Astrology / History

Astrology in the Roman World 200 B.C.-500 A.D.

    
    The Goths sacked Rome in 410 A.D., and the last Western Roman Emperor, appropriately named Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in his capital of Ravenna in 476 A.D. With this date comes the symbolic end of the ancient world in western Europe, and the beginning of 500 years of decline in European scholarship. Astrology shared in this decline, but the focus of astrological learning continued where it had always been, in the east and Babylonia, now under the sway of a brilliant new Persian 'Sassanid' Empire.
    
    In the Eastern Empire the last vestige of the Roman Empire was not swept away until the sack of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 A.D., but the new Christian climate of opinion was not always favourable to astrology. In 529 A.D. the Emperor Justinian closed the Platonic Academy at Athens, its scholars moved to Mesopotamia or Alexandria, and the pagan culture of Greece and Rome was officially ended.

 1  2  3  4  5