the tail the scorpion and he's got this second Panther head this again might become Sagittarius from the Greco Egyptian period still got two tails wings Panther head plus Egyptian address when the Greeks adopted centaurs from from the ancient Near East in general they got rid of the wings and the Centaur tail and Panther head it was like just too much too much enough so these images these guys over here from 30 BC company thing called the Dendera zodiac this is the earliest complete zodiac representation we have from the ancient world it comes from the temple complex of half hour in dendera Egypt and it's a giant sandstone slab that was on the top of the temple the roof of the temple on the inside and you've got the celestial sphere represented by a big disk it's being held up by four goddesses and inside you've got the zodiacs the symbols of the zodiac which are pretty much the same as the ones that we know now for instance you can see here so this is Aries here's Taurus right I've got sort of a sketch of it that makes it easier alright so here aries taurus etc right Sagittarius up there goog fish but you've also got all these other weird constellations that don't make it into the greco-roman canon my favorite two of these books my favorite two of these are this hippopotamus god which takes the place of Draco the dragon and the Bulls foreleg which replaces the Great Bear or is there instead of the grape there so this is a really cool really cool thing now so depending on your perspective the Greeks adopted imported co-opted hijack or quite simply stole major portions of the Mesopotamian skyscape around the Year 400 BCE and here's a famous representation of it from the greco-roman period this is the famous Farnese Atlas to the 2nd century CE copy of an original Hellenistic original and you've got right the Titan atlas is holding the celestial sphere here is again a sketch of all the things that are on it and you'll notice for instance right Aries and Taurus and then here we got Cadis the sea monster and drama no with our arms outstretched Perseus the mom and the dad you'll notice the backwards right that's not the order where they appear when we're just looking to them a moment ago the reason is because the Farnese atlas represents sort of a God's eye view you're looking outside the celestial sphere sort of at it whereas we right are in the celestial sphere looking towards the roof so you have to invert it to get everything in the right order so here right this is the right order where you look up at the night sky and Perseus raises to the left of n dromeda so forth so the students century who witnessed an unprecedented intellectual effluent set up fluorescence in a wide range of disciplines that thought the catalogue can explain the natural world in our relationship - it feels like Natural Philosophy Natural History Medicine geography ethnography the list goes on by adopting the star map to the Mesopotamians the Greeks instantly imposed order on a large swath of the night sky which meant that it could be rigorously analyzed understood and put to use immediate was a systematic empirically based mechanism for keeping time and predicting the weather as a whole however the night sky must have seemed a chaotic a jumble a mass of constellations and named stars some are old and familiar others new in totally foreign the first person to attempt to codify is Khan juries of unorganized material and to divide the whole of the Greek sky into named constellations ie not just the zodiac but the whole sky was a mathematician from Asia Minor named Eudoxus around the Year 360 Eudoxus cataloged and describe the relative positions of forty-six constellations all of which became canonical and still form the basis the star maps that we use today we've now hit this number 88 I think at the core at 46 of Eudoxus although Eudoxus has work hasn't survived we have a pretty good idea of what it looked like in the early third century an ambitious poet named aratus versified Eudoxus is treatise poetry and intercept in the first half of the poem aratus describes the positions of the 46 constellations relative to one another establishing an orderly in tightly interconnected map of the night sky for instance this is obviously a much more recent map beneath the Bears head why the twins and beneath her waist the crab and beneath her hind feet the lion shines forth in splendour right as you can see right beneath the bear we've got the twins beneath the stomach crab int lion I can keep going if you have a mind to look at the charioteer and his stars over here and report has reached you of the goat and her kids you'll see that the whole body of the charioteer is stretched out at length to the left of the twins all right so left of the twins over here well on the top of his head wheels on its way opposite the bear if the feed of the charioteer look for the bolt that is crouching there and see the bowls or crouching beneath charioteer a reigneth uses certain constellations here the bear and the charioteer as reference points in other words this interconnected network of constellations functions like a grid an imagistic forerunner of our mathematical system of celestial coordinates but there's something kind of funny going on notice the Bears looking this way the images we saw before the Bears looking the other way right what's happened is that a radius is describing something like the Farnese atlas right where you're looking from the outside down into the cosmic sphere