OF THE COSMOS. GROUPING OF THE FIXED STA11S. 103 



bathe in the ocean"), Bootes, and the Dog of Orion ; and 

 Hesiod names Sirius and Arcturus ; both speak of the Plei- 

 ades, the Hyades, and Orion. ( 192 ). If Homer twice says that 

 the Bear alone never plunges into the ocean, this merely 

 implies that in his time the constellations of the Dragon, 

 Cepheus, and the Little Bear, which also never set, had not 

 yet been placed in the Greek Celestial Sphere. It by no 

 means implies that the existence of the stars forming these 

 three catasterisins was not known, but only that they had 

 not yet been arranged in figures. A long and often mis- 

 understood passage of Strabo (lib. i. p. 3, Casaub.) on Homer 

 (II. xviii. 485 489) proves rather than anything else that 

 which is here important viz., the gradual acceptance of 

 figures or constellations in the Grecian Sphere. "It is 

 unjustly," says Strabo, " that Homer is accused of ignorance, 

 as if he knew only of one Bear instead of two. Perhaps the 

 second was not yet constellated, and that it was only after 

 the Phoenicians had marked out this constellation, and used 

 it in navigation, that it came to the Greeks." All the 

 scholiasts on Homer, Hygin, and Diogenes Laertius, ascribe 

 the introduction to Thales. The Pseudo-Eratosthenes calls 

 the Little Bear QOIVIKTI (as it were the Phoenician Lode- 

 star). One hundred years later (01. 71), Cleostratus of 

 Tenedos enriched the Sphere with Sagittarius, TO^OT^C, and 

 the Earn, jcpioc. 



It is to this epoch, that of the tyranny of the Pisistratides, 

 that we are to ascribe, according to Letronne, the introduc- 

 tion of the Zodiac in the ancient Greek Sphere. Eudemus 

 of Rhodes, one of the most distinguished disciples of AnV- 

 totle, author of a "History of Astronomy," ascribes the 

 introduction of the Zodiacal Zone (*/ rov 



