A curious fact as to the lines in which Aratos refers to the constellation Cassiopeia must here be noted. Aratos versified “the _Phainomena_ of the astronomer Eudoxos, who lived cir. B.C. 403-350.” It has often been pointed out that the facts concerning the constellations which Aratos and Eudoxos record “are to a great extent traditional and archaic, and belong to another and far earlier epoch.” What is said of Cassiopeia is a case in point; for thus the poet deplores her pride and its punishment at line 654 _et seq._-- “And now she, too, her daughter’s form pursues, Sad _Kassiepeia_; nor seemly still Show from her seat her feet and knees above; But she head foremost like a tumbler sits: With knees divided: since a doom must fall On boasts to equal Panopê and Doris.”[123] [123] _The Phainomena or “Heavenly Display” of Aratos_, _ub. supr._ Now in Eudoxos’ time and in his latitude, though Cassiopeia’s head did by a few degrees extend into the southern heavens, yet her position was not so deplorably ignominious as the poem would suggest. Three thousand years earlier the pity for her expressed by Aratos would have been more appropriate, for then her whole figure for observers in lat. 35° N. would have been visible in the southern quarter of the sky, and her feet, not her head (as at Lat. 23° N.), would have been on the zenith. These considerations may lead us to suppose that the idea of Cassiopeia’s pride, and the fit punishment of it--_i.e._, her reversed position in the heavens, must have assumed form in _northern_ latitudes almost at as early a date as the constellation figures were first imagined in _tropical_ latitudes. If this be so, it is indeed curious to find a legend which embodied the _animus_ of astronomic rivalry 3500 B.C. handed down for thousands of years, and repeated in what professed to be a somewhat scientific treatise at a date between 400 and 300 B.C., when the astronomic facts no longer tallied with those narrated in the legend. As to Andromeda, the classic story describes her as the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia; but the constellation itself--except on legendary grounds--might equally well have marked the beginning of a solstitial year 6000 B.C., or of a non-solstitial and calendrical year 3500 B.C. The terrible prevalence of human sacrifices in ancient times, and at the solstices especially, may make us almost fear that the representation of a chained human victim had its place in the sphere at the earlier (solstitial) date.