Part 4

Thus it can be seen that Comets have been held to foretell disaster on one side, and victory on the other.

The Comets which conquerors hailed as their guiding stars, have meant war and bloodshed and disaster to those whom they came to conquer.

The same Comets which shone upon the birth of mighty rulers, have blazed in warning of their death.

Julius Caesar, who was born under a Comet, saw his bloody end foretold by another Comet.

Therefore, Shakespeare in his play “Julius Caesar,” makes Calpurnia say to Caesar:

“When beggars die, there are no Comets seen; The Heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

On the night of Caesar’s assassination, when the Comet was seen blazing at its brightest, the Romans said that it had come to bear away the great soul of the murdered Caesar.

At the death of Nero, the Roman Emperor, who persecuted the Christians, a Comet blazed forth again. The Roman historian Suetonius, who wrote the Life of Emperor Nero, thus described this Comet:

“A blazing star, which was commonly held to portend destruction to Kings and Princes, reappeared above the horizon several nights in succession.”

Another great Comet (Halley’s again) reappeared when Attila, the King of the Huns, the “Scourge of God,” was overthrown in the greatest battle of Christendom on the Catalaunian fields.

Claudius, a Roman writer of that period, then stated that “a Comet was never seen in the Heavens without implying some dreadful event.”

This has ever been the belief of all the great poets of olden time.

Homer, the greatest poet of Ancient Greece, a thousand years before the birth of Christ, sang of:

“The red star, that from his flaming hair Shakes down diseases, pestilence and war.”

Let it be explained here that the word Comet in Greek means “long-haired,” from kome,—hair.

Virgil, the greatest Roman poet, sang of “the baleful glare of bloody Comets,” and again, of “dreadful Comets blazing in the sky.”

Tasso, the greatest of Italian poets after Dante, sang thus of Comets in his “Jerusalem Delivered”:

“Qual con le chiome sanguinose horrende Splender Cometa suol per l’aria adusta, Che i regni muta, e i feri morbi adduce, Ai purpurei tiranni infausta luce.” —Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto VII., Stanza 52.

Rendered thus by Wiffen into English:

“As with its bloody locks let loose in air Horribly bright, the Comet shows whose shine Plagues the parched World, whose looks the Nations scare, Before whose face States change, and Powers decline, To purple Tyrants all, an inauspicious sign.”

The great English poets, on their part, have lifted up their voices to sing of the dire effects of Comets.

Shakespeare, the greatest of them all, abounds in allusions to these dread wandering stars.

Thus he makes Horatio in the first scene of “Hamlet” speak with awe of:

“Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood;

* * * * *

And even the like precurse of fierce events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on.”

More briefly Shakespeare in his “Henry VI.” refers to:

“A Comet of revenge A prophet to the fall of all our foes”;