Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/161

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 143 gence, of" the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in criAP. a hihorious work, has recorded all the great phenomena ^^' of nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect". Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe. A distinct chapter of Pliny" is designed for eclipses of an extraor- dinary nature and unusual duration ; but he contents himself with describing the singular defect of light which followed the murder of Cfcsar, when, during the greatest part of a year, the orb of the sun appeared pale and without splendour. This season of obscurity, which cannot surely be compared with the preter- natural darkness of the passion, had been already cele- brated by most of the poets'' and historians of that me- morable aee'^. n Seneca Quaest. Natur. i. 1. 15. vi. 1. vii. 17; Plin. Hist. Natur. 1. ii. ° Plin. Hist. Natur. ii. 30. P Virgil. Georg. i. 466 ; Tibullus, 1. i. eleg. v. ver. 75; Ovid. Meta- morph. XV. 782; Lucan. Pharsal. i. 540. The last of these poets places this prodigy before the civil war. 1 See a public epistle of M.Antony in Joseph. Antiquit. xiv. 12; Plu- tarch, in Cajsar, p. 471 ; Appian. Bell. Civil. 1. iv. ; Dion Cassius, 1. xlv. p. 431; Julius Obsequens, c. 128. His little treatise is an abstract of Livy's prodigies.