Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20): Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky
Science
Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20): Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky
Science -- Juvenile literature
The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, not unnaturally took the star,
which they saw alternately emerging from the effulgence of the rising
and setting sun, in the east and in the west, for two distinct bodies,
and named it differently according to the time of its appearance. The
evening star they called Hesperus, and from its place on the western
horizon, fabled an earthly hero of that name, the son of Atlas, who
from the slopes of that mountain on the verge of the known world used
to observe the stars until eventually carried off by a mighty wind,
and so translated to the skies. These divine honors were earned by his
piety, wisdom, and justice as a ruler of men, and his name long shed a
shimmering glory over those Hesperidean regions of the earth, where
the real and unreal touched hands in the mystical twilight of the
unknown.
But the morning star shone with a different significance as the herald
of the day, the torchbearer who lights the way for radiant Aurora on
her triumphal progress through the skies. Hence he was called
Eosphorus, or Phosphorus, the bearer of the dawn, translated into
Latin as Lucifer, the Light-bearer. The son of Eos, or Aurora, and the
Titan Astraeus, he was of the same parentage as the other multitude of
the starry host, to whom a similar origin was ascribed, and from whom
in Greek mythology he was evidently believed to differ only in the
superior order of his brightness. Homer, who mentions the planet in
the following passage:
"But when the star of Lucifer appeared,
The harbinger of light, whom following close,
Spreads o'er the sea the saffron-robed morn."
(LORD DERBY'S "Iliad.")
recognizes no distinction between those celestial nomads, the planets,
"wandering stars," as the Arabs call them, which visibly change their
position relatively to the other stars, and the latter, whose places
on the sphere are apparently fixed and immutable. In this he and his
compatriots were far behind the ancient Egyptians, who probably
derived their knowledge from still earlier speculators in Asia, for
they not only observed the movements of some at least of the planets,
but believed that Mercury and Venus revolved as satellites round the
sun, which in its turn circled round our lesser world. Pythagoras is
said to have been the first to identify Hesperus with Phosphor, as the
"Silver planet both of eve and morn,"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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