In Roumania, Venus was taken for a Russian aeroplane; and in Bessarabia (Russia), rifle-shots were fired at the beautiful planet, in the belief that it was a Roumanian dirigible.
Yet it would be sufficient to use quite a small telescope or even a good opera-glass to correct this error, for Venus showed phases which would have immediately completed the identification, and certainly not allowed it to be confused with aerial vehicles.
Such popular emotions caused by the appearance of Venus are not confined to our own times. In December 1797 the young General Bonaparte, after his wonderful conquest of Italy, returned to Paris to receive from the Directory the honours which presaged the consulate. Attended by a brilliant staff, he was going on horseback to the palace of the Luxembourg, where the Directory awaited him, when he was surprised to see, in the Rue de Tournon, all the people who stood ready to greet him turn round and look at a point in the sky instead of looking at him. His aide-de-camp told him that a star shone in the sky and that the French saw in it the star of the conqueror of Italy. It was Venus, then at its maximum brightness. Political conditions have changed, but the star remains.
It was there in mythological times:
Venus Astarte, daughter of the sea,
Shook off her mother’s tears amid her fond caresses
And fertilised the earth in wringing out her tresses.
She was there, receiving the lovers’ holocausts within the temples consecrated to her in Greece, Egypt, India, all over the world, for it was from her brilliant or mysterious aspects of the morning and evening that the cult of her charming personality was derived. Even nowadays many an observer sees in her only a radiant beauty in an ethereal dwelling-place, and does not remember that science has explained the idol and transfigured the star.
From its greatest easterly elongation to its greatest westerly elongation the brightness of the planet is such that when it is not quite close to the sun it is usually seen with the naked eye in daylight. Its phases are always curious and interesting. Their discovery by Galileo was of great importance to the beginning of modern astronomy in proving that the planets are globes without light of their own, similar to the globe which we inhabit.
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