Now, some scheme of the heavens must always accompany and guide human existence. There is literally no choice for man but to observe the movements, real or apparent, of celestial objects, and to regulate his actions by the measure of time they mete out to him. Nor had he at first any other means of directing his wanderings upon the earth save by regarding theirs in the sky. They are thus to him standards of reference and measurement as regards both the fundamental conditions of his being—time and space. This intimate connexion, and, still more, the idealising influence of the remote and populous skies, has not been lost upon the poets in any age. It might even be possible to construct a tolerably accurate outline-sketch of the history of astronomy in Europe without travelling outside the limits of their works. But our present concern is with Homer. To begin with his mode of reckoning time. This was by years, months, days, and hours.[16] The week of seven days was unknown to him; but in its place we find[17] the triplicate division of the month used by Hesiod and the later Attics, implying a month of thirty, and a year of 360 days, corrected, doubtless, by some rude process of intercalation. These ten-day intervals were perhaps borrowed at an early stage of Achæan civilisation from Egypt, where they correspond to the Chaldean ‘decans’—thirty-six minor astral divinities presiding over as many sections of the Zodiac.[18] But no knowledge of the Signs accompanied the transfer. A similar apportionment of the hours of night into three watches (as amongst the Jews before the Captivity), and of the hours of day into three periods or stages, prevails in both the Iliad and Odyssey. The seasons of the year, too, were three—spring, summer, and winter—like those of the ancient Egyptians and of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers;[19] for the Homeric _Opora_ was not, properly speaking, an autumnal season, but merely an aggravation of summer heat and drought, heralded by the rising of Sirius towards the close of July. It, in fact, strictly matched our ‘dog-days,’ the _dies caniculares_ of the Romans. The first direct mention of autumn is in a treatise of the time of Alcibiades ascribed to Hippocrates.[20] This rising of the dog-star is the only indication in the Homeric poems of the use of a stellar calendar such as we meet full-grown in Hesiod’s Works and Days. The same event was the harbinger of the Nile-flood to the Egyptians, serving to mark the opening of their year as well as to correct the estimates of its length. Footnote 16: _Odyssey_, x. 469; xi. 294. Footnote 17: _Ib._ xix. 307. Footnote 18: Brugsch, _Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft_, Bd. ix. p. 513. Footnote 19: Lewis, _Astronomy of the Ancients_, p. 11. Tacitus says of the Germans, ‘Autumni perinde nomen ac bona ignorantur’ (_Germania_, cap. xxvi.) Footnote 20: Smith’s _Dictionary of Antiquities_, article ‘Astronomy.’