The Ram
Whom Ptolemy with twice nine stars adorns,
Of which two only claim the second rank,
The rest, when Cynthia fills the sign, are lost.
Aries has been called the "Prince of the Zodiac," the "Prince of the Celestial Signs," and the "Leader of the Host of the Zodiac." It has also been associated with the ram into which Zeus changed himself to escape the pursuit of the giants. He fled to Egypt, and there the constellation was called "Jupiter Ammon."
In Chaldea, where the constellation is supposed to have originated, the ram simply represents the favourite animal of the shepherds. Considering the fact that Aries is in an inconspicuous part of the heavens, and comprises only three stars of any importance, it is surprising the wealth of lore and legend that surrounds it, and the attention paid to it by the ancients, unless we attribute to it some extraneous claim for notoriety, such as the position of these stars as regards the sun at a certain period of the year. There is little doubt that this is the real cause of the importance of this constellation.
"If," says Plunket, "we find Aries equally honoured by several nations in very early times, either these nations, independent of each other, happened to observe and mark out the sun's annual course through the heavens at exactly the same date, and therefore chose the same date, or we must suppose that they derived their calendar and knowledge of the zodiac from observations originally made by some one civilised race."
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