Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:










1 We may presume that the trabes are, for the most part, to be referred to the aurora borealis. The chasma and the appearances described in the twenty-seventh chapter are probably varieties of this meteor. On these phænomena we have the following remarks by Seneca: "Lucem in aëre, seu quamdam albedinem, angustam quidem, sed oblongam, de noctu quandoque visam, sereno cælo, si parallelo situ sit, Trabem vocant; si perpendiculari, Columnam; si, cum cuspide Bolida, siveJaculum." Nat. Quæst. vii. 4, and again, vii. 5, "Trabes autem non transcurrunt nec prætervolant, ut faces, sed commorantur, et in eadem parte cceli collucent."
2 Seneca describes this meteor, ubi supra, i. 14. "Sunt chasmata, cum aliquando cœli spatium discedit, et flammam dehiscens velut in abdito ostentat. Colores quoque horum omnium plurimi sunt. Quidam ruboris acerrimi, quidam evanidæ et levis flammæ, quidam candidæ lucis, quidam micantes, quidam æquabiliter et sine eruptionibus aut radiis fulvi." Aristotle's account of chasmata is contained in his Meteor. lib. i. cap. 5. p. 534.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.
View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.
- Cross-references to this page
(2):
- Smith's Bio, Diodo'rus
- Smith's Bio, Germa'nicus Caesar
- Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page
(1):
- Lewis & Short, juxtā