Saturn in the Fifth Place

by Julius Firmicus Maternus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A case wanting in the third book of the Mathesis*, supplied, with the account of how the want was found.*

I

In the third book of my Mathesis I gave each of the seven stars in each of the twelve places of the nativity: Saturn in the first place, Saturn in the second, and so through the twelve, and then Jupiter, and then Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. That makes eighty-four cases, and I gave all eighty-four. In the sixth book I gave the stars together, two and two, in conjunction and in aspect, as the ancients teach them. I believed, when my lord Mavortius received the eight books and wrote to say that he had read the third twice, that between the third book and the sixth a man could find himself.

A man could not. The case that follows is in neither book. I did not find the want myself. A grammarian of Panormus found it, and wrote to tell me so, and because the case is what the reader of the book requires and the grammarian is only the road by which it came to me, I give the man first and the case after, so that the reader will know what the case cost.

II

The letter came in the third year after the books went to Rome, in the month of the threshing. A cheese-merchant brought it along the coast road with his cheeses, and it smelt of them. It was written on the back of a sheet that had already been used for a school exercise, the five declensions set out in columns in a boy's large hand, with the master's corrections in red above the faults. On the clean side the master had written to me in a small, upright, very even script, without a single erasure, as a man writes who has made a fair copy of his own letter.

He gave his name as Aurelius Ursinus, teacher of grammar at Panormus, in his fifty-second year. He said he had read my books in the copy belonging to a councillor of that city, who had had it made from my lord Mavortius's own, and that he had read them in the councillor's house, standing, over forty days, because the councillor did not lend.

Then he gave his nativity, and he gave it as I would wish every man gave it: the year by the consuls, the day, and the hour of the night by the water-clock of the school where his father had also taught. Scorpio rising. The Sun in Capricorn, in the third place, under the earth, so that the birth was by night. Saturn and Jupiter together in Pisces, which is the house of Jupiter, and Pisces falling in the fifth place, which the Greeks call Good Fortune and which is the place of children. Venus in Cancer, beholding them both from the trine. Mars, the lord of the rising sign, cast down in Libra in the twelfth place. The Moon he gave too, and Mercury, and the Lot of Fortune, each to the degree.

"Your third book," he wrote, "gives Saturn in the fifth place: that the native will have no children, or will bury those he has. Your sixth book gives Saturn and Jupiter together: that the harshness of Saturn is tempered by the kindness of Jupiter, and the evil delayed. Neither gives Saturn and Jupiter together in the fifth place, by night, in the house of Jupiter, with Venus in trine. I have looked for forty days. My case is not in your book. I ask you to supply it."

Below that, set a little apart from the rest, there was one sentence more.

"When I was twenty, a man in the forum at Panormus told me for two asses that I would have no sons. When your book came, the third book seemed to agree with him. I did not marry."

That was all. He did not complain. He did not say what he had given up, or whom. He signed himself, and gave the name of the councillor, and the street of the school, and an inn at Thermae where a letter might be left for the Panormus carrier.

III

I did not answer at once. I am obliged to set down why.

The doctrine with which I closed my second book is not a doctrine of the stars. It is a doctrine of the man who reads them. Let him be just, continent, free of greed; let him give his answers openly and not in secret; let him refuse every question put for a base end, and above all every question that touches the life of the emperor, who alone is not subject to the courses of the stars. The heaven does not open itself to a corrupt question. This is not a rule laid over the science like a cloak; it is part of the science, as the trueness of the rule is part of geometry. A man who asks for a nativity in order to harm, or to steal, or to lie, receives a false reading even from an honest astrologer, because the question has warped the board before the astrologer has set a single counter on it.

So I wrote to Aurelius Ursinus at the inn at Thermae and asked him to what end he wished to have his case. I asked whether he meant to show it to anyone, and to whom. I asked whether he had been paid to ask, or promised anything. I asked whether there was a woman in it, and if so whose woman she was.