really everything looks like this the Bears this way and the charioteer is to the right of the twins not to the left what this means is that the earliest description we have of the constellations isn't actually a description of the constellations at all it's a description of a scientific instrument right a globe which is also simultaneously a work of art and which is which is really pretty cool now to fuse the Greek star tradition with the new Mesopotamian constellations required more than the dispassionate drafting of catalogues as we've seen between the time of Homer and aratus the Greeks had begun to associate some of their constellations with concrete mythological figures with the arrival the Mesopotamian astronomical imagery a whole new cast of characters flooded the night sky the Greeks appear to have viewed this situation as a challenge the task now was to come up with mythological associations for all of the constellations and if there's any way to associate multiple star clusters with the same narrative so much the better the goal in some sense must have been to impose not just geographical order on the sky but discursive order as well sometimes this required the inventing of branded new mythology's and this is exactly how I Ryan got connected with Scorpio got a Ryan over here using the claws of Scorpios he comes up over the horizon we've already seen that Homer didn't have a lot to say about Orion the story lines familiar to us from later ages of runs as follows Orion used to go hunting with the two goddesses Leto and Artemis a mother and daughter team associated with the hunt Ryan haunted the such skill that he threatened to kill all the animals which which angered the earth from the capital II who subsequently sent forth a giant scorpion that stunned Orion and left of dead as one ancient fighter puts a Zeus Center Ryan among the constellations out of regard for his bravery and the request of Artemis and Leo also placing the scorpion there to commemorate the episode some dazzlingly ingenious stargazer we don't know who fabricated this entire myth out of whole cloth after the introduction of the zodiac Orion's existence was a given but he was a blank canvas just waiting to be fleshed out Scorpio was a newcomer and scorpions simply don't figure in Greek mythology but two Scorpio rises in the East just as a Ryan sets in the west it made perfect sense it was wonderfully efficient to imagine the rising scorpion is chasing a fleeing Orion and the story grew from there brilliantly bridging the cultural gap between old and new right they imagine scorpion is chasing Orion the bear underwent a similar creative reimagining in a Classical period there are two bears right here's right the Big Dipper again part of Ursa Major here's her face in our legs first a minor alright is this one here this or the body and the tail and between them right is the dragon there's a dragon's head a Raiders calls these bears heli K R Ursa Major and Cinna Shira r Ursa Minor but they have nothing to do with Orion without committing himself wholly to the story her anus raises the possibility the two women ascended to the heavens through the will of Zeus because they took care of the God when he was a child on Crete the poet is deliberately vague about what actually happened here leaving the reader to fill in the details according to other sources when the Zeus was the young his mother Rhea hit Aman creaked far away from his violent bloodthirsty father Cronus king of the gods Cronus knew that his children particularly Zeus opposed a threat to his sovereignty so we decided to take care of the situation once and for all by eating them in an effort to keep the Zeus out of harm's way Rhea hidden to God in a cave on the island of Crete so far the story is traditional and quite old at some point however a twist was added the Zeus had been protected by two women whom he subsequently transformed into bears and placed in the night sky as a token of his gratitude this twist is manifestly a recent invention designed to highlight Zeus his biography and to give it a prominent place in the habitus a radius undoubtedly alludes to it because it reminds his readers of the Zeus's benevolence a key theme in the work but irradiance is narrative is somewhat unsatisfactory since there's no logical connection between the Zeus's caregivers and their subsequent identity right it's like why are they bears and a waiter source however playfully improves upon the situation according to this version when Kronos came looking for Zeus on Crete the Zeus escape detection by turning his nurses into bears and himself into a snake after he departed Kronos after he deposed Chronos and established himself as king zeus commemorated the episode by placing images of all three animals at the top of the celestial sphere not only does the story make the link between the caregivers and the bears explicit it has the added benefit of explaining why there's another circumpolar constellation between them namely the dragon right so it makes this whole group right one sort of close-knit family somewhere and there's there's another really famous story about the two bears involving a woman named Callisto which I be happy to talk about in the QA so this kind of creative manipulation of Mythology constitutes a game the rules were simple try to bend mythology to fit the facts as comprehensively and economically as possible and by facts I mean the iconography and nomenclature of the constellations clearly there