Judaism and Christianity

Most Romans came to believe that the movements of the heavenly bodies influenced their fortunes and fates and governed their decisions. If one could do nothing to change one’s destiny, one could at least try to find out what that destiny might be by consulting an expert astrologer. The astrologer would study the seven planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon), each of which had its own will, character, gender, plants, numbers, and attendant animals, and each of which was lord of a sphere.

There are many arguments as to why civilization had to wait so long before scientific knowledge was given a systematic application. Whatever the answers, a tendency to see science as being in opposition to religion was developing. Perhaps the answer lay, in part, in the attitudes of the Roman ruling groups.