AURIGA

, the Waggoner, a constellation in the northern hemisphere, consisting of 14 stars in Ptolemy's catalogue; but in Tycho's, 27; in Hevelius's, 40; and in the Britannic catalogue, 66.

This is one of the 48 old asterisms, mentioned by all the most ancient astronomers. It is represented by the figure of an old man, in a posture somewhat like sitting, with a goat and her kids in his left hand, and a bridle in his right.

The Greeks probably received this and all their other constellations from the Egyptians; but, wanting to appear the inventors of them themselves, and not understanding the meaning of the figures, they have cloathed them with some of their own fabulous dresses, to favour the deceit. They accordingly tell us that this figure of a waggoner was an honourable character, and Erichthonius, the inventor of coaches. Vulcan, say they, once fell in love with Minerva, and when he could not prevail with her to marry him, he would have obtained her upon less honourable terms. There was a struggle between them, and some way or other Erichthonius was begotten, though it does not seem that Minerva had much share in it: she took care of the offspring how ever. Some have supposed it was only a serpent; but the graver authors say, Erichthonius was a man with legs only like the body of a serpent, and that to hide this monstrous part of his sigure he invented coaches to carry him about. They add, that Jupiter, doing him honour for an invention that was, in some degree, imitating the sun's carriage on the earth, raised him up among the stars.

But others, ill satisfied with a story which so badly agreed with the figure, have said that it belonged to Myrtillus, a son of Mercury and Clytie, and charioteer to Aenomanus; they say, that at his death, his father Mercury, by permission of his superiors, raised him up into the skies. All this however does not at all account for the goat and her two kids in the hands of Auriga. To set this right, they afterward made Auriga to be Olenus, a son of Vulcan, and the father of Aega and Helice, two of the Cretan nymphs that nursed the infant Jupiter. They talk of a goat that was used for giving milk to the young deity, and they suppose that this creature, and its two young ones, were placed in the hands of the father of the virgins, to commemorate the creature they took into their service on that occasion.

Besides the Hœdi, this constellation contains also another of those stars which the ancients honoured with peculiar names, the goat Capra, and Amalthæa Capra: this is the bright one near the shoulder, and supposed to be the mother of the Hœdi, and the nurse of Jupiter.

Although the whole constellation of Auriga is not mentioned among those from which the ancients formed presages of the succeeding weather, the two stars in his arm were of the foremost in that rank. It is these they called by the name Hœdi, and dreaded so extremely on account of the storms and tempests that succeeded their rising, that it is said they shut up the navigation of the sea for their season. And the day of their influence being over, we find, was celebrated as a festival with sports and games, under the name of Natalis Navigationis. Germanicus calls them unfriendly stars to mariners; and Virgil couples them with Arcturus, mentioning their setting and its rising as things of the most important presage. Horace also puts them together as the most formidable of all the stars to those who follow the traffic of the sea. And to the same purpose speak all the ancient writers, thus making a part of the conftellation Auriga, if not the whole constellation, a thing to be observed with the utmost attention, and to be feared as much as the blazing Arcturus.