His answer came in five weeks, on the back of another exercise: the same boy's hand, by the look of it, now declining fructus with only one fault.

"I have no end but this," he wrote, "that the book be complete. You wrote in your Proem that this was why you wrote. No one has paid me. I will show it to no one. There is no woman. There was, thirty years ago; she has been dead nine years, and her husband was a decent man, and her sons are both at the school."

I read it standing in the library. My freedman Zosimus, who writes for me now for a wage, was at his table and watched me read it, and when I had finished he asked whether the man was refused.

"The man is answered," I said, "in my own coin. Get out the sixth book and the third. Trim the lamp."

IV

Here is the case, and the cases on either side of it, because a reader who comes to this place looking for his own nativity must find his own, and it may lie one degree to the left of the grammarian's.

When Saturn and Jupiter are together in the fifth place, the place of children, the first question is whether the nativity is by day or by night. Saturn and Jupiter are both stars of the day. By day they are in their own sect and their natures are full; by night they are out of it, and both are weakened, Saturn in his harm and Jupiter in his help.

By day, in a house of Saturn, Capricorn or Aquarius, Saturn is the stronger: the native will have few children, and will lose the first-born, and the rest will be slow, sickly, or estranged from him, though one will be honoured in old age.

By day, in a house of Jupiter, Sagittarius or Pisces, Jupiter is the stronger: children will be granted, but late, and they will rise above their father in station.

By day, in any other sign, the two contend, and the outcome must be read from whichever of them is the nearer to its own exaltation, and from the aspect of the Moon.

By night, in a house of Saturn, the decree is hardest: the native will have no children of his own body, or will bury every one, and will leave his goods to strangers.

By night, in a house of Jupiter, without the aspect of Venus, the native will be long childless; whatever is granted will come after the fiftieth year, and it will not be of his first wish.

By night, in a house of Jupiter, with Venus beholding them from the square, the native will have children by a woman of low station, and there will be dispute over the inheritance.

By night, in a house of Jupiter, with Venus beholding them from the opposition, the native's wife will be barren or will die in childbed, and he will raise children not his own.

By night, in a house of Jupiter, with Venus beholding them from the trine, this is the grammarian's case. Saturn delays; he does not deny. The native will be thought childless through all his best years, and will think so himself. After his fiftieth year a son will be given him, and the son will survive him, and will keep his house and his name.

If Mars, in that same nativity, beholds the fifth place, the son will be given in grief, or by a death. Mars in Ursinus's nativity was cast down in the twelfth and did not behold the fifth. I set it down nonetheless, because the next man's Mars may.

I did not write and so forth anywhere on those sheets, and I have not written it here.

I checked the grammarian's places against the tables twice, the second time from the end backwards, as my teacher taught me to check a column of sums. I found no error in his reckoning. He had made his water-clock reading by a clock that his father had set, and a grammarian's father is a careful man.

When I had written the delineation for his case, I did not like it. I sat with it while the oil burned down a finger's breadth in the lamp. A man in his fifty-second year, unmarried, who has lived thirty years by a sentence bought for two asses in the forum, is now to be told that he is not childless, has never been childless, and that a son is decreed to him out of a heaven that took no notice of what he did in the meantime.

There is a softer voice, which I have heard from Greeks of the schools, that would say to such a man: the heaven only inclines; it shows what may be; you are free to make of it what you will. I heard that voice in the library that night, and I put it out of the room, as I would put out a slave who had come in to steal the oil. If the decree is soft, then the astrologer in the forum did him no harm and I did him none, and there is nothing to supply. If I was wrong to leave his case out, it is because the case is true, and if it is true, it is firm. I wrote it as firm. I wrote a son will be given him, and I did not add perhaps, and I did not add if he will.

V

There remained a thing that is not part of the case, and that I must set down because I promised in the Proem to omit nothing.

