Week 32: Dog Days (Horace, Heraclitus)

Cover Image. Illustration of the Constellation Sirius, with text. From The Harley Aratus (c. 820-840). Rheims, France. From the British Library, Harley Collection.

Waning Crescent Moon; 46 Days to Fall Equinox

This week’s post is dedicated to my highly anxious first-and-only childhood dog, Cricket; my father-in-law, Walter; and dog lovers everywhere except outside my bedroom window at night.

Headnote#

Welcome to the “dog days” of summer. You’ve probably heard or perhaps used the phrase in casual conversation, but did you know that it originates in a bit of astronomical confusion from thousands of years ago?

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For this week’s post, I was tempted to simply point you to the extensive Wikipedia article on the subject—scrappy as it is in some places, such entries embody the marvels of digitally crowd-sourced research. Or, I could direct you to one of many local news segments, that other bastion of cultural weirdness. As demonstrated by several links in the Supplementum below, meandrous opining about the summer heat is a well-established tradition.

So here is my short-ish version of the story:

“Dog days” (dies caniculares in Latin) refers to the muggy, languid stretch of time, from peak through late summer, when the atmosphere feels slightly warped and you find yourself questioning frequently whether you have a sunburn. This period, which receives a pretty bad wrap overall (fevers, droughts, and rabies!), coincides with the heliacal rising of Sirius, the “dog-star” as it was known in ancient Greece, which is the Alpha star of the Canis Major constellation and also the brightest star in the night sky. In other words, sometime between mid-July and mid-August, depending on your latitude, the “dog-star” will begin rising in the dawn sky, glimmering briefly until it disappears in the emerging sunlight. When the ancient Greeks and Romans noticed this phenomena, they reasoned incorrectly that the light of Sirius was combining with that of the sun and thereby multiplying the summer’s heat. Oops.

The confusion of the ancients nonetheless has inspired plenty of evocative literary conceits and turns of phrase, from Virgil’s Georgics and Horace’s ode to a freshwater spring (the first reading below, which also—content warning—mentions animal sacrifice) to contemporary Canadian eco-poetry and Cameroonian political fiction. “Dog-days,” apparently, are a great time to think about queens and catalog them with a lover. And “dog daies” were even included in several 16th-century editions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. And one mustn’t forget that early-twenty-first-century hit single by Florence + the Machine.

All these historical and cultural layers leave one to ponder in the heat: What does this close association with summer mean for the reputation of our dear dogs? And what do the dogs actually think of all this warmth? Will summer ever end?

Take heart. You may have heard the phrase that every region of the U.S. likes to claim as its own: “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.” Or, per the fragments of Heraclitus (see below), “Cold becomes warm, and warm, cold; wet becomes dry, and dry, wet.”

Maybe it’s time to go take a cold shower.

Fig. 2. Plate a03507 (May 2, 1899). Marked-up astronomical plate from Arequipa, Peru, featuring Sirius. Harvard College Observatory, StarGlass.

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Readings#

1. O Bandusian fountain, brighter than crystal,
   worthy of sweet wine, not lacking in flowers,
   tomorrow we’ll honour you
   with a kid, whose brow is budding
   
   with those horns that are destined for love and battle.
   All in vain: since this child of the playful herd will
   darken your ice-cool waters,
   with the stain of its crimson blood.
   
   The implacable hour of the blazing dog-star
   knows no way to touch you; you offer your lovely
   coolness to bullocks, weary
   of ploughing, and to wandering flocks.
   
   And you too will be one of the famous fountains,
   now I write of the holm oak that’s rooted above
   the cave in the rock where your
   clear babbling waters run down.

Horace. “Odes, Book III: XIII.” Trans. A. S. Kline. Poetry in Translation, 2003.#

2. XXXIX. — Cold becomes warm, and warm, cold; wet becomes dry, and dry, wet.

   XL. — It disperses and gathers, it comes and goes.

   XLI. — Into the same river you could not step twice, for other and still other waters are flowing.

   XLII. — To those entering the same river, other and still other waters flow.

Heraclitus. “Fragments 39-42.” The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature. Trans. G.T.W. Patrick, from the Greek text of Ingram Bywater. Baltimore, Maryland: N. Murray, 1889. 93-94.#

Supplementum#

• Patrice Nganang. Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle. Trans. Amy Baram Reid. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

• Chris Pearson, “The Sinister Side of Summer: Revisiting the Dog Days of Nineteenth-Century New York.” Journal of Urban History 51.1 (January 2025): 10-20.

• Roy Reed, “Cats, Cattle and People—Beware of Dog-Days.” The New York Times (August 1, 1975). 59.

• Liza Kirwin. “Dog Days of Summer.” The Primary Source Blog. Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art (August 16, 2013).

• Val Lauder. “Don’t Call Them the Dog Days of Summer.” The Saturday Evening Post (July 21, 2020).

Fig. 3. “It’s Dog Days, But ‘Dog Days’ is Biggest Hoax Yet.” The Tacoma Times [Tacoma, Washington] (August 2, 1909).

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✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦#

• A charming morning reading from Sei Shōnagon (c. 1002) and an equally charming, but also devastating, afternoon reading, from Emily Dickinson (c. 1862)

• A humorous morning image by Eadweard Muybridge (1887), fitting of this week’s goofiness

• Tweaked the code so “turn the page” now forces new readings and images to load (rather than repeating the same ones multiple times)