are a lot of players we can take our knowledge about many of them and their stories to Eratosthenes a scholar and poet from North Africa who belongs to the generation after aratus while serving as a head librarian the Great Library of Alexandria Eratosthenes compiled a collection of all the major myths for the constellations of Eudoxus and aratus the work was called catastroica Latian usually with the help of God although we don't have the actual text give a summary of it a number of Eratosthenes is stories centered on Heracles all the stories themselves are old the catastrophe Marin vented in the fifth or fourth century in a deliberate attempt to connect the disparate parts of the night sky so it takes just two examples first one is Heracles and the dragon so this is our constellation Heracles he's got his club up in the air and he's kneeling with his head on the dragon its trampling the dragon and you can see over here right there is his kneeling leg and his foot and he's trampling on the head of the dragon the constellation that we know as Heracles was originally called the kneeler just the kneeling figure and his identity generated a good deal of playful speculation perhaps it was an image of Theseus kneeling at the rock under which the emblems of his fraternity were hidden or maybe it represented Orpheus cowering before the mob of angry Bacchus who are about to tear him limb from limb eventually the consensus emerged the figure represented Heracles standing on the dragon that guarded the apples of the Hesperides fetching these golden apples located either in Libya or to the far north constituted Heracles his eleventh labor and in most versions Heracles had to kill the dragon to get them according to Eratosthenes Zeus commemorated the event by placing an image the image of Heracles trampling the dragon at the top of the celestial sphere so again it serves as a commemorative purpose it commemorates the past the story went out over the is rivals precisely because it explained two constellations at once while simultaneously connecting this part of the sky with another I inserted is better to have fewer characters and get them all connected so another example be cancer cancer the crab here he counts like a lobster here's the gist of what Eratosthenes had to say about the crab it would seem that it was placed among the stars by Hera because when Heracles was trying to kill the Hydra with the assistance of the others it jumped out of the lake and bit him on the foot they say that Heracles in a fury crushed it with his foot like to crush things with his feet and the crab attained this great honor the great honor being numbered among the 12 constellations of the zodiac as a consequence it may seem odd such an insignificant actor should claim so great a distinction but it's actually quite clever this is the only crab Greek mythology here's an example I can see the crab come after Heracles it's the only crab in Greek mythology if the Greeks had invented their own satanical constellations they never would have devoted one of them to such a culturally insignificant animal but they didn't invent their own cycle constellations and since one of them was a crab they made a virtue of necessity gained a little more connectivity among the fixed stars all told Heracles lenses biography - 9 constellations why Greece was not a unified country or a sovereign city-states sorry a sovereign nation-state but rather an idea rooted in a common language in common cultural heritage including a common mythology Heracles as travels took them all over the Greek world which meant that his life connected different places interiors to one another by ridding the countryside of dangerous monsters and terrifying beasts Heracles cleared a space for Greek civilization to survive and made it possible for a sense of Greek cultural unity to emerge 5th and 4th century stargazers realized this instead of making the sky Athenian or Spartan Stephan or Corinthian Heracles made it Greek now not all the Mesopotamian constellations could be so easily combined the narratives of Greek mythology Capricorn provides a delightful example so capital as we've seen in capital art is goat fish right the Greeks had no idea what to do with this bizarre hybrid it corresponds to absolutely nothing in a Greek mythological repertoire faced with this embarrassing situation someone decided to invoke the god Pan who was traditionally a half man and half goat Ryan sees he's got a goat head goat horns goat feet pretty big difference though as the Eratosthenes put the figure Capricorn another thing here is similar in appearance to pan and is moreover modeled on him his lower limbs are formed like those the beasts and he has horns on attach so I mean yeah I guess so far so good but Eratosthenes goes on to explain that during the epic battle between the Olympians and the monstrous Titans this anonymous cam like figure picked up a giant seashell and blew on it yeah by terrifying the Titans and securing the victory for Team Zeus she was placed them in the sky to commemorate the service another act of commemoration and mystic work Eratosthenes is summary he has the tail of a fish to indicate that he discovered the shell and the see this kind of associative logic pushes the limits of credibility once installed the Mesopotamian iconography could not be wished away and so we're left with a rationale that almost feels deliberately absurd I'm kind of convinced that whoever came up with this idea was like basically