Could you elaborate on this? I am really curious how you can reconcile the evidence I cited with your view or what compelling reasons you have to dismiss this evidence, based on a close reading of the original text (not a translation), backed by a comparison with the word usage of other early Hellenistic authors and best scholarship available, as not strong enough.
I don't doubt it. Perhaps it's my raging ego and naive ignorance?
Nevertheless, when I read Manilius I don't see the strength of connection that implies that Manilius meant to describe to his readers that house systems are, by their nature, defined from the zodiac signs, and rather than that they divorced from it. The evidence in favour of their being a secondary layer or level not defined by the zodiac includes the fact that in the one section where Manilius goes to some length to define the houses he does not reckon their beginning from the 0 degree of the sign. In fact he describes explicitly as being from the cardinal points. Now I take this as being his deliberate intention for the houses, and all other statements or references to the houses to be placed within this context. He also uses imagery, when explicitly defining the houses, which suggest that the houses are stationary for a given locale, and that the zodiac revolves through the houses - this is so even in your rendition of the translation. Book II lines 856 onwards are the ones I've tried the most to render an intelligible translation from the Latin - keep in mind my comment about being no Latin scholar.
The gist (not literal translation) I got from my own muddled understanding of the Latin (see above about being no Latin scholar) was more like "every sign, no matter what the shape, is infected by mundane divisions; the place rules the stars gives the dowry (or the good or bad); each (sign?) revolves and sends and receives powers to and from the sky"
I'm no Latin expert as you can see. But from this reading, and elsewhere, I do still get the sense that the houses are conceived of as another layer, not that of the signs, and that the signs (and stars) move through these divisions, with power or good and bad being determined by these places and influences being sent to and from the signs and places. But they are nevertheless distinct, almost like two separate layers, one moving, the other stationary.
This idea seems to remain firmly in place when Manilius describes the houses. Manilius bakes into his visual imagery the idea of climbing from the ascendant to the MC. Manilius has defined the Horoscope just immediately before this as being the cardinal point itself. He divides up the space between horoscope and MC and says this quarter signifies youthfulness. Nowhere in reading that section do I get the sense that he means by "horoscope" anything other than the point of the ascendant, certainly I don't think he means sign. Do you?
In the same way, when he immediately moves onto the houses, he seems to use the same kind of language to divide up the mundane sphere, houses are described also as deriving from the same term he used for a horoscope point. He seems to allow for the house to be named after this horoscopic point.
I concede it's possible he means for the zodiac sign, but if so, he never actually suggests as much. Sure we can argue that this was so widespread everyone knew what he meant, but actually the evidence against that idea is much stronger. I think it much more likely that there was no firm idea in his mind about what the housesystem was than that there was such a widespread agreement everyone knew what he meant. Certainly you would imagine that the zodiac would be something everyone knows about but he still takes time to explain it. Aratus and Geminus and so on all describe the zodiac in great detail - disagreeing with that or that expert in doing so. They say nothing at all of the houses. In fact Manilius is the first explicit account we have surviving of the houses at all, and it's only a century or so away from some of these experts. Valens does take time to describe the houses in a more technical manner and never describes whole sign houses.
In fact, for me, what it boils down is being asked to believe that because these authors will occasionally refer to the house as being a sign that in fact all their technical descriptors of how to calculate the houses is just metaphor and poetry, and actually they meant the entire sign all along - why on earth don't they just say so. It would be a great deal easier than talking about this or that cardinal point. Because a massive problem here isn't so much the ascendant it's the MC. Manilius tells us very explicitly in a number of different ways (noontime, the division of east and west etc.) that he means to define his houses by the meridian, not just the tenth sign. Indeed he explains, when introducing the cardinal points (Book II 788) that the cardinal points are fixed and receive the signs as they pass by. He describes the houses in much the same manner.
If they are fixed and receive the signs that pass by and if the houses are the same, then bluntly the houses cannot be defined by the signs themselves. Now it's entirely possible, and I happen to believe, that when Manilius talks about the signs receiving the power of the houses and so on, that actually what this means is that the houses are quadrant houses but that the signs partake of the power of whatever house they contain. Valens seems to imply a similar thing.
What this means is that when they later refer to the 'sign' as being the house, this is not meant to mean that the house begins at 0 degrees of the sign, but rather that the sign contains the house and so is influenced and has the power of that house.
So for me when Manilius defines a house system has being static, and that the zodiac passes through the houses and influence one another, that this is indeed how he wants us to imagine the house system. That he later refers to it as a sign is just practical evidence of his point about giving and receiving back to the sky etc. and so the 11th sign, in this example, can be imagined as the 11th house not because the 11th house begins at 0 degrees of that sign, but rather because that sign typically contains the 11th house cusp and is coloured or influenced therefore by 11th sign 'energy' to use a modern phrase.
I am clearly not alone in imagining that Manilius imagines the houses to be distinct from the signs and for the signs to pass through them and be coloured by the signification of the house.
Whilst I'm no expert in Latin or Greek, the same is not true for Bouche Leclerq.
Now this may not be true for you Levente, so I don't mean to imply that it is, but a growing phenomenon I have observed is this sense that we knew almost nothing about the Greek or Latin authors or their astrology until the Project Hindsight movement. Of course this isn't the case. Ideas like the cardinal points being like cattle prods and being like pivots and so on existed long before Schmidt or Project Hindsight. Bouche Leclerq discusses all of these things. Sure, scholarship has progressed, but it is interesting to me that Bouche Leclerq sees the houses, and quotes Manilius in particular, in a very similar way.
In Chapter IX he says, after discussing the Horoscope/ascendant point:
(translation mine, apologies if rudimentary, blue text is my insertion, p.257 Astrologie Grecque)
It is this point [i.e. the horoscope] that the division of the circle of the geniture begins, the circle which is the zodiac itself, but endowed with an autonomous 12-part division superimposed on those of the signs and communicating to each of its compartments (loci) specific properties which can be combined afterwards with those of the underlying signs, but are prima facie independent. The signs had their place fixed once and for all, whereas the places of the circle [compartments, which he tells us are loci, so I'll translate as places for convenience] measured according to the horoscope, were moving, in respect to them [i.e. in respect to the signs], for each geniture. But, on the other hand, mobile in respect to the divisions of the zodiac, the circle of the geniture is fixed in respect to the Earth. It is like an unmoving building in which turns the zodiac and the entire cosmic machine.
BL explicitly, in a footnote, highlights this very section of Manilius when discussing the houses, the very same section that Goold begins with "in any geniture every sign is affected...".
Later BL uses the metaphor of "une charpente" to describe the houses, which connotes a sturdy, solid, wooden skeletal frame around which a house, or typically at least the roof, would be constructed.
It is curious to me that my own reading of Manilius, and indeed others, seems to be the same as what BL describes here. That the houses and signs are independent, the houses static, the signs moving through them not defining them, but passing influence from one another.
Anyway I don't expect to change anyone's views, as I say, but just help answer the question of why on earth I would be so outrageous as to not imagine that referring to the 11th house as a sign means he imagined the houses as beginning with 0 degrees of the sign (exaggeration mine). As I say, I am not going to fight on this, my thoughts are a work in progress, and I'm happy to be given a fool's pardon or thought an idiot if it comes to it.
