A naval disaster foretold in the stars
The streaks are the stars of Orion moving across the sky over six minutes.Photo by BURИBLUE
I’m working through some material on Camerina. There’s some interesting questions coming up. So far it seems to be exactly what I’m looking for which is usually too good to be true. Fortunately more of a poke around the texts reveals that I could be making a few unwarranted assumptions.
In the meantime here’s a tract which I probably won’t work in, but might be useful to refer back to in the future. Usually people refer back to Hesiod when they want to show how people watched the stars to find the sailing season. That’s fine but it dates back to the eighth century. Were people still looking for the same signs hundreds of years later? Polybius, Greek historian writing here about the First Punic War in the mid-third century BC shows they were. In this section the Romans are eager to sail to meet the Carthaginians and are moving along the southern Sicilian coast.
The passage was effected in safety, and the coast of Camarina was reached: but there they experienced so terrible a storm, and suffered so dreadfully, as almost to beggar description.
The disaster was indeed extreme: for out of their three hundred and sixty-four vessels eighty only remained. The rest were either swamped or driven by the surf upon the rocks and headlands, where they went to pieces and filled all the seaboard with corpses and wreckage. No greater catastrophe is to be found in all history as befalling a fleet at one time. And for this Fortune was not so much to blame as the commanders themselves. They had been warned again and again by the pilots not to steer along the southern coast of Sicily facing the Libyan sea, because it was exposed and yielded no safe anchorage; and because, of the two dangerous constellations, one had not yet set and the other was on the point of rising (for their voyage fell between the rising of Orion and that of the Dog Star).
That would be around early July by our calendar.
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