The comet of 79 A.D. is interesting as having given rise to a happy retort from Vespasian, whose death the comet was held to portend. Seeing some of his courtiers whispering about the comet, 'That hairy star,' he said, 'does not portend evil to me. It menaces rather the king of the Parthians. He is a hairy man, but I am bald.' Anna Comnena goes even beyond Josephus. He only rebuked other men for not believing so strongly as he did himself in the significance of comets--a rebuke little needed, indeed, if we can judge from what history tells us of the terrors excited by comets. But the judicious daughter of Alexius was good enough to approve of the wisdom which provided these portents. Speaking of a remarkable comet which appeared before the irruption of the Gauls into the Roman empire, she says: 'This happened by the usual administration of Providence in such cases; for it is not fit that so great and strange an alteration of things as was brought to pass by that irruption of theirs should be without some previous denunciation and admonishment from heaven.' Socrates, the historian (b. 6, c. 6), says that when Gainas besieged Constantinople, 'so great was the danger which hung over the city, that it was presignified and portended by a huge blazing comet which reached from heaven to the earth, the like whereof no man had ever seen before.' And Cedrenus, in his 'Compendium of History,' states that a comet appeared before the death of Johannes Tzimicas, the emperor of the East, which foreshadowed not alone his death, but the great calamities which were to befall the Roman empire by reason of their civil wars. In like manner, the comet of 451 announced the death of Attila, that of 455 the death of Valentinian. The death of Merovingius was announced by the comet of 577, of Chilperic by that of 584, of the Emperor Maurice by that of 602, of Mahomet by that of 632, of Louis the Debonair by that of 837, and of the Emperor Louis II. by that of 875. Nay, so confidently did men believe that comets indicated the approaching death of great men, that they did not believe a very great man _could_ die without a comet. So they inferred that the death of a very great man indicated the arrival of a comet; and if the comet chanced not to be visible, so much the worse--not for the theory, but--for the comet. 'A comet of this kind,' says Pingré, 'was that of the year 814, presaging the death of Charlemagne.' So Guillemin quotes Pingré; but he should rather have said, such was the comet whose arrival was announced by Charlemagne's death--and in no other way, for it was not seen by mortal man.