II.

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CHAPTER XX

REMARKABLE COMETS

If eclipses were a cause of terror in past ages, comets appear to have
been doubly so. Their much longer continuance in the sight of men had no
doubt something to say to this, and also the fact that they arrived
without warning; it not being then possible to give even a rough
prediction of their return, as in the case of eclipses. As both these
phenomena were occasional, and out of the ordinary course of things,
they drew exceptional attention as unusual events always do; for it must
be allowed that quite as wonderful things exist, but they pass unnoticed
merely because men have grown accustomed to them.

For some reason the ancients elected to class comets along with meteors,
the aurora borealis, and other phenomena of the atmosphere, rather than
with the planets and the bodies of the spaces beyond. The sudden
appearance of these objects led them to be regarded as signs sent by the
gods to announce remarkable events, chief among these being the deaths
of monarchs. Shakespeare has reminded us of this in those celebrated
lines in _Julius Caesar_:--

"When beggars die there are no comets seen,
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

Numbed by fear, the men of old blindly accepted these presages of fate;
and did not too closely question whether the threatened danger was to
their own nation or to some other, to their ruler or to his enemy. Now
and then, as in the case of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, there was a
cynical attempt to apply some reasoning to the portent. That emperor, in
alluding to the comet of A.D. 79, is reported to have said: "This hairy
star does not concern me; it menaces rather the King of the Parthians,
for he is hairy and I am bald." Vespasian, all the same, died shortly
afterwards!

Pliny, in his natural history, gives several instances of the terrible
significance which the ancients attached to comets. "A comet," he says,
"is ordinarily a very fearful star; it announces no small effusion of
blood. We have seen an example of this during the civil commotion of
Octavius."

A very brilliant comet appeared in 371 B.C., and about the same time an
earthquake caused Helice and Bura, two towns in Achaia, to be swallowed
up by the sea. The following remark made by Seneca concerning it shows
that the ancients did not consider comets merely as precursors, but even
as actual _causes_ of fatal events: "This comet, so anxiously o