like winking and like nudging you when he said it but what are the constellations despite the stories we've been considering many writers are clearly aware that the constellations themselves suppose the actual stars are really human constructs the following story about the constellation of Lepus the hair comes from the Latin treatise on astronomy that might have been written by Julius vagina's a Freedman of Emperor Augustus and the chief librarian of Rome's first public library it's connection between star mythology and librarians so here's the hair school bunny here's somebody tail in the distant past there were no hairs on the island of leros a tiny strip of land in the northern Aegean just off the coast at Asia Minor a young man who is particularly fond of animal brought over pregnant female for the mainland and took great care of it his enthusiasm proved infectious and soon everyone on Laros was raising hares needless to say the situation in God and as a renegade rabbits took to the countryside to power the crops and quite simply over on the island eventually the Islanders managed to expel the invaders but the astronomers decided to establish an image of the hare in the sky quote to remind people that in this life nothing is so desirable the one cannot subsequently derive more sorrow from it than joy consolation in its moral are entirely human and also I suspect somewhat playful as for the actual stars the general consensus was that they consisted of fire or the mysterious fire like substance either more importantly though they were also divine a firm conviction that the stars were gods promoted in crucial ways by Plato and Aristotle paved the way for an entirely new framework in which to understand and interact with the heavens mainly astrology from the perspective of astrological discourse the Stars indicate or potentially bring about and actually determine events on earth the basic idea makes perfect sense just think about the ways in which the Sun and the moon impacts the world around us like the signs of the zodiac themselves Western astrology originated in ancient Mesopotamia it appears with migrated to the Greek world at some point in the second century BCE probably via Egypt again I'd be happy to say a little bit more about Babylonian astrology in the qat ad to develop the greco-roman world astrology was first and foremost a matter of geometry tada for the purposes of casting the simple horoscope the zodiac is represented as a circle divided into twelve equal signs of 30 degrees and each of these signs has a name an aries taurus gemini etc and here's aries taurus gemini all the way around these symbols by the way are not don't appear in ancient manuscripts these are more recent inventions although there are suitable for the sun and the so at the center of the circle is you all right the zodiac is the ecliptic circling around you right here in the middle before making a prediction the astrologer must figure out in which of the 12 signs the wandering stars stand at the given moment Greek astrologers astrologers obtain this astronomical data from almanacs are the figures in which were ultimately a Babylonian origin today we just use computers once the wandering stars have been situated in a few other variables have been determined the astrology considers the geometrical relationships that connect them and interprets these relationships based on its own craft knowledge so what you see here right these various signs indicating the planets show you where in the zodiac they were the specific time from the specific location all right horoscopes are always placed in time specific and then you know for extra fun you've got these other weird symbols so this is a lot of fortune its location is determined by a formula this thing medium caelum is another sort of variable that it allows you to get extra or to make it more complicated and then you basically write you look at all these angles that pop up and you have to you have to interpret the geometry here's an example of an actual astrological prediction made by a practicing astrologer it was found on a scrap of papyrus buried in an ancient trash heap in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus thanks I wasn't able to find a picture of the actual papyrus but some it looked like that near 27 Caesar Augustus rob5 according to the Augustan calendar about the third hour of the day Sun and Libra moon in Pisces standard in Taurus Jupiter in cancer Mars and Virgo the papyrus is sort of torn or damaged tars descent setting lower mid heaven aquarius there are dangers take care for 40 days because of Mars now someone has consulted an astrologer but his or her immediate future may be whether in wanting to know whether or not it's a good time to do something and the astrologer has provided a written response beginning with a date and time which modern scholars have worked out to be roughly 9:00 a.m. on October 2nd in year 4 BCE because I get this thing about how cool this is right we know that an actual person went to an astrologer right at 9:00 a.m. on October 2nd right like 2,000 years ago 2000 15 years ago we have like the receipt from it what's striking from our perspective is the implicit and again I could say a lot more about this if you guys are interested but what's striking from our perspective the perspective of this talk is the implicit distinction between the signs of the astrologer and the constellations of the Nightside the astrologist signs constitute a coordinate