Hyădes
(
Ὑάδες). According to some, the daughters of Atlas and
sisters of the Pleiades. The best accounts, however, make them to have been the nymphs of
Dodona, to whom Zeus confided the nurture of Bacchus. Pherecydes gives their names as
Ambrosia, Coronis, Eudora, Dioné, Aesula, and Polyxo. Hesiod, on the other hand,
calls them Phaesula, Coronis, Cleea, Phaeo, and Eudora. The names generally given to the seven
stars are Ambrosia, Eudora, Pedilé, Coronis, Polyxo, Phyto, and Dioné or
Thyené. The Hyades went about with their divine charge,
communicating his discovery to mankind, until, being chased with him into the sea by Lycurgus,
Zeus, in compassion, raised them to the skies and transformed them into stars. According to
the more common legend, however, the Hyades, having lost their brother Hyas, who was killed by
a bear or lion, or, as Timaeus says, by an asp, were so disconsolate at his death that they
pined away and died; and after death they were changed into stars (
Hyg. Fab. 192). The stars called Hyades (
Ὑάδες) derived their name from
ὕειν,
“to make wet,” “to rain,” because their setting, at
both the evening and morning twilight, was for the Greeks and Romans a sure presage of wet and
stormy weather, these two periods falling respectively in the latter half of April and
November. Horace, with a double allusion to both fable and physical phenomena, calls the stars
in question
tristes Hyadas (
Carm. i. 3, 14). The Roman writers sometimes call these stars by the
name of Suculae, “little pigs,” for which epithet Pliny assigns a singular
derivation. According to this writer, the Roman farmers mistook the etymology of the Greek
name Hyades, and deduced it, not from
ὕειν, “to
rain,” but from
ὗς, “a sow”
(Pliny ,
Pliny H. N. xviii. 26). It is more
probable, however, that Suculae was the oldest Roman name, given before the Greek appellation
was known, and to be compared with our popular astronomical terms such as “the
Dipper,” “Charles's Wain,” etc. Isidorus derives the term
Suculae from
succus, in the sense of “moisture” or
“wet” (
a succo et pluviis, Isidor.
Orig. iii. 70), an etymology which has found its way into many later
works. Some grammarians, again, sought to derive the name Hyades from the Greek
Υ (upsilon), in consequence of the resemblance which the cluster of
stars bears to that letter.
The Hyades, in the celestial sphere, are at the head of the Bull (
ἐπὶ τοῦ βουκράνου).