OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
433
embraced the simple notion of Seneca and the Chaldæans, that they are only planets of a longer period and more eccentric motion.[1] Time and science have justified the conjectures and predictions of the Roman sage; the telescope has opened new worlds to the eyes of astronomers;[2] and, in the narrow space of history and fable, one and the same comet is already found to have revisited the earth in seven equal revolutions of five hundred and seventy-five years. The first[3] which ascends beyond the Christian era one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven years, is coeval with Ogyges the father of Grecian antiquity. And this appearance explains the tradition which Varro has preserved, that under his reign the planet Venus changed her colour, size, figure, and course: a prodigy without example either in past or succeeding ages.[4] The second visit, in the year eleven hundred and ninety-three, is darkly implied in the fable of Electra the seventh of the Pleiads, who have been reduced to six since the time of the Trojan war. That nymph, the wife of Dardanus, was unable to support the ruin of her country; she abandoned the dances of her sister orbs, fled from the zodiac to the north pole, and obtained, from her dishevelled locks, the name of the comet. The third period expires in the year six hundred and eighteen, a date that exactly agrees with the tremendous comet of the Sibyll, and perhaps of Pliny, which arose in the west two generations before the reign of Cyrus. The fourth apparition, forty-four years before the birth of Christ, is of all others the most splendid and important. After the death of Cæsar, a long-haired star was conspicuous to Rome and to the nations, during the games which were exhibited by young Octavian in honour of Venus and his uncle. The vulgar opinion, that it conveyed to heaven the divine soul of the dictator, was cherished and consecrated
- ↑ Seneca's viith book of Natural Questions displays, in the theory of comets, a philosophic mind. Yet should we not too candidly confound a vague prediction, a veniet tempus, &c. with the merit of real discoveries.
- ↑ Astronomers may study Newton and Halley. I draw my humble science from the article Comete, in the French Encyclopedia, by M. d'Alembert. [See App. 20.]
- ↑ Whiston, the honest, pious, visionary Whiston, had fancied, for the æra of Noah's flood (2242 years before Christ), a prior apparition of the same comet which drowned the earth with its tail.
- ↑ A Dissertation of Fréret (Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, tom. x. P- 357-377) affords an happy union of philosophy and erudition. The phænomenon in the time of Ogyges was preserved by Varro (apud Augustin. de Civitate Dei, xxi. 8), who quotes Castor, Dion of Naples, and Adrastus of Cyzicus — nobiles mathcmatici. The two subsequent periods are preserved by the Greek mythologists and the spurious books of Sibylline verses.