system that make it possible sorry that they make it possible to visualize the geometrical relationships between the wandering stars that's all they're good for to figure out how the Stars relate to one another the mythology and iconography of the constellations play no role in the process of astrological prediction in fact the process was so abstract the Greeks and Romans regularly called astrologers mathematicians and they saw no fundamental difference between the activities of astrologers on the one hand and astronomers on the other right they're the same people the same word was used for both of them they're called mathematic e and this is a conjunction that persisted until people like Kepler and Galileo and Newton are also really into astrology astrology became immensely popular and once we get outside the astrologers workshop as a word we find the iconography and the mythology of the constellations does actually exert a profound influence on the meaning of the science so I'll close with one example the Imperial biographer Suetonius tells the following story about the Emperor Augustus in his right hand man Agrippa the date is 44 BCE Julius Caesar has just been assassinated and the two young men have fled Rome your situation is precarious and the reader knows they must survive 17 years of new year continual Civil War before Augustus can claim to have saved the Roman Republic here's what's to atonia says having withdrawn to Greece Augustus went with Agrippa to the studio of the astrologer Diogenes when a great and almost incredible feature was predicted for Agrippa who was the first to put his questions Augustus concealed the details of his own birth and kept refusing to reveal them through fear or shame the king himself would turn out to be of lesser importance however when after much persuasion he slowly and unwillingly disclosed them Theogony had jumped up and venerated him soon Augustus had acquired such faith in fate we made public his horoscope not a silver coin struck with the image of the star sign Capricorn under which he had been born right so Augustus is a very modest sort of shy by the astrologers foreign guy but then once he tells it with information the straw was like oh my god you can only you know become the rule over the world whether a mountains events took place the fact that the story circulated says a lot Imperial propaganda cultivated the idea that Rome's greatness was written in the stars that ate itself determined who would rule the world Greek intellectuals including the stralla Jers that dove such claims with empirical evidence the scientific rigor of their procedures and the antiquity of the discipline itself does all way back to Mesopotamia well that weight to their pronouncements what's more we know that Augustus did in fact publish his horoscope in mint coins of the type Suetonius is talking about so here are two examples right Google Augustus Capricorn and coin and you'll see a bunch of pictures so you got Augustus his head on one side and then you've got Capricorn right go fish over here and he's holding between his go feet he's holding an image of the world right symbolizing that Augustus has conquered the world this thing is at or symbolizing Gus's victory and an important naval battle and you've got a corner sopia up here the image of the horn of plenty similarly down here you just got Capricorn a little simpler and this phrase is referring to an important diplomatic victory that justice won in the 20s so both of these coins date to around 16 or 18 BCE in addition to such coin augustus included images of Capricorn on sculptural reliefs terracotta paintings and jewelry essentially co-opting the symbol as his personal trademark the de gustas invested so heavily an astrological propaganda indicates that such symbolism carried significant weight with the greater populace you wouldn't do it it didn't mean something to people but why emphasise Capricorn Capricorn which Augustus is moon sign important astrological relationship right my million sign is Aquarius my star sign is Sagittarius when you say I'm a Sagittarius you mean your your Sun Sign but this the moon sign was was more important for Augustus Capricorn's primary claim to fame is that it houses the Sun at the time of the winter solstice when the hours of daylight gradually start to increase and we begin to sense this spring is on its way augustus promoted his horoscope of connection with the goatfish to suggest that both he and his rule marked the fated destined divinely sanctioned the beginning of a new era the heaven-sent arrival of a new spring this was a politically expedient and powerfully reassuring message after seventeen years of civil war the rise and spread of astrology fundamentally altered the ways individuals and communities thought about divinity communicated with the gods and understood their place in the world to be sure traditional forms of divination didn't disappear but the balance of power was disrupted some members of the ruling elite were better at negotiating and shifting dynamics than others at the end of his life Augustus himself issued an edict making it allele for diviners to prophesy to anyone alone or to prophesy to anyone at all about a person's death knowledge of power it's not hard to imagine when mber I want to discourage his subjects from making predictions especially at the end of life indeed both before and after Augustus is Edict astrologers as a class were periodically expelled from both the city and the