Adopted the zodiac

The Greeks seem to have adopted the zodiac as early as the 6th century BC; it may have been Democritus, round about 420, who popularized it and the idea that the planets influenced man as they travelled through the signs. It is said that he spent much time in Egypt and the east; certainly he visited Persia, and he may have been more decided in advancing his view that the planets governed men’s lives than any Greek before him. He agreed with Zeno that nothing could happen in the world by chance. It has been claimed that he gave the zodiac signs their Greek names, although other historians have suggested that Anaxagoras, born in lonia about 500 BC, may have had a hand in that — he was an adventurous astronomer, the first to explain that the Moon shone because of the reflected light of the Sun. He was thrown out of Athens, where he lived for thirty years, for attempting to rationalize astronomy, and teaching rationalist theories about ‘the things on high’. The Greeks, who sacrificed to the Sun and Moon, were outraged at his suggestion that they were paying court to a ‘fiery star’ and a lump of earth.