When Zosimus had gone home I took a wax tablet and made a reckoning I had never made before. Seven stars, taken two and two, make twenty-one pairs. Each pair may stand together in any of the twelve places; each place may fall in any of the twelve signs; each nativity is by day or by night. That is six thousand and forty-eight cases before a third star is so much as looked at. Each of the five remaining stars may behold the pair from the conjunction, the sextile, the square, the trine, the opposition, or not at all, and the delineation changes with each. I multiplied it out on the tablet and then again on the counting-board, because I did not believe the tablet.

Forty-seven million, twenty-nine thousand, two hundred and forty-eight.

If I wrote one such case a day, as fully as I had written the grammarian's, and did nothing else, and was spared all illness, the work would be finished in a hundred and twenty-eight thousand years and some months. And that is before the terms and the decans are brought in, and the Lots, and the degree that rises, which I set down in my eighth book for the very reason that it changes everything.

I had written in my Proem that I would give the whole art, that nothing of it be lost. I did not lie when I wrote it. I believed it, as a man who has walked all the roads of his own island believes he knows the earth.

I record, then, that the art is complete and that the book is not and cannot be; that the heaven has every case and the astrologer has those he is asked for. I do not know a third thing to say about it. I smoothed the wax.

VI

I sent the case to Thermae by the carrier with a covering letter. In the letter I told Aurelius Ursinus that the want was mine; that I had given the stars singly and the stars in pairs and had thought, through the pride of a man finishing a long work, that the reader could join them for himself; and that a reader who must join cases for himself is a reader I had sent away to guess. I asked his pardon, which I have asked of no other reader.

His answer came before the rains. It was on a clean sheet, the first that had not been a school exercise.

"I have read it," he wrote. "I am fifty-one. I thank you for the case. It is now in your book, which is what I asked.

"You did not say whether it is wrong for a man to help a decree. I do not ask it. I note only that you did not say."

I did not answer that letter. I did not know what to answer, and an astrologer who writes when he has nothing to set down is no better than the man in the forum.

VII

What follows I set down because the order of every delineation requires that the end be told, so far as it is known.

In the second winter after, a letter came from Panormus in a hand I did not know. It was a young hand and a careful one, every letter made separately as a schoolmaster teaches, and it began with the formula of greeting set out complete, which no one under thirty does any longer.

It said that Aurelius Ursinus, teacher of grammar, had died in the month of February of a fever of the chest, in his fifty-fourth year. It said that the year before his death he had petitioned for the emperor's rescript, as the law requires for a boy whose father is not living, and had adopted before the governor at Panormus the son of a fuller of that city, a pupil of his school since the age of seven, one Dionysius, whose father had drowned at the salt-pans. It said that the boy had taken the name of Aurelius Ursinus, and kept the school, and the house in the street of the school, and had found among his father's papers a sheet in the hand of Firmicus Maternus of Syracuse, which his father had left word should be returned to its author, that it might be put into the book.

The sheet was enclosed. It was my own delineation of Saturn and Jupiter in the fifth place, by night, in the house of Jupiter, with Venus in trine. The grammarian had made no mark on it, except one. Under the word given, in a son will be given him, there was a short line ruled in red, such as a master draws under a word in a boy's exercise, not to mark a fault but to have him look at it again.

I am asked, by the young man's letter and by the old man's red line both, whether the decree was fulfilled. I do not know. The ancients do not say whether a son made by the law is a son given by the heaven. I will not supply what the tradition does not teach and set it down in my book as if I had found it there; that would be to invent, and I preserve. Nor will I say that the decree failed, for I do not know that either, and the heaven knows what it meant by given, though neither the grammarian nor I did.

I gave the sheet to Zosimus. I told him to copy the case, with the cases on either side of it, into the third book of my own copy, at the end of Saturn in the fifth place, and to make eleven copies more for the eleven owners of the book whose names I know, and to leave the red line out of all of them.

He copied it that afternoon at his low table by the window, and when he came to the word given in the twelfth copy his reed stopped above it, and stayed there, and then went on.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iūliō Firmicō Māternō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Julius Firmicus Maternus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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