Italian peninsula but they always return indeed astrology proved remarkably tenacious much like the iconography mythology the night sky itself we still have and Capricorn still looks like this so in conclusion the Greek sky is wonderfully diverse and while the work of scholars like Eudoxus and Eratosthenes imposed coherence in order on the celestial sphere the ancient sky scape remained profoundly multiple discordant and cacophonous a fundamental tension dominates this space that between order and chaos reasoned explanation and fanciful invention scientific knowledge in exuberant artistic play in the grief sky all of these categories are mutually implicated more another breaking down any distinction we might like to make between science and art thank you [Applause] so yeah I would be happy to take any questions about us or any of this or you know your star sign or something yep so there are lots of inanimate objects in the sky Libra is an interesting one because it originally said Libra is the balance and it was originally part of Scorpio it was Scorpios claws were super huge and when they divided the zodiac into twelve signs for the twelve months they had to chop it in half and make something else out of it I don't know the specific reason why they chose the balance but the balance did end up being important in terms of your political propaganda people argued about what the moon sign of the city of Rome was and so there's a debate about when Rome was founded like what year what day and people you know part of this was people cast the horoscope of Rome and it turned out that Rome the moon sign of Rome is Libra and so Weber became the symbol of Roman power just like Capricorn is a simple Augustus is power and that again is sort of there's a clear combination of scholarly debate and something is like kind of fun and quirky so I don't know specifically why Libra but there are various inanimate objects up there in the sky yeah question um and they use the stories of the constellations as a mnemonic to teach people what was what and them memorize it better yeah so I mean it certainly helps if you have a connected story right you've got Hercules did all these things here all the sign it makes it much simpler than trying to have a different story for every single thing but unfortunately they couldn't impose total unity right on one of the reasons that people wrote poems about the signs though was because it's easier to remember a poem than you know just a bunch of numbers or just like a list poems are inverse which is just inherently easier to sort of commit to memory and so that was a big part of it as well but yeah absolutely trying to connect them all together with these figures makes it easier to keep track of and they use cones and the shows to teach other kinds of science other than astronomy so there's a whole tradition of with some didactic poetry poetry that teaches you stop and some of that is our moral you know ethical teachings but especially starting around the year like in the 300s and 200s people not really into using poetry to teach you about science so there's like a great poem for instance about poisonous animals and like antidotes that you need to take them it's like a medicine poem of poisonous animals and there are poems about farming and about marine biology and there are a bunch of ones about the Stars the Stars turned out to be those popular so this Greek poem by aratus actually some accounts was the second or third most popular text in the ancient world based on the papyri that we have we have the most papyri of homer not surprising everybody knew Homer Homer is the be-all and end-all the person that we have the second most papyrus evidence for is the poem about the Stars and it was translated into Latin like five times was translating the Latin by Cicero it was translated into Latin by a relative of Augustus is named Germanicus and a couple of other people I'll be translated into Latin it was this thing that people just loved and found amazing so weird from our perspective but there's a really close connection that the Greeks of moments felt that I now have two questions okay uh is there like an English copy of that how long absolutely cool can I get the name of that so the star poem is called a phenomena right like phenomenal right the phenomena and I mean I think thank you if you just google it on Amazon or something you should be able to find it the guy's the poet's name right rate us right this is name and the other thing I wanted to know is was there anything about Mesopotamian astrology that you thought was really really cool but you couldn't shoehorn into the presentation so the reason Babylonian astrology came into being is actually really cool um Babylonian astrologers were like bureaucrats there were civil servants who's like sole job was just to keep track of the wandering stars right like the planets the sign of the moment and since they thought for the stars were divine that they were gods and they thought that their movements right sort of caused or indicated stuff on earth the idea was that if you could predict where they were going to be you know what was going to be in store for the state right so it's kind of like the king wants to know is there going to be a drought next years there going to be a war is there going to be some some kind of giant earthquake or something and so there's this whole group of civil servants right whose sole job was like to watch the stars and do this and they wanted to