“What can be avoided,
Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?
Yet Caesar shall go forth; for these predictions
Are to the world in general as to Caesar.”
On the following morning Caesar was murdered at the foot of Pompey’s statue in the Curia.
Immediately after Caesar’s death, records the Roman historian Suetonius in his “Life of Caesar”: “A Comet blazed for seven nights together, rising always about eleven o’clock, visible to all in Rome. It was taken by all to be the soul of Caesar, now received into Heaven; for which reason, accordingly, Caesar is represented in his statue with a star on his brow.”
Only one more Comet is recorded in ancient history before the birth of Christ. This was the Comet, now identified as Halley’s Comet, which shone over the dense forests of Germany, eleven years before the birth of Christ, when Drusus, the brother of Tiberius, was warring against the ancient Germans and robbing them of their last vestige of liberty. At the same time fell the death of Agrippa, who ruled over the Roman Empire in the absence of Augustus.
THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM
The coming of the Messia, according to the sacred legends of the Jews, was to be foretold by a flaming star.
Many sacred writers have held, and many still hold, as did the distinguished American astronomer R. A. Proctor, that the “Star of Bethlehem,” whose shining trail guided the Wise Men from The East, was a Comet. Lubienitius in his “History of Comets” expressly mentions the Star of Bethlehem as the most important Comet of history.