it is to be
remembered that comets vary very much even at successive apparitions,
and it would be quite unsafe to judge from the appearance of a comet
seen eighteen centuries ago that it either was or was not the same as
some comet now known to be periodic.

The comet of 79 A.D. is interesting as having given rise to a happy
retort from Vespasian, whose death the comet was held to portend. Seeing
some of his courtiers whispering about the comet, 'That hairy star,' he
said, 'does not portend evil to me. It menaces rather the king of the
Parthians. He is a hairy man, but I am bald.'

Anna Comnena goes even beyond Josephus. He only rebuked other men for
not believing so strongly as he did himself in the significance of
comets--a rebuke little needed, indeed, if we can judge from what
history tells us of the terrors excited by comets. But the judicious
daughter of Alexius was good enough to approve of the wisdom which
provided these portents. Speaking of a remarkable comet which appeared
before the irruption of the Gauls into the Roman empire, she says: 'This
happened by the usual administration of Providence in such cases; for it
is not fit that so great and strange an alteration of things as was
brought to pass by that irruption of theirs should be without some
previous denunciation and admonishment from heaven.'

Socrates, the historian (b. 6, c. 6), says that when Gainas besieged
Constantinople, 'so great was the danger which hung over the city, that
it was presignified and portended by a huge blazing comet which reached
from heaven to the earth, the like whereof no man had ever seen before.'
And Cedrenus, in his 'Compendium of History,' states that a comet
appeared before the death of Johannes Tzimicas, the emperor of the East,
which foreshadowed not alone his death, but the great calamities which
were to befall the Roman empire by reason of their civil wars. In like
manner, the comet of 451 announced the death of Attila, that of 455 the
death of Valentinian. The death of Merovingius was announced by the
comet of 577, of Chilperic by that of 584, of the Emperor Maurice by
that of 602, of Mahomet by that of 632, of Louis the Debonair by that of
837, and of the Emperor Louis II. by that of 875. Nay, so confidently
did men believe that comets indicated the approaching death of great
men, that they did not believe a very great man _could_ die without a
comet. So they inferred that the death of a very great man indicated