270 ECLIPSES IN THE PRE-CHRISTRIAN PERIOD. 



ECLIPSES IN THE PRE-CHRISTIAN PERIOD. 



When the world was younger than it is now by many centuries, the eclipse 

 of the sun, which will to-morrow be studied with the closest attention by men of 

 science, and watched with an eager and intelligent curiosity by every one 

 wherever it is visible, would have caused the greatest terror even in the most 

 brilliant and highly civilized nations of the time. The lively Greeks and the 

 unimaginative Chinese alike looked upon an eclipse of the sun or moon with awe- 

 struck eyes. They believed it to be beyond the circle of the regular order of 

 nature, a portent big with the presages of calamity and disaster impending over 

 whole empires, republics and peoples Milton expressed this idea as prevalent 

 among the ancients in the splendid imagery in which Satan is described in the 

 Paradise Lost. The poet paints the form of the arch-fiend as one that had not 

 yet lost " all its original brightness," and compares him to the light of day 

 darkened : 



As when the sun, new risen, 



Looks through the horizontal misty air, 



Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon 



In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds 



On half the nations, and with fear of change 



Perplexes Monarchs. 



The dread and the awe it inspired were almost universal, and strangely enough 

 their impressions were extraordinarily vivid among the Greeks They were felt 

 by a nation that had given birth to a Homer, an ./Eschylus, and a Sophocles, and 

 whose greatest historian is unexcelled even to this day. They influenced the 

 leaders of the people as well as the masses even in the days when Socrates was 

 teaching in the streets of Athens, and when a Plato and an Aristotle were writ- 

 ing their immortal works. The Athenians had shaken themselves free from many 

 delusions, but the old mystic astrology they had acquired from the Egyptians and 

 Chaldeans clung to them in this and many analogous forms long after they had 

 learned to laugh at many of the tales of their gods. The singularity of the firm 

 foundation of this belief in a people so acute and so subtle is yet heightened by 

 the assertion, which found credit almost everywhere, that Thales, the famous 

 Ionian philosopher, had predicted the great eclipse of the year 610 B. C. The 

 Medians and the Lydians were then at war, and a fierce engagement was in pro- 

 gress when the shadow of the moon began to obscure the face of the sun. At first- 

 it was scarcely noticed, but long before the totality of the eclipse was reached 

 both the armies, infuriated though they were by all the enmity of protracted hostil- 

 ities were so thoroughly frightened that they laid down their arms, and when the 

 sun again grew bright, to turn away the anger of heaven, peace was at once 

 concluded and a marriage celebrated be ween the son and the daughter of the 

 rival monarchs. Thales some years afterwards died, but his fame survived him, 

 and yet in spite of this the Athenian superstition was the cause of innumerable 

 woes from another eclipse. It was in the year 413 before our era, when their 

 generals had determined to abandon the siege of Syracuse. The night they had 