get better and better at it right the king says well you know it's not just enough to tell me there's going to be a drought next year I want to know five years from now this is where astronomy mathematical astronomy basically was born right the idea they needed to be able to make these kinds of predictions with greater accuracy and further ahead of time and so astronomy kind of grew out of astrology the two grew together when it came to grief this is a totally different because again Greece doesn't have a centralized server administration there's no one head of anything there's no sort of bureaucracy to speak of but it's just great that right it'd be like if we had on the cap you know the cabinet of the president cabinet there's a secretary of astrology or something keeping track of all this stuff [Music] caretakers names 12 zodiac 9yv so it started out we think which is the four cardinal points right east west north and south and so right that was around the year 3000 or 2500 that would have been Taurus Leo Aquarius and Scorpio and the idea there was that it was again timekeeping right to sort of keep track of the where the Sun was and what the time is gradually they ordered more or develop more it seems like just to fill out the circle and some of them had clear sort of mythological associations or sort of symbolic values so Lions and bowls are symbols of royal power so sort of like the king of symbols were like up in the sky and the Sun is moving through the orbit of like the Kings fear influence others right we saw our gods but that process took them a long time they didn't actually develop all 12 of the signs until some point between 900 and 600 probably whereas they had the first four you know around here like almost 3,000 raps so there are content which is like four for a while but yeah it seems like they just wanted to fill it out with symbols of sort of national symbols and symbols of the gods I have a question about the 13 signs of zodiac they talked about it in not very long time ago in the news they said that in people in equator zones they see kind of like a bigger zodiac circle I can barely pronounce it Oh see okay so I don't know can you tell anything about it um inter I don't know specifically about a 13th side of the zodiac but I mean if you think about assume I go back to what I use this astronomical to far not far enough oh that's what I'm okay so you see the way that these things right are at an angle like this right the closer so this is from the northern hemisphere if you were to look like walk south right towards the equator these would all start moving up write-ins or parallel if you've got to the equator all these would be three straight lines up and down so all the stars rise collectively overhead and set directly I'm sort of behind you similarly if you were to go all the way to the North Star they would kind of flatten out they would fall down like this and till the point where you just have circles going like that and like this and then some down here and so you just see from the North Pole all the stars would just be spinning around nothing whatever rise or set and so that does affect right the way that the Stars look the stars you can see and sort of I guess maybe how big the zodiac is or how you would divide it so I can't speak to that specifically but that is like a cool thought experiment constellation that the Sun goes into which is called like Ophiuchus or something like that okay yeah it kind of slices down between two of the stars with zodiac so see all right so yeah Ophiuchus um I don't know if it tears there it's she is not here somewhere else Ophiuchus are is probably an older constellation he's not a part of the zodiac he's further up well I just know that with the modern outlines of what the stars are that astronomers use nowadays the Sun does appear in or Fuca Sonic eight for a couple of days a year okay here is off yuccas this guy here yeah he's a snake holder that's probably related to the preset the precession of the equinoxes would be my guess so this is something that people who criticize astrology love to point out I'm not taking a stand either way but that the equinox is don't actually occur where they do want to start on the zodiacs chart anymore everything has actually moved pretty much a full constellation away since the time of apparatus and since the time of you know the Mesopotamians when they like invented this think is even further off so there's a complete disconnect between the actual constellations and the astrological sort of apparatus so I mean yeah basically the stuff that I'm looking at here is all reflection of how it looked around the year 300 or 200 but actually there's so a little bit of a problem because the constellations you mentioned earlier that they made the constellations all the same size except they're not Aries is a tiny little constellation virgo is a great big one so Aries the sun's really only in Aries for two weeks out of the year whereas it could it's like six weeks for Virgo or Leo yes the different sizes and your aries isn't even on the ecliptic to the north so we've all kind of an illusion but a very powerful illusion yeah any other takers okay well thank you [Applause]

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 22,574

Rating: 4.7275205 out of 5

Keywords: Patrick Glauthier, Aries, Taurus, Horoscope, Greece, Rome, astrology, astronomy

Id: bv-UQlesw3U

Length: 69min 18sec (4158 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2017