M. MANILIUS

ASTRONOMICON

BOOK ONE

[v. 26] ...by the gift of the celestials. For who, while they were establishing these things, could have stolen the world by stealth, by which all things are ruled? Who, from a human heart, would have attempted so much,
29 that a god himself would desire to be seen against the will of the gods,
32 and to open the sublime paths and the lowest part beneath the orb?
30 You, prince and author of such a sacred thing, Cyllenius Mercury/Hermes.
Through you, now the inner heaven, now the stars are known,
33 and through the void, the stars obeying their own boundaries,
and the names and courses of the signs, their weights, and their powers,
35 so that the greater face of the world might exist, and to be venerated
not just in appearance, but also in the very power of things.
37 And nations might feel the god, how great he was.
40 And nature gave the powers and revealed itself,
deigning first to move royal minds,
touching the highest peaks of things near the sky,
who tamed the fierce nations under the east itself,
which the Euphrates cuts, and into which the Nile floods,
45 where the world returns and flies over the black cities.
Then those who worshipped the temples with sacred rites throughout all time,
and the chosen priests, for public vows,
bound the god to their duty, to whom the very presence of the powerful
divinity ignited a chaste mind,
50 and the god himself brought them into the god, and he revealed himself to his ministers.
These moved such great glory and were the first through their art
to see the hanging fates in the wandering stars.
For they marked individual times by their own event,
having grasped long ages through constant cares,
55 which day for each was that of birth, which life it had been,
into which laws of fortune and which hour it would prevail,
and how great were the differences that small movements made.
After the whole appearance of the sky, with the stars returning...