Now, by all accounts it’s been a warmish July up there – some say the hottest July ever recorded – with plenty of places in Europe and North America getting up into the mid-40s. A smart dog needs to be ready when summer arrives here.
But searing hot weather has nothing at all to do with dogs: our emissions are of little consequence in contributing to a warming climate, even though, The Boss grumbles, they can be of the unsavoury kind.
He reckons stinking hot days have been called dogs days for several thousand years and the pejorative use of the term can be laid squarely at the feet of ancient Greek astronomers.
It turns out it’s all about Sirius, the dog star, with which I identify: it’s the brightest star in the universe after all and I urge you to embrace the implication.
Sirius sits in the constellation of Canis Major, being the bigger companion hound to Orion, the hunter. In the southern hemisphere, both constellations dominate the summer night sky, visible in the east from late September and high overhead around Christmas. They disappear over the western horizon in April.
In the northern hemisphere, Sirius behaves slightly differently. From early July until half-way through August – generally the hottest part of their summer – Sirius rises close to the sun in the morning.
The ancient astronomers concluded that the fierce brilliance of Sirius supercharged the sun’s power and was to blame for droughts, fires, thunderstorms, fevers and lethargy – and dogs going mad.
As far back as Homer’s Illiad, thought to be composed around the 8th century BC, the sentiment surfaced in verse:
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion’s dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
There were annual sacrifices to Zeus ahead of Sirius rising to prevent scorching drought; Aristotle refers to the heat of the dog days in an argument about the formulation of evolution. And the Romans caught on as well: Virgil noted the extra efforts required of wine growers “when the Dog-star cleaves the thirsty ground.”
Seneca’s Oedipus railed against “the scorching dog-star’s fires” and the blaming habit continued through early western medicine, then literature, from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to Richard Adams’s Watership Down.
Yet it’s all a dreadful misconception. The Boss assures me that, while Sirius is twice the size of the sun and shines 25 times brighter, it is 8.6 light years away, whereas the sun is just 8.6 light minutes away. Sirius has no heat effect at all. The whole basis of dog days is a blight of human ignorance, visited upon we loveable hounds. Woof!
