about this, Phaeded said something interesting on another thread (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=974&p=14340#p14338):
So I want to know, Phaeded, can you tell me your reference? Would it have been known in the Renaissance? I thought that the issue was that the solstices had shifted since Cancer and Capricorn had been the tropics, due to precession. In that case, Macrobius would be defending the standard astrological view that the actual position of the stars doesn't matter, in relation to the solar year, it's the position of the stars whenever the system was set that counts. And the correction would be Gemini/Sagittarius. But Sagittarius is near the bottom!Hermes leads Ariadne/Dionysos towards Scorpius, which is where the brightest part of the Milky Way crosses the zodiac. Macrobius confuses the two MW crossing points with the solstices at Cancer and Capricron but in fact they are in Gemini and arrrow-of-Sagittarius/tail-of-Scorpius; the latter was considered the "gate" of ascent (Gemini for birth/descent of the soul).
I've studied this object quite a bit in connection with the Roman cult of Mithras (which I see as a late, bastardized version of Orphic beliefs mapped over with Perisan names and a few geniune scraps of Zoroastrian beliefs).
If Hermes is leading them to Scorpio, then it isn't being depicted as an ascent, as Kerenyi supposes, and the forelegs of the horses are misleading--even though if, headed toward Sagittarius, it would in fact be an ascent. Also, I thought the claws were supposed to be where Libra is now. The artist has it backwards.
Here is what Kerenyi says about this zodiac (pp. 385-6; for the preceding paragraph, on the type of object it is, see the end of my post at viewtopic.php?f=11&t=974&p=14340#p14337):
I infer that Kerenyi thought fourth century, because it's the end of the Peloponnesian War, when colonization resumed--or was it when the zodiac changed to 11?-- and first century, because that's when the zodiac changed to 12. But perhaps he was out of date. I any case, Plato is fourth century.The Brindisi disk includes the earliest known representation of the zodiac on Greek or Italian soil. To the artisan who fashioned it, the zodiac was still new. He inscribed it on the edge of the disk but he did not understand its figures. His Capricorn, originally an Oriental hybrid with horns and a fish's tail, has no tail; his Virgo is holding a slender vessel and is so low-waisted that the artisan's model may have stemmed from as early as the fourth century B.C. He also changed the order of the constellations but surely followed a very early model, for like the original Babylonian zodiac his has only eleven signs and a double-length Scorpio. {footnote: See F. Boll, C. Besold, and W. Gundel, Sternglaube und Sterndeutung, pp. 7, 52.] From this it may be inferred that the Brindisi disk was fashioned between the fourth and the first century B.C.