ge, and the regulations of the watch; (11) and
in general, with regard to all matters connected with the night season,
or with the month, or the year, (12) it was well to have such reliable
data to go upon as would serve to distinguish the various times and
seasons. But these, again, were pieces of knowledge easily learnt from
night sportsmen, (13) pilots of vessels, and many others who make it
their business to know such things. As to pushing the study of astronomy
so far as to include a knowledge of the movements of bodies outside
our own orbit, whether planets or stars of eccentric movement, (14) or
wearing oneself out endeavouring to discover their distances from
the earth, their periods, and their causes, (15) all this he strongly
discountenanced; for he saw (he said) no advantage in these any more
than in the former studies. And yet he was not unversed (16) in the
subtleties of astronomy any more than in those of geometry; only these,
again, he insisted, were sufficient to wear out a man's lifetime, and to
keep him away from many more useful pursuits.

(11) Schneid. cf. Plat. "Rep." vii. 527 D.

(12) "Occurrences connected with the night, the month, or year." e.g.
the festival of the Karneia, the {tekmerion} (point de repere) of
which is the full moon of August. Cf. Eur. "Alc." 449.

(13) See Plat. "Soph." 220 D; above, III. xi. 8; "Cyrop." I. vi. 40;
"Hunting," xii. 6; Hippocr. "Aer." 28.

(14) See Lewis, "Astron. of the Ancients"; cf. Diog. Laert. vii. 1.
144.

(15) Or, "the causes of these."

(16) {oude touton ge anekoos en}. He had "heard," it is said,
Archelaus, a pupil of Anaxagoras. Cf. Cic. "Tusc." V. iv. 10.

And to speak generally, in regard of things celestial he set his face
against attempts to excogitate the machinery by which the divine power
formed its several operations. (17) Not only were these matters beyond
man's faculties to discover, as he believed, but the attempt to search
out what the gods had not chosen to reveal could hardly (he supposed)
be well pleasing in their sight. Indeed, the man who tortured his brains
about such subjects stood a fair chance of losing his wits entirely,
just as Anaxagoras, (18) the headiest speculator of them all, in his
attempt to explain the divine mechanism, had somewhat lost his head.
Anaxagoras took on himself to assert that sun and fire are identical,
(19) ignoring the fact that human beings can easily look at fire, but to
g