Alien Space Gods Of Ancient Greece and Rome (41 page)

The alleged appearance of Celestials at Caesar's funeral and his translation to the skies accord with the divine honours usually bestowed upon illustrious personages in Antiquity; such firm beliefs do suggest that the Romans clearly accepted the concept of the Gods, the Spacemen.

In 42 BC according to Piiny, three suns were seen; if indeed they denoted Spacemen their attention would surely be attracted by the destiny of Brutus. After Caesar's murder Brutus and Cassius fled East in wanton rampage, sacking towns in
Palestine
and ravaging
Asia Minor
, then they returned to
Macedonia
for final confrontation with Octavian and
Antony
. In Asia Brutus captured Theodotus of Chios, murderer of Pompey, still revered by most Romans; in stern revenge he had him put to death with every conceivable torture, so as Plutarch comments,191 Theodotus won more fame for his death than for his life. Brutus, an idealist, honoured even by his enemies, must have brooded on the retribution he meted out to the murderer of Pompey, remembering how he himself had murdered his own friend, Caesar. Conversant with those great tragedies of Greece Brutus knew the Gods decreed revenge.

The night before crossing the
Hellespont
with his army into Thrace Brutus lay in his dimly lighted tent lost in meditation; he fancied he heard a noise at the door, looking towards the lamp almost extinguished; his eyes suddenly beheld a strange and monstrous apparition of a man, silent at his side. Terrified by this solemn visitant Brutus asked fearfully 'Who art thou, of Gods or men?' The phantom replied 'I am thy evil genius, Brutus, and thou shalt see me at
Philippi
.' Summoning courage Brutus replied 'I shall see thee.' Brutus unburdened his fears to Cassias, who following the Epicurean philosophy argued that men see only what they think they see; still brooding Brutus began to speculate on the ethics of suicide. On the plain of Philippi in Macedonia Brutus won his own fierce battle against
Antony
, Cassius lost his and bade his freedman behead him. Octavian stayed in bed with influenza. Again the phantom loomed before Brutus but departed without a word. Brutus understood. He lost the second battle and fell on his sword. A tyrannicide whom a kinder fate might have made King.
Antony
gave him an illustrious funeral.

The reality of this apparition is open to doubt, although Plutarch was sufficiently impressed to mention it in ‘
Caesar',
LXXIX, also '
Brutus'
, XXXVI and XLVIII. Shakespeare's genius for melodrama promptly saw the phantom as the ghost of Caesar. Brutus was probably haunted by his guilty conscience, yet some remembering Faust and Mephistopheles, also those UFO, entities might view the apparition as a demon from infernal dimensions come for Brutus's soul.

Perhaps
Philippi
should be more famous for the first poetic protest against the futility of war. At
Athens
young Horace met Brutus, swayed by his republican ideals he accepted command of a legion. In the midst of the battle the poet saw war in all its horror, he flung away his shield and fled home. Later pardoned by Augustus, Horace secured the patronage of wealthy Maecenas, who gave him a private villa with a farm near the Sabine mountains; in these beautiful surroundings he wrote his lyrical Odes. Should Horace have stayed at
Philippi
and sought a hero's death, robbing posterity of a rare poet? Today dare any man answer?

Octavian and
Antony
now shared the world. Lepidus, who took
Africa
, wisely withdrew from the inevitable conflict for supreme mastery. Antony sailed East in flamboyant triumph while Octavian ruthlessly consolidated the key- positions in the West Like Alexander of old Antony sought new worlds to conquer; this 'international playboy' became irresistibly drawn towards Cleopatra queening the Nile. Accusing her of aid to Cassius Antony summoned Cleopatra to come to
Tarsus
. Lycosthenes reports that in 41 BC three suns merged into one, a similar prodigy occurred in the following year; this phenomenon might not have meant Spaceships but surely any Spaceman even from the furthest planet would have felt gloriously thrilled to watch this fateful meeting.

Cleopatra 'sailed up the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple, its rowers urging it on with silver oars to the sound of the flute blended with pipes and lutes.' This wonderful description from Plutarch was borrowed by Shakespeare in
'
Antony
and Cleopatra'
almost word for word. Their exotic amours interrupted by wars culminated in 31 BC with naval defeat by Octavius at
Actium
.
Antony
in theatrical climax stabbed himself. 'A Roman by a Roman valiantly vanquished.' Cleopatra cheated a Roman triumph by applying a poisonous asp to her breast; Octavian tried to frustrate her dramatic suicide and ordered snake-charmers to suck the poison from her wound. In vain! Cleopatra died as alluring as she had lived. The two lovers were buried together; playwrights have nude them both immortal.

Octavian took the title 'Augustus Imperator' and for forty-one years gave
Rome
a Golden Age. Literature in Augustan times bloomed as one of the fairest flowers in Antiquity, eclipsed only by those glorious plays of Periclean Athens. The poets of
Rome
deified the Emperor honouring the Gods; poems and plays approached Space-fiction. In his patriotic
'Aeneid
' Virgil sang of Venus, Jupiter and Mars as if they existed in the skies ever ready to wing down to the aid of heroes. It is fascinating to study the superstitions which a thousand years later transformed Virgil into a mediaeval magician, almost as if we were now to make Shakespeare a Spaceman.

