There was also a very widely held belief, which has survived in European folk-lore, that each man has his star in the sky. This star is dazzling if his lot be brilliant, pale if his state of life be humble. It is lit at his birth and falls when he dies. The fall of a shooting star therefore denotes a person’s death. This popular idea existed in antiquity. Pliny the Naturalist reports it, although he denies its truth,[218] and it was again combated in the fifth century by Eusebius of Alexandria. “Were there then only two stars in the time of Adam and Eve,” asks the bishop, “and only eight after the Flood when Noah and seven other persons alone were saved in the Ark?”[219] The formulas of epitaphs and the very usages of language show how current was the belief that each man was, as we still say, born under a good or an evil star. _Astrosus_ was the Latin equivalent of our _unlucky_. This doctrine of a rudimentary astrology was incorporated in the general system of learned genethlialogy. Although this latter attributed a predominant influence to the planets and the signs of the zodiac, it also taught, in accordance with popular opinion, that each of the most brilliant stars (λαμπροὶ ἀστέρες) ensures riches, power and glory to the newly born child, if it be in a favourable position at his birth.[220] But side by side with this general conception of a relation between the life of the stars and that of men, a much more precise idea is met with from the first. The soul was, as we shall see,[221] often conceived by the ancients as a bird preparing for flight. Where would it alight when it had passed through the air except on the heavenly bodies which were still imagined as quite near the earth? The paintings on an Egyptian tomb of a late period, found at Athribis, show us the soul of the dead man fluttering with those others like him in the midst of the constellations.[222]