13
Concerning Bellerophon also I am of this opinion: that he had a volatile as horse I do not at all believe, but conceive that he pursued this wisdom and raised his thoughts on high and held conversation with the stars, and thus ascended unto heaven by means not of his horse but of his wit.
14
The same may be said of Phrixus, the son of Athamas, that is fabled to have ridden through the ayr upon a golden ram. And certainly of Daedalus the Athenian; although his story be strange, yet methinks it is not without relation unto astrology, but rather he practised it constantly himself and taught it unto his son.
15
But because Icarus was governed by youth and audacity, and sought not the attainable but let his minde carry him into the zenith, he came short of truth and defected from reason and was precipitated into a sea of unfathomable perplexities. But the Greeks tell an idle myth of him and loosely call a golfe of their sea Icarian after his name.
16
Doubtless Pasiphae also, hearing from Daedalus of the Bull that appeareth amongst the constellations and of Astrology itself, fell in love with the doctrine; whence they derive the belief that Daedalus conjoined her in wedlock with the bull.The reader will not fail to note how neatly this explanation of the Pasiphae myth puts a colophon upon Lucian’s masterly treatment of the flight-legends, which is entirely his own.
17
Again, there be-those who, dissecting the science into parts, have made different discoveries, some collecting the particulars of the moon, some those of Jupiter, and some those of the sun, concerning their course and motion and potency.
18
So Endymion established the motions of the moon,We are indebted to Germanicus, in his commentary on Aratus, for the information that Mnaseas of Sicyon credited Endymion with the discovery of the course of the moon. Having found the key to the flight-legends, it was easy for Lucian to supply a pendant to Endymion in Phaethon.
