800 SPECIAL EESULTS IN THE UBANOLOGICAL 



descriptive or expressive intermixed ; ^cuvwv for Saturn, 

 oriA^wv for Mercury, and Trvpoeie for Mars ( 505 ) . If, as we 

 learn from passages in the Commentary of Simplicius (p. 

 122) to Aristotle's 8th book "de Ccelo/' and from Hy. 

 ginus, Diodorus, and Theon of Smyrna, Saturn, the outer- 

 most of all the planets then known, received, singularly 

 enough, the title of Sun, it can only have been because its 

 position and the length of its revolution were supposed to 

 raise it to the rank of ruler over the other planets. De- 

 scriptive appellations, however ancient some of them may 

 have been, and probably the same as were used by the Chal- 

 deans, are yet first found in frequent use among Greek and 

 Roman writers in the time of the Caesars. Their prevalence 

 was connected with the influence of astrology. The plane- 

 tary signs, with the exception of a round disk for the sun, 

 and the crescent or sickle for the moon, on Egyptian monu- 

 ments, are of very late origin; according to Letronne's 

 researches, they even do not go back beyond the tenth cen- 

 tury ( 506 ). They are even not found upon stones having 

 gnostic inscriptions. Later copyists have introduced them 

 into gnostic and alchemistic manuscripts; but they are 

 hardly ever found in the oldest manuscripts which we pos- 

 sess of the Greek astronomers, Ptolemy, Theon, or Cleo- 

 medes. The earliest planetary signs, some of which (those 

 for Jupiter and Mars) have been derived, as Salmasius has ob- 

 served with his wonted sagacity, from alphabetical characters, 

 were very different from those which we now employ, the 

 particular forms of which are little, if at all, older than the 

 15th century. It is undoubted, and is proved by a passage 

 borrowed by Olimpiodorus from Proclus (ad Tim. ed. Basil. 

 p. 14), as well as by a late scholion to Pindar (Isthm. V. 2), 

 that the symbolising custom of dedicating certain metals to 



