ABSTRACT
The question of the nature and extent of the influence of the heavenly bodies on sublunary existence, and in particular on human life, was one on which no ancient philosopher could avoid having an opinion. There were some, certainly – notably Epicureans, Sceptics, and some later Peripatetics 1 — who were prepared to deny any such influence (and therefore to dismiss the validity of astrological calculations), but this was not the view of the ordinary citizen, nor yet of most intellectuals, especially if they were of the Stoic, or even the Platonist, persuasion. Believers in astrology could hold to a belief either in what has been termed ‘hard’ astrology 2 , that is, a conviction that the heavenly bodies, both stars and planets, actively cause sublunary events, including the events of our own lives, or in ‘soft’ astrology – a more respectably philosophical position, according to which these bodies act merely as signs of what is to come, this having been immutably fixed (according to the tenets of Stoic determinism) from the beginning of the world — of which, of course, the heavenly bodies are an organic part. I propose, in this essay, to examine the position of the third-century Platonist philosopher Plotinus, to see how he fits into the spectrum of late antique views on this question.
