A great comet traversed the northern skies for seven days in 44 B.C., bright enough to shine even in the summer light of day. To Roman eyes, such a celestial sighting ordinarily spelled woe. But this was no ordinary case. As the Emperor Augustus notes in his memoirs, contemporaries saw it as the happy sign of the apotheosis of Gaius Julius Caesar. The conqueror of Europe, towering intellectual and dictator for life, daggered to death that year by self-proclaimed saviors of the republic, had found a place in heaven to live on.
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