CHAPTER XII.
ECLIPSES AND COMETS.
We have seen in the earlier chapters on the systems of the ancients and their ideas of the world how everything was once supposed to have exclusive reference to man, and how he considered himself not only chief of animate objects, but that his own city was the centre of the material world, and his own world the centre of the material universe; that the sun was made to shine, as well as the moon and stars, for his benefit; and that, were it not for him they would have no reason for existence. And we have seen how, step by step, these illusions have been dispelled, and he has learnt to appreciate his own littleness in proportion as he has realised the immensity of the universe of which he forms part.
If such has been his history, and such his former ideas on the regular parts, as we may call them, of nature, much more have similar ideas been developed in relation to those other phenomena which, coming at such long intervals, have not been recognised by him as periodic, but have seemed to have some relation to mundane affairs, often of the smallest consequence. Such are eclipses of the sun and moon, comets, shooting-stars, and meteors. Among the less instructed of men, even when astronomers of the same age and nation knew their real nature, eclipses have always been looked upon as something ominous of evil.
Among the ancient nations people used to come to the assistance of the moon, by making a confused noise with all kinds of instruments, when it was eclipsed. It is even done now in Persia and some parts of China, where they fancy that the moon is fighting with a great dragon, and they think the noise will make him loose his hold and take to flight. Among the East Indians they have the same belief that when the sun and the moon are eclipsed, a dragon is seizing them, and astronomers who go there to observe eclipses are troubled by the fears of their native attendants, and by their endeavours to get into the water as the best place under the circumstances. In America the idea is that the sun and moon are tired when they are eclipsed. But the more refined Greeks believed for a long time that the moon was bewitched, and that the magicians made it descend from heaven, to put into the herbs a certain maleficent froth. Perhaps the idea of the Dragon arose from the ancient custom of calling the places in the heavens at which the eclipses of the moon took place the head and tail of the Dragon.
In ancient history we have many curious instances of the very critical influence that eclipses have had, especially in the case of events in a campaign, where it was thought unfavourable to some projected attempt.
Thus an eclipse of the moon was the original cause of the death of the Athenian general Nicias. Just at a critical juncture, when he was about to depart from the harbour of Syracuse, the eclipse filled him and his whole army with dismay. The result of his terror was that he delayed the departure of his fleet, and the Athenian army was cut in pieces and destroyed, and Nicias lost his liberty and life.
Plutarch says they could understand well enough the cause of the eclipse of the sun by the interposition of the moon, but they could not imagine by the opposition of what body the moon itself could be eclipsed.
One of the most famous eclipses of antiquity was that of Thales, recorded by Herodotus, who says:—"The Lydians and the Medes were at war for five consecutive years. Now while the war was sustained on both sides with equal chance, in the sixth year, one day when the armies were in battle array, it happened that in the midst of the combat the day suddenly changed into night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this phenomenon to the Ionians, and had pointed out precisely that very year as the one in which it would take place. The Lydians and Medes, seeing the night succeeding suddenly to the day, put an end to the combat, and only cared to establish peace."