Nero and the Comets of Doom

Dec 24, 2007 Alun Science, The Past 3 Comments Ancient History, Archaeoastronomy, Archaeology, Comet, Religion, Star of Bethlehem

Won­der or portent of doom? Photo (cc) Won­der­fer­ret.

Judith Weingarten at Zen­o­bia: Empress of the East, has some thought­ful com­ments as a follow-up to The Star of Beth­le­hem Solved? in The Magi and Christ­mas. She starts by talk­ing about Marco Polo’s trip to the east, and it’s a great example of how his­tory can be a series of echoes from the past inter­act­ing with each other. She also raises three prob­lems with Jen­kins’ the­ory and two of them high­light how little we know about ancient astro­nomy. Her most ser­i­ous objec­tion is that comets are not stars, and Mat­thew would not have con­fused the two. It’s a very good point and strikes at the heart of the prob­lem I have with some his­tor­ies of ancient astronomy.

One reason that it’s reas­on­able to state that a comet would not be con­fused with a star is down to Aris­totle. Aris­totle puts for­ward his the­ory of comets in book one of Met­eor­o­logy. He argues they’re caused by exhal­a­tions of the earth and exist in the sub-lunar realm. This would explain their unpre­dict­ab­il­ity as for Aris­totle the heav­ens were per­fect and con­stant. Aris­totle was writ­ing in the 4^th Cen­tury BC, but his ideas had great influ­ence. Manilius wrote wrote his Astro­nom­ica in the Augustan/Tiberian period largely accepts Aristotle’s explan­a­tion. This isn’t the only explan­a­tion of comets though, and we’re lucky that Aris­totle records the opin­ions of other thinkers before dis­card­ing them. These explan­a­tions would sug­gest that some people in the ancient world were think­ing about comets as stars. In Book one, part six we get:

Anaxagoras and Demo­critus declare that comets are a con­junc­tion of the plan­ets approach­ing one another and so appear­ing to touch one another.

Some of the Itali­ans called Pythagoreans say that the comet is one of the plan­ets, but that it appears at great inter­vals of time and only rises a little above the hori­zon. This is the case with Mer­cury too; because it only rises a little above the hori­zon it often fails to be seen and con­sequently appears at great inter­vals of time.

A view like theirs was also expressed by Hip­po­crates of Chios and his pupil Aeschylus.

Unfor­tu­nately I’m not sure how much this tells us about Matthew’s astro­nomy. Aristotle’s Met­eor­o­logy is a book of ser­i­ous research notes. It wouldn’t have been access­ible to the aver­age farmer in the ancient world, nor neces­sar­ily reflec­ted the folk astro­nomy of the period. It’s the astro­nomy of an élite. This is a prob­lem every­where in ancient his­tory. It tends to be writ­ten by male élites and the vast bulk of pop­u­la­tion was not of interest to them. In con­trast Matthew’s gos­pel is a work of evan­gel­ism. It was inten­ded to be spread among the gen­eral popu­lace and so folk astro­nomy is import­ant if we take the star of Beth­le­hem ser­i­ously. How can you access this astro­nomy? It’s hard but there are clues in other texts.

Aratus wrote the Phaenom­ena, a poetic descrip­tion of the sky, in the 3^rd Cen­tury BC. He only men­tions comets briefly, but the word he uses on line 1092 is κομόωντες. From Kidd’s trans­la­tion (page 557), this is from κομῆται ἀστέρες. Kometai asteres are lit­er­ally hairy stars. Pliny’s Nat­ural His­tory opens its sec­tion on comets in the Pen­guin trans­la­tion (page 19) with:

There are also stars of sev­eral kinds that sud­denly come into being in the sky itself. The Greeks call them ‘comets’; we call them ‘long-haired’ stars, because they bristle with a blood-red tail which is shaggy on top, like hair.

You can read the sec­tion on comets in a Loeb trans­la­tion on the Perseus Pro­ject. I can see that cer­tainly there would be a view among the edu­cated that comets were not stars, but I think there’s enough uncer­tainty to leave the door open to Matthew’s star being a comet.

Judith Weingarten’s second objec­tion is more ser­i­ous. Comets are bad news. Some authors like Aris­totle think they’re bad news because the con­di­tions which lead to things like civic strife also cause comets. Manilius closes book one of the Astro­nom­ica (from line 809 onward) with a descrip­tion of comets. He can be bleak like around line 893–5 in the Loeb trans­la­tion:

Death comes with those celes­tial torches, which threaten earth with the blaze of pyres unceas­ing, since heaven and nature’s self are stricken and seem doomed to share men’s tomb.

Fol­low­ing that with Peace on Earth and Good­will to all Men seems difficult.

