Nine Books on the Nature of Things

As you have already understood, a wise person can rule the stars, withdraw from an evil planet and submit to a better one, pass from servitude to freedom and escape the prison of an evil planet. So too the animal person who is a child of the Sun, Jupiter, Venus or Mercury can withdraw from a kindly planet and submit to Saturn or Mars. He resembles someone who runs away from a religious community and, unable to bear a comfortable life, becomes a soldier or some other worthless fellow, obliged thereafter to spend his whole life in pain and hardship. The same applies to a rich man who, driven by frivolity, wickedly squanders and consumes his goods in gambling, feasting and whoring, which he pursues until everything is swallowed up. At last he is needy, miserably struggling with infamous poverty, and deservedly becomes everyone’s laughingstock and object of contempt. Even children in the streets say: “Look at that worthless good-for-nothing! He could have been his own master, but, despising mastery, preferred to be a servant, beggar and slave of slaves, and cannot now even aspire to mastery again.” An evil star or ascendant has driven him to this. Had he not been foolish and wicked, he would not have left the stars such certain mastery over him but would have resisted them completely. Even if he did not himself know how to resist the stars, he could have attended to the example of others and thought: “See how wealthy that man was, yet through frivolous and shameful pursuits he cast himself into utter poverty. That other man lived splendidly, receiving abundant food and generous pay without great bodily labour, yet could no longer tolerate those comforts. Now he must live meanly and poorly and drink water instead of wine, while his work increases daily and his wages diminish.”