Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, a blue-white point in the constellation Canis Major about 8.6 light-years from Earth. Long before telescopes, the ancient Greeks watched it closely and built it into their farming calendar, their ideas about health and their poetry. Its Greek name, Seirios, is usually rendered as “glowing” or “scorching,” although scholars have not settled where the word comes from. What Greek writers recorded about the star is more interesting than the modern legends that have grown up around it.
From Homer’s omen to Hesiod’s calendar
The star’s most famous literary appearance comes in Book 22 of Homer’s Iliad. As Achilles races across the plain toward Troy, the aged King Priam sees his armor flashing “like to the star that cometh forth at harvest-time,” in A.T. Murray’s translation, “the star that men call by name the Dog of Orion.” Homer adds a warning: “Brightest of all is he, yet withal is he a sign of evil, and bringeth much fever upon wretched mortals.”
The simile shows that Greek audiences already linked the star with the sickly heat of late summer. Hesiod, the farmer-poet of Works and Days, used Sirius more practically. In high summer, he writes, “when the artichoke flowers” and the grasshopper sings in the trees, “Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat.” His remedy is a shady rock and a cup of wine. When the heat breaks and the autumn rains arrive, Sirius spends only a short time overhead by day, and Hesiod says that is the season to cut timber. Later, when “Orion and Sirius are come into mid-heaven” and dawn meets the star Arcturus, he tells his brother Perses to cut the grape clusters and bring them home. For Hesiod, Sirius was a working tool: a calendar marker and a weather sign.
Why we still speak of “dog days”
Sirius is called the Dog Star because it is the brightest star of Canis Major, the “Greater Dog.” Homer’s phrase, the Dog of Orion, ties it to the giant hunter whose constellation shines nearby. The hottest weeks of summer followed the star’s heliacal rising, the first morning of the year on which it becomes visible just before sunrise. Greeks, Romans and Egyptians believed that the star added its own heat to the sun’s. The Romans called the period dies caniculares, the source of the English phrase “dog days of summer”. Ancient writers linked the season with fever, drought and even mad dogs. These were beliefs, not science. Sirius has no effect on Earth’s weather; high summer simply coincided with its return to the dawn sky.
Egypt, Alexandria and a star that seemed red
The Greeks were not the first to watch Sirius. In Egypt, where it was known as Sothis, its heliacal rising was tied to the annual Nile flood and the start of the year. Egyptian observers noticed that the rising recurred every 365.25 days, not the 365 days of their civil calendar. Egypt’s Greek-speaking Ptolemaic rulers, based in Alexandria, took that knowledge on board. In 238 BC a synod of priests at Canopus, honoring Ptolemy III, issued a decree that noted the drift of Sothis’s rising and called for an extra day every fourth year. The reform failed, and a fixed leap year arrived in Egypt only under the Roman emperor Augustus.
Alexandria also left a puzzle. Claudius Ptolemy, heir to a Greek star-mapping tradition that included Hipparchus and his star catalog, worked there in the second century AD. He described Sirius as reddish in his Almagest, and the Roman writer Seneca called it redder than Mars. Today the star shines blue-white. Most astronomers rule out a real change in the star itself, and the old descriptions may reflect atmospheric effects or a poetic link between red and ill fortune. The question has not been fully settled.
The Dogon and a modern myth
In the late 1940s the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who had worked with the Dogon people of Mali since 1931, reported secret Dogon teachings about the Nommo, beings said to come from a world circling Sirius. In 1976 Robert Temple’s book The Sirius Mystery argued that the Dogon knew of Sirius B, the star’s faint companion, and that this pointed to contact with extraterrestrials. However, the evidence points elsewhere.
The German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel deduced in 1844 that Sirius had an unseen companion, and the American telescope maker Alvan Clark first saw it in 1862, decades before Griaule’s fieldwork. Carl Sagan, in his 1979 book Broca’s Brain, argued that the knowledge more likely came from contact with Europeans. In a 1991 restudy published in Current Anthropology, anthropologist Walter van Beek reported finding no evidence that the Dogon held advanced knowledge of Sirius, and said his informants disagreed about which star Griaule’s term referred to. Like many claims about lost “ancient astronomy,” the story rested largely on a single account and did not survive independent checking. The Greek record needs no such embellishment. Using only their eyes, Greek observers followed one bright star through the year and used it to time harvests, brace for heat and explain fever.
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