BOOK II. VIII. 52-ix. 54 



retire, so as to refresh the earth with the darkness of 

 the nights ? when otherwise it would unquestionably 

 scorch up the earth, and even as it is does so in a 

 certain part, so great is its magnitude. 



IX. The first person indeed of Roman nationality EcUpses, 

 who pubhshed an explanation of both kinds of ecHpse ''"•«^««^ «" '^ 

 was Sulpicius Gallus — the colleague in the consulsliip of 

 Marcus Marcelhis, but at the time miUtary tribune — 

 who dehvered the army from fear when on the day 

 before the defeat " of King Perseus by Paulus he was 

 brought before an assembly by the commander-in- 

 chief to foretell an ecHpse ; and later also by writing 

 a treatise. The original discovery was made in 

 Greece by Thales of Miletus, who in the fourth year 

 of the 48th Olympiad (585 b.c.) foretold the ecHpse 

 of the sun that occurred in the reign of Alyattes, in 

 the 170th year after the foundation of Rome. After 

 their time the courses of both stars for 600 years were 

 prophecied by Hipparchus, whose work embraced 

 the calendar of the nations and the situations of 

 places and aspects of the peoples * — Kis method 

 being, on the evidence of his contemporaries,'^ none 

 other than fuU partnership in the designs of nature. 

 O mighty heroes, of loftier than mortal estate, who 

 have discovered the law of those great divinities and 

 released the miserable mind of man from fear, 

 mortaHty dreading as it did in ecHpses of the stars 

 crimes or death of some sort (those subHme singers, 

 the bards Stesichorus and Pindar,** clearly felt this 

 fear owing to an ecHpse of the sun), or in the dying 

 of the moon inferring that she was poisoned and con- 

 sequently coming to her aid with a noisy clattering 

 of cymbals (this alarm caused the Athenian general 

 Nicias, in his ignorance of the cause, to be afraid to 



203 



