Abnormal celestial appearances are scarcely noticed in the Homeric poems. Certain portentous darknesses, reinforcing the solemnity of crises of battle, or impending doom,[43] are much too vaguely defined to be treated as indexes to natural phenomena of any kind. Nevertheless, Professor Stockwell finds that, by a curious coincidence, Ajax’s Prayer to Father Zeus for death—if death was decreed—in the light, might very well have been uttered during a total eclipse of the sun, the lunar shadow having passed centrally over the Hellespont at 2h. 21 min. P.M. on August 28, 1184 B.C.[44] Comets, however, have left not even the suspicion of a trace in these early songs; nor do they embody any tradition of a star shower, or of a display of Northern Lights. The rain of blood, by which Zeus presaged and celebrated the death of Sarpedon,[45] might, it is true, be thought to embody a reminiscence of a crimson aurora, frequently, in early times, chronicled under that form; but the portent indicated is more probably an actual shower of rain tinged red by a microscopic alga. An unmistakable meteor, however, furnishes one of the glowing similes of the Iliad. By its help the irresistible swiftness and unexpectedness of Athene’s descent from Olympus to the Scamandrian plain are illustrated.
_Iliad_, xv. 668; xvii. 366; _Odyssey_, xx. 356.
Even as the son of Kronos the crooked counsellor sendeth a star, a portent for mariners or a wide host of men, bright shining, and therefrom are scattered sparks in multitude; even in such guise sped Pallas Athene to earth, and leapt into their midst.[46]
In the Homeric verses the Milky Way—the ‘path of souls’ of prairie-roving Indians, the mediæval ‘way of pilgrimage’[47]—finds no place. Yet its conspicuousness, as seen across our misty air, gives an imperfect idea of the lustre with which it spans the translucent vault which drew the wondering gaze of the Achæan bard.
To Compostella. The popular German name for the Milky Way is still _Jakobsstrasse_, while the three stars of Orion’s belt are designated, in the same connexion, _Jakobsstab_, staff of St James.
The point of most significance about Homer’s scanty astronomical notions is that they were of home growth. They are precisely such as would arise among a people in an incipient stage of civilisation, simple, direct, and childlike in their mode of regarding natural phenomena, yet incapable of founding upon them any close or connected reasoning. Of Oriental mysticism there is not a vestige. No occult influences rain from the sky. Not so much as a square inch of foundation is laid for the astrological superstructure. It is true that Sirius is a ‘baleful star’; but it is in the sense of being a harbinger of hot weather. Possibly, or probably, it is regarded as a concomitant cause, no less than as a sign of the August droughts; indeed the _post hoc_ and the _propter hoc_ were, in those ages, not easily separable; the effect, however, in any case, was purely physical, and so unfit to become the starting-point of a superstition.