Des­pite this, there are a few reas­ons to sus­pect that comets weren’t auto­mat­ic­ally bad news. My favour­ite is men­tioned on page 24 of Comets, Pop­u­lar Cul­ture, and the Birth of Mod­ern Cos­mo­logy by Sara Schech­ner Gen­uth, which I found by acci­dent while search­ing on Google. She tells of Chaere­mon the Stoic who I don’t remem­ber hear­ing of before. He wrote the book On Comets which sadly is lost, but in it he appar­ently argues that comets can be good news. Con­text is import­ant before we accept this opin­ion and in this case the con­text is inter­est­ing. Chaere­mon was a tutor to Nero, who as I men­tioned in the earlier post, had a few comets vis­ible dur­ing his reign. It could be that this was a mat­ter of flat­ter­ing the emperor.

Another Ner­o­nian source is Seneca’s De Cometis, which is book seven of the Quaes­tiones Nat­urales. This dates from around AD 60, so it close to the gos­pels in date. There sadly not a lot I can say about that because I don’t have a copy handy. Liba Taub touches on it a few times in her book Ancient Met­eor­o­logy, and it seems to be in part a mat­ter of writ­ing against fear of comets. Seneca even says that the rule of Nero “redeemed comets of their bad char­ac­ter”, but given Nero’s repu­ta­tion that’s debatable.

Pliny the Elder is the closest source in time to the Gos­pel of Mat­thew that I’ve looked at and he can be pos­it­ive about comets. From Nat­ural His­tory again:

It is thought import­ant to notice towards what part it darts its beams, or from what star it receives its influ­ence, what it resembles, and in what places it shines. If it resembles a flute, it por­tends some– [p. 1058] thing unfa­vour­able respect­ing music; if it appears in the parts of the signs referred to the private parts, some­thing respect­ing lewd­ness of man­ners; some­thing respect­ing wit and learn­ing, if they form a tri­an­gu­lar or quad­rangu­lar fig­ure with the pos­i­tion of some of the fixed stars; and that some one will be poisoned, if they appear in the head of either the north­ern or the south­ern serpent.

I’ve altered a couple of words to update the trans­la­tion slightly an emboldened the pos­it­ive sign because it could eas­ily be lost amongst the doom and fore­bod­ing. This is cur­rently the biggest prob­lem I see with Jen­kins’ idea. It does require comets to be indic­at­ive of change as well as death and dis­aster. In the after­math of the fall of the temple of Jer­u­s­alem that may be a hard idea to support.

There are a couple more texts which give cir­cum­stan­tial evid­ence to sup­port Jen­kins inter­pret­a­tion. Manilius writes in Astro­nom­ica 1.8146: In times of great upheaval rare ages have seen the sud­den glow of flame through the clear air and comets blaze into life and per­ish. This is the same guy that I quote above say­ing “Death comes with those celes­tial torches…,” so it’s not over-positive but it does show there’s another prob­lem in inter­pret­ing comets. Their mean­ings were not fixed in antiquity.

For Manilius this was a time of great change. Augus­tus had turned the Repub­lic into an Empire and as part of this Augus­tus was engaged on a rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent approach to pub­lic image. Part of this was the use of pop­u­lar astro­logy and so this was a very dynamic time in the use of astro­nom­ical sym­bols. Vir­gil uses a comet in the Aeneid as a divine sign. There’s a lot of room for dis­cus­sion of whether or not the Gos­pel of Mat­thew uses post-Augustan imagery and uses it to com­mu­nic­ate its own story. The arrival of the Mes­siah would be a time of change, and so the story could be using the lan­guage of cre­at­ing a new epoch, hence a comet. Judith Weingarten is abso­lutely right in identi­fy­ing this a prob­lem for his­tor­i­ans. The mean­ing of comets to a 1^st Cen­tury audi­ence is uncer­tain. I expect that if this idea gains trac­tion, this is what a lot of the dis­cus­sion will be about.

Her final point is one that I simply can­not answer. She shows that Cas­sius Dio recor­ded the pro­ces­sion of the Magi as pro­ceed­ing over­land without passing through Syria. If I remem­ber rightly, Anti­och is cur­rently the favour­ite loc­a­tion for the writ­ing of Matthew’s Gos­pel, which is well off this route. Why then is the pro­ces­sion in the gos­pel? I don’t have an answer. Non­ethe­less even this shows why Jen­kins’ idea is appeal­ing. It’s a ques­tion that needs to be answered but, like the prob­lems above, it’s a ques­tion that can be dis­cussed by his­tor­i­ans. Most Star of Beth­le­hem ideas simply aren’t his­tor­ical answers. If you have an opin­ion then add it below or on the Zen­o­bia blog.

Links

The Magi and Christ­mas: Judith Weingarten’s com­ments on Rod Jen­kins’ Star of Beth­le­hem paper.

What’s up with the star of Beth­le­hem?: Another col­lec­tion of views on what the Star might be.

The Comet Book: Not dir­ectly rel­ev­ant, but I don’t link to Bib­li­odys­sey often enough.