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been partially explained by what has been said about the time sovereignty of the planets, and it may be better understood, or perhaps I should say that the difficulty of understanding it will be better appreciated, when we have considered the history of the astrological movement during this period.
Divination by means of the heavenly bodies was not a primitive idea with either the Greeks or the Romans. Their superstitions took rather the form of auguries from the flight of birds, or from the entrails of slaughtered animals, and of dream-interpretation and various omens. There is no astrology in Homer or the Greek dramatists. It was perhaps the contact of East and West brought about by Alexander's armies which set the ball rolling. The universal belief in the Roman world that astrology was 'Chaldaean' in origin is probably so far true that the cruder astrological ideas of Babylon were grafted on to Greek astronomy to produce the elaborate system which prevailed to the Middle Ages. But there is, so far as I know, no historical evidence of its prevalence in the Empire of Alexander and his successors till the time when the Greek in his
time! I do not indeed know how much evidence there is of the observance of the nundinae after the first century or so. But market-days are always a persistent matter; moreover in the earlier times they regulated school holidays (v. Marquardt, loc. cit. p. 3). Superstition too attached to them. Augustus would take no journey on the day after the 'nundinae' (Suetonius, Aug. 92).
