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In book 3 of Lucan’s Pharsalia, enthusiasm for the civil war between Caesar and Pompey inflamed the whole world, including:

Ethiopians from that southern land
Which lies without the circuit of the stars,
Did not the Bull with curving hoof advanced
O’erstep the limit.

Lucan (1st century CE). Pharsalia, book 3. Translated by Edward Ridley (1896). Project Gutenberg.

A. E. Housman translated these lines as follows, and explained that Lucan had made an astronomical blunder:

“And the land of the Ethiops, which would have no portion of the zodiac overhead, unless the hock of the hunched Bull had given way and the tip of his hoof projected.”

He says that the only part of the zodiac which passes perpendicularly over Ethiopia is the projecting hoof of Taurus; that is, that Ethiopia lies further south than any other part of the zodiac. This is false and impossible. Half of the zodiac lies still further south than the hoof of Taurus; and if the hoof of Taurus passes perpendicularly over any spot, so must those parts of Aries and Pisces, Virgo and Libra, which are likewise close to the equator. He has forgotten that the zodiac is oblique and touches both tropics; he imagines it to be parallel with the equator and the two tropical circles. If it were, then the hoof of Taurus would in truth be the Southern extremity of the zodiac, and the peoples over whom it passed would have the rest of the zodiac to the north of them.

A. E. Housman, editor (1926). M. Annaei Lucani Belli civilis, pages 327–328. Oxford: Blackwell.

Robert Graves gave the same explanation as Housman in a footnote to his translation:

It even reached Ethiopia, where none of the ordinary signs of the Zodiac are visible above the horizon, except a projecting hoof of the Bull, which happens to have one leg doubled under him.†

† Half of the Zodiac, which Lucan wrongly imagined to run parallel with the Equator, lies still farther south than the Bull’s hoof.

Robert Graves (1956). Lucan: Pharsalia, page 50. London: Cassell.

Is there a way to rescue Lucan from this blunder?

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  • I hope the question is clear—do ask if not. Commented 16 hours ago

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Here’s the Latin text, and my literal translation:

Aethiopumque solum, quod non premeretur ab ulla
Signiferi regione poli, nisi, poplite lapso,
Ultima curvati procederet ungula Tauri.

And Ethiopians, who alone are not pressed down by any
Of the signs of the region of the pole, unless, by flexing hock,
The hindmost hoof of the curving Bull was projecting.

The idea that this is a blunder rests on the interpretation that Lucan’s phrase “signiferi regione poli” means “the zodiac”. Housman gave the following argument for this interpretation:

signiferi poli means signiferae poli partis, the zodiac, whose Latin name is signifer (or signorum) orbis (or circulus), the term signa or ζῴδια, originally applicable to all the constellations, being often appropriated to the 12 signs of the zodiac, as in IV 109 medios signorum … ignes and IX 532. The phrase is of the same sort as Hor. carm. III 23 8 pomifero graue tempus anno, that is pomifera anni parte, autumno, and recurs in Amm. Marc, XXVI 1 8 polo percurso signifero, quem ζῳδιακόν sermo Graecus appellat; and Lucan at VII 363 has signiferi … caeli in the same sense.

A. E. Housman, editor (1926). M. Annaei Lucani Belli civilis, page 328. Oxford: Blackwell.

But I think that this is a case where “one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens” applies. If interpreting Lucan’s “signiferi regione poli” as “zodiac” leads to the conclusion that Lucan made an elementary astronomical blunder (one that he could have corrected by looking at the constellations on any clear winter night), then that’s evidence that this interpretation is wrong.

The difficulty in interpreting Lucan’s astronomical passages is that, since Latin lacked technical terms for “hemisphere”, “equator”, “ecliptic”, “tropic”, etc., he had to use descriptive phrases like “regione poli”, and these are ambiguous (“regio” means a boundary or dividing line as well as a region; “polus” means the sky as well as an axis or pole).

If we take “regione poli” to mean “the region of the (north) pole”, that is, the northern hemisphere, then of the constellations that lie entirely in the northern hemisphere, Taurus comes closest to the celestial equator, and in the first century BCE when Pharsalia is set, the southernmost bright star of the constellation, Omicron Tauri, was very close to the celestial equator, so that only a little flexing of the hock (as Lucan poetically puts it) would be required for it to touch the equator:

>>> import ephem
>>> otauri = ephem.readdb("o Tauri,f|S,3:24:48.84,9:1:44.6,3.61,2000")
>>> otauri.compute("-47/8/9") # Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BCE
>>> print(otauri.dec)
0:03:21.3

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