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48
REMAINS OF HESIOD.
Know too they set, immerged into the sun,
While forty days entire their circle run;
While forty days entire their circle run;
- ↑ is meant the last ploughing, when they turned up the soil to receive the seed. Thus Virgil, Georg. 1:Heyne observes, "they sink below the region of the West, at the same time that the sun emerges from the East;" the cosmical setting described by Hesiod. The receding of the bright star of the crown of Ariadne, which Virgil mentions, is its receding from the sun; that is, its heliacal rising.First let the morning Pleiades go down:
From the sun's rays emerge the Gnossian crown,
Ere to th' unwilling earth thou trust the seed.Warton.
The heliacal rising is a star's emersion out of the sun's rays; that is, a star rises heliacally when, having been in conjunction with the sun, the sun passes it and recedes from it. The star then emerges out of the sun's rays so far that it becomes again visible, after having been for some time lost in the superiority of day-light. The time of day in which the star rises heliacally is at the dawn of day; it is then seen for a few minutes near the horizon, just out of the reach of the morning light; and it rises in a double sense from the horizon and from the sun's rays. Afterwards, as the sun's distance increases, it is seen more and more every morning.
The heliacal rising and setting is then, properly, an apparition and occultation. With respect to the Pleiads, it appears - ↑ In a note by Holdsworth on Warton's Georgics, it is observed that the heliacal setting of these stars is pointed out by the word abscondantur. But this is a contradiction; for Eoæ absconduntur is the same as occidunt matutinæ, set in the morning; but the time of day in which a star sets heliacally is in the evening, just after sun-set, when it is seen only for a few minutes in the west near the horizon, on the edge of the sun's splendour, into which in a few days more it sinks.
