Plato wrote in his dialogue, "The Statesman" (Politicus): "I mean the change in the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set . . . the god at the time of the quarrel, you recall, changed all that to the present system as a testimony in favor of Atreus."
Then he proceeded: "At certain periods the universe has its present circular motion, and at other periods it revolves in the reverse direction. ... Of all the changes which take place in the heavens this reversal is the greatest and most complete."16
Plato continued his dialogue, using the above passage as the introduction to a fantastic philosophical essay on the reversal of time. This minimizes the value of the quoted passage despite the categorical form of his statement.
The reversal of the movement of the sun in the sky was not a peaceful event; it was an act of wrath and destruction. Plato wrote in Politicus: "There is at that time great destruction of animals in general, and only a small part of the human race survives."
The reversal of the movement of the sun was referred to by many Greek authors before and after Plato. According to a short fragment of a historical drama by Sophocles (Atreus), the sun rises in the east
M Ibid., pp. 306, 315, 316.
is Plato, The Statesman or Politicus (transl. H. N. Fowler, 1925), pp. 49, 53.
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only since its course was reversed. "Zeus . . . changed the course of the sun, causing it to rise in the east and not in the west."17
Euripides wrote in Electra: "Then in his anger arose Zeus, turning the stars' feet back on the fire-fretted way; yea, and the sun's car splendour-burning, and the misty eyes of the morning grey.
And the flash of his chariot-wheels back-flying flushed crimson the face of the fading day. . . .
The sun . . . turned backward . . . with the scourge of his wrath in affliction repaying mortals."18
Many authors in later centuries realized that the story of Atreus described some event in nature.
But it could not have been an eclipse. Strabo was mistaken when he tried to rationalize the story by saying that Atreus was an early astronomer who "discovered that the sun revolves in a direction opposite to the movement of the heavens." 19 During the night the stars move from east to west two minutes faster than the sun which moves in the same direction during the day.20
Even in poetical language such a phenomenon would not have been described as follows: "And the sun-car's winged speed from the ghastly strife turned back, changing his westering track robin-bobin
through the heavens unto where blush-burning dawn rose," as Euripides wrote in another work of his.21
Seneca knew more than his older contemporary Strabo. In his drama Thyestes, he gave a powerful description of what happened when the sun turned backward in the morning sky, which reveals much profound knowledge of natural phenomena. When the sun reversed its course and blotted out the day in mid-Olympus (noon), and the sinking sun beheld Aurora, the people, smitten with fear,
W The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. by A. C. Pearson (1917), III. 5, Fragment 738; see also ibid., I, 93. Those of the Greek authors who ascribed a permanent change in the direction of the sun to the time of the Argive tyrant Atreus, confused two events and welded them into one: a lasting reversal of west and east in earlier times and a temporary retrograde movement of the sun in the days of the Argive tyrants. *8 Euripides, Electra (transl. A. S. Way), 11. 727 ff.
19 Strabo, The Geography, i, 2, 15.
20 Every night stars rise four minutes earlier: the earth rotates 366% times in a year in relation to the stars, but 365K times in relation to the sun.
21 Euripides, Orestes (transl. A. S. Way), 11. 1001 ff.
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asked: "Have we of all mankind been deemed deserving that heaven, its poles uptorn, should overwhelm us? In our time has the last day come?" 22
The early Greek philosophers, and especially Pythagoras, would have known about the reversal of the revolution of the sky, if it actually occurred, but as Pythagoras and his school kept their knowledge secret, we must depend upon the authors who wrote about the Pythagoreans. Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans differed between the right- and the left-hand motion of the sky ("the side from which the stars rise" is heaven's right, "and where they set . . . its left"23), and in Plato we find: "A direction from left to right—and that will be from west to east."24 The present sun moves in the opposite direction.
In the language of a symbolic and philosophical astronomy, probably of Pythagorean origin, Plato describes in Timaeus the effects of a collision of the earth "overtaken by a tempest of winds" with "alien fire from without, or a solid lump of earth," or waters of "the immense flood which foamed in and streamed out": the terrestrial globe engages in all motions, "forwards and backwards, and again to right and to left, and upwards and downwards, wandering every way in all the six directions."25
As the result of such a collision, described in a not easily understandable text which represents the earth as possessing a soul, there was a "violent shaking of the revolutions of the Soul," "a total blocking of the course of the same," "shaking of the course of the other," which "produced all manner of twistings, and caused in their circles fractures and disruptures of every possible kind, with the result that, as they [the earth and the "perpetually flowing stream"?] barely neld together one with another, they moved indeed but more irrationally, being at one time reversed, at another oblique, and again
22 Seneca, Thyestes (transl. F. J. Miller), 11. 794 ff.
23 Aristotle, On the Heavens, II, ii (transl. W. K. C. Guthrie, 1939). Cf. also Plutarch, who, in his The Opinions of the Philosophers, wrote that according to Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle,
"east is the right side, and west is the left side." 2*Plato, Laws (transl. R. G. Bury, 1926), Bk. iv, 11. 760 D.
25 Plato, Timaeus (transl. Bury, 1929), 43 B and C.
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upside down." 26 In Plato's terminology, "revolution of the same" is from east to west, and
"revolution of the other" is from west to east.27 In The Statesman, Plato put this symbolic language into very simple terms, speaking of the reversal of the quarters in which the sun rises and sets.
I shall return later to some other Greek references to the sun setting in the east.28
robin-bobin
Caius Julius Solinus, a Latin author of the third century of the present era, wrote of the people living on the southern borders of Egypt: "The inhabitants of this country say that they have it from their ancestors that the sun now sets where it formerly rose." 29
The traditions of peoples agree in synchronizing the changes in the movement of the sun with great catastrophes which terminated world ages. The changes in the movement of the sun in each successive age make the use by many peoples of the term "sun" for "age" understandable.
"The Chinese say that it is only since a new order of things has come about that the stars move from east to west." 30 "The signs of the Chinese zodiac have the strange peculiarity of proceeding in a retrograde direction, that is, against the course of the sun." 31
In the Syrian city Ugarit (Ras Shamra) was found a poem dedicated to the planet-goddess Anat, who "massacred the population of the Levant" and who "exchanged the two dawns and the position of the stars." 32
The hieroglyphics of the Mexicans describe four movements of the sun, nahui ollin tonatiuh.
"The Indian authors translate ollin by 'motions of the sun.' When they find the number nahui added, they render nahui ollin by the words 'sun (tonatiuh) in his four mo-26 Cf. Bury's comments to Timaeus, notes, pp. 72, 80. " Plato, Timaeus, 43 D and E.