An accretion of legends credited Virgil with a castle near
Naples
defended by an impenetrable barrier of air, mechanical horsemen on mechanical steeds, and a brazen head like some talking-computer which evaluated dangers and gave warning. 'He possessed a magic garden where no rain fell, protected by a wall of air, so that birds could not fly away; he boasted that he could make fruit-trees bear three times a year and his spirits fetched dishes for his banquets from the feasts of his foes.’

Mediaeval romances alleged that Virgil transported the daughter of the Sultan of Babylon to Naples on a bridge of air; his greatest feat of misplaced ingenuity was the invention of a marble hand which bit off the arm of any woman falsely swearing to her chastity; a poetic comparison with that marble statue of Don Gonzalo dragging the libertine, Don Juan, down to Hell. Such tales of enchantment do prove that people always believed in realms of magic, memories perhaps of Spacemen. The lovelorn Catullus had been too bewitched by his Clodia to bother about Gods but Ovid despite his 'Art of Love’ that brought his banishment to the
Black Sea
, reveled in fables of Celestials and their love-affairs; he depicted the Gods like Film-Stars. Livy in his wonderful epic history presented all the peaks and chasms of tremendous events, he studiously recorded those prodigies in the skies convinced they influenced the destiny of
Rome
.

The widespread influence of astrologers and diviners amid the materialist Roman world seems strangely topical in our age of Science today, with popular interest in the Occult. Most Romans followed Zeno's stoic philosophy of duty and reason, fatalistic adherence to a divine plan obliging star-worship and obedience to the Gods; in reaction a few preferred the Epicurean concept of pleasure, free-will, convinced that the highest good for any Man is happiness. In a galaxy of stern Dictators, great Generals and brilliant Writers, who adorned that stormy first century before Christ the most intriguing personality to our modern Space Age is probably Lucretius, a mysterious figure of unknown origin believed to be born about 99 BC.

It is strange that nothing is known of his birth or even his death, possibly about 52 BC; he was said to have been driven mad by a love-potion and to have perished by his own hand, somewhat surprising for a philosopher who wrote that 'sexual love ruins a man's health, wealth and reputation and makes him unhappy'. Living in Rome a wealthy Patrician during the period of civil war and bloodshed, Lucretius scorned the harsh code of duty and discipline and sought inspiration from the teachings of Epicurus born in 341 BC on the island of Samos like Pythagoras; he taught his followers to practise virtue because it leads to happiness and to cultivate peace of mind, the greatest of human treasures.

In his lofty poem 'De Rerum Natura' - 'On the Nature of Things' - Lucretius set forth the philosophy of Epicurus in most profound verse which surprises us today with a universality of knowledge almost modern debating that there are many worlds in the universe; he says in Book 2, 1074-8, 'You are bound to admit that in other parts of the universe there are other worlds inhabited by different races of men and different species of wild beast.'

More than sixteen hundred years later when Giordano Bruno said this in the same City of
Rome
, the Inquisition had him burned at the stake for heresy. Lucretius expounded the concept of Epicurus that 'Matter exists in the form of an infinite number of indivisible particles and atoms.' He wrote that 'atoms moving downwards through the void sometimes swerve a little from the straight course', a statement ridiculed for two thousand years until put forward a few years ago by the great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, to initiate the fantastic discoveries of nuclear-physics.

In curious anticipation of our own ultramodern concept of Extraterrestrials, Lucretius located the homes of the Gods in the spaces between the worlds, apparently Etherians. Ovid in 'Amores' I, 15, 23-24, wrote 'The verses of sublime Lucretius are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction.' Lucretius reminds us irresistibly of Count St. Germain, a Man of Mystery.

The Roman priests probably knew the secret of everburning lamps mentioned by the 'Lord' to Moses and found in
Athens
,
Edessa
and
Antioch
. The 12th century chronicler, William of Malmesbury (ii. pp. 86-87) relates a marvellous discovery in AD 1046 of Pallas, the son of Evander, who had been slain by Turnus, described in the
'Uia’\
Book X, the perpetual light in his sepulchre, a Latin epitaph, the corpse of a young giant, the enormous wound in his breast, ('pectus perofrat ingens, etc.'). A startling find, if true, since this famous duel occurred at nearly 1200 BC, so we are told!

In 1485 workmen in
Rome
searching for marble quarries discovered near the
Appian Way
an ancient Roman sarcophagus, on opening the lid they were startled to discover the body of a young woman in virgin bloom as if she had been interred that very day. The Florentine humanist, Bartolemeo Fonte, hastened to send a lyrical description to his friend, Francesco Sassetti, which fascinates us today. The brilliant writer, Mara Calabri, has translated Fonte's letter from Latin into Italian which we are privileged to interpret They discovered there a marble sarcophagus. On opening it, they found the body of a cat, its back covered by a substance two inches thick, greasy and perfumed. The odorous crust was removed beginning at the head, there appeared to them a face of such limpid paleness it seemed as if the young lady were buried that day. Her long black hair still hung from her skull, parted and knotted to suit a young girl and fastened in a little net of silk and gold.