Glyph and Origin

The glyph is a horizontal bar carrying a raised curve, read as the beam of a balance, and it is one of the more stable of the twelve sign glyphs, changing comparatively little between the Byzantine manuscript copies of Greek horoscopes and the modern printed form fixed in the Renaissance. Its stability may owe something to how late the emblem itself was settled: Roman writers only replaced the constellation's older identity as the Scorpion's claws with an independent balance in the decades around the end of the Republic, a change later sources connect to honouring Julius Caesar, assassinated in 44 BCE, with a sign of justice set at the point of the year where day and night stand equal.

The manuscript tradition that carried the glyph forward is the same one catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in their study of Greek horoscopes, and fifteenth century printed almanacs, following the example of Regiomontanus's Nuremberg Kalendarium, helped fix its final typeset shape. Libra belongs to the Babylonian zodiac fixed in Hellenistic astrology and has drifted from its constellation through precession, the same slow axial wobble that has carried every tropical sign away from its namesake constellation over the centuries.