Julius Obsequens

Julius Obsequens was a Roman writer of the fourth century A.D. who collected the wonders recorded in Livy's history into a separate book, the Prodigiorum liber (Book of Prodigies; also given as Liber de prodigiis), an account of the omens and portents that occurred in Rome between 249 and 12 B.C. His book is a source for sky prodigies of the late Roman Republic, among them a golden fireball that rolled to the earth and a flaming "shield" that crossed the sky from west to east, and it is cited in the literature on aerial reports from antiquity. Obsequens wrote centuries after the events he lists, so the text is a compilation drawn from Livy rather than eyewitness testimony.

Michael Salla's 2026 briefing for public officials opens its seven levels of the phenomenon with craft and orbs associated with non-human intelligence that "are found in reports by Roman historians such as Livy". The sky entries behind that reading are Obsequens's, portents that the critic of ancient-astronaut writing Jason Colavito notes are "all cataloged from Livy (though in missing books)". The scientist Richard Stothers weeded out the Roman reports with conventional explanations and judged that the residue falls "neatly into the same categories as modern UFO reports"; Colavito holds that the notices are Roman portents, mostly distorted meteorological events, and that the UFO writers who quote them have mistranslated the Latin. The first reading needs the Roman magistrates who investigated witnesses to have recorded something real; the second needs only that a text set down centuries afterwards, and printed in the sixteenth century with additions by another hand, was misread by the writers who took it up.

The Book of Prodigies

Obsequens's book is an epitome of the prodigies that Livy had set down in his Roman history, and Thomas E. Bullard places it in the Roman tradition in which concern for prodigies was a cornerstone of the state religion, with Pliny the Elder including prodigies in his natural history and historians such as Livy and Dio Cassius recording them as integral elements of the historical record. The manuscript surfaced mysteriously around 1500 and disappeared again after its publication in 1508; many editions followed, with translations into Italian and French and with woodcut illustrations, one set by Bernard Salomon in 1553 and 1554 and another in 1589, and the most accessible modern edition is the Loeb Classical Library A Book of Prodigies of 1959.

The text's own title extends the book back to the year 505 of the city, 249 B.C., but the first surviving entry stands under the consuls of 190 B.C. and the last under those of 11 B.C. Only part of the work survives: Aldus Manutius published it in 1508, Conrad Lycosthenes made additions that were printed with the text at Basel in 1552 and marked with asterisms, and John de Tournes reprinted the whole the next year without the distinction, so that "the book of Obsequens, and the supplement, appeared as done by the same hand" until Scheffer's edition of 1679 printed the two in different type. Of Livy's own history only books 1–10 and 21–45 survive, and the Liber, a list of portents "assembled from Livy", is slated for the final volume of D. S. Levene's Oxford edition of the Livian fragments. Livy's prodigy lists for the years before about 123 B.C. derive, perhaps indirectly, from the Annales Maximi kept by the Pontifex Maximus, Stothers writes, and Obsequens stands with Pliny, Plutarch and Orosius among "Livy and his extractors". Colavito singles out a passage he describes as "a 'restored' text from Julius Obsequens, added in the sixteenth century by a German", which "exactly parallels Livy".

Prodigy accounts met scepticism from learned quarters in their own day. Cicero mounted the most systematic attack against signs and portents to survive from antiquity in De divinatione, arguing that prodigies held only the significance an interpreter read into them. Livy himself recorded that the number of prodigy reports rose with the fear of war with Carthage, though he did not say which ones he doubted. Sky sights now identified with known bodies were read as portents too: Halley's Comet was first recorded by Chinese astronomers in 240 BC, and possibly as early as 467 BC, as a strange and unknown "guest light" in the sky.

Sky prodigies

Readers took the Roman prodigies for craft in the 1950s: Harold T. Wilkins extended the ufological past to Roman and medieval times in Flying Saucers on the Attack (1954), while Donald H. Menzel cited airships and prodigies in 1953 as natural causes mistaken for wonders. Stothers calls Menzel's study of Pliny superficial and says it induced enthusiasts, Wilkins among them, to compile "long, uncritical lists" of everything seen in the ancient skies, and Samuel Rosenberg's chapter of the 1969 Condon Report found that the authors of "ancient UFO reports" were "uniformly highly uncritical of the authenticity of these reports". Stothers himself holds that with more information "conventional scientific hypotheses could explain most, if not all" of the reports, although a small residue remains.

A woodcut in the 1589 edition illustrates two aerial prodigies, a burning torch that fell from the sky and an object like a round shield that flew from west to east, which Bullard's caption dates to 98 B.C. The Latin reads fax ardens Tarquiniis late visa subito lapsu cadens and sub occasu solis orbis clipei similis ab occidente ad orientem visus perferri: a burning torch seen far and wide at Tarquinii falling in a sudden glide, and at sunset a disc like a shield seen carried from west to east. Latin writers other than Obsequens also record burning shields in the sky. Pliny the Elder records in his Natural History a burning shield, glittering as it ran from west to east at sunset, during the consulship of L. Valerius and C. Marius, and Seneca the Younger lists burning shields and columns among the fires seen in the sky in his Naturales quaestiones. Stothers treats Pliny's clipeus and Obsequens's entry as one report of 100 B.C., "a circular object, like a round shield", and finds that nothing in the ancient reports forbids that these were bolides, meteoric fireballs. Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck's anthology Wonders in the Sky (2009) presents the entry as a "round shield" flying from west to east, and Colavito replies that the Latin describes "a round glowing globe, like a meteorite", and that the word rendered "shield" can also mean "meteorite". Two other entries use the vocabulary of arms: Compsae arma in caelo volare visa in 154 B.C., weapons seen flying in the sky at Compsa, and in 104 B.C. weapons seen fighting from east and west, those from the west being beaten. Stothers reads such military terms as a witness reaching for "the most advanced technology known at the time", a tendency he finds in modern UFO reports too.

For 91 B.C. Obsequens reports a golden fireball that rolled to the earth, increased in size, lifted from the ground and grew large enough to blot out the sun; Bullard finds too little information in such entries to carry weight, and sets them against the Chinese "pearl" that Shen Kuo records, which he treats as the early report with enough detail to compare with modern ones. The Latin has two fireballs that year: one at sunrise from the northern region with a great sound in the heavens, and one in the Spoletium district, colore aureo globus ignis ad terram devolutus, maiorque factus e terra ad orientem ferri visus magnitudine solem obtexit. Stothers takes the sunrise ball, with its sound, as probably a bolide, rejects Peter Bicknell's ball lightning reading of the Spoletium object, whose trajectory he finds more consistent with a bolide's approach, passage and retreat, and adds that "an actual landing on or near the ground is strongly indicated". Vallée and Aubeck hold that it could be neither meteor nor ball lightning; Colavito, taking the summary as "somewhat accurate", sees "something like the Tunguska meteor", and charges that Wilkins's English adds "a scientific-sounding gyration and a revolution that aren't in the original".

Salla's briefing sets the Roman reports beside the sixteenth-century sky battles over Basel and Nuremberg, "witnessed by thousands and depicted in newspaper reports", as the most significant ancient sightings. The 1566 celestial phenomenon over Basel and the 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg reach the modern reader through the broadsides of the sixteenth-century prodigy trade, in which the Basel theologian Lycosthenes, Obsequens's editor, compiled his 1557 chronicle of prodigies.

Ships in the sky and the 216 B.C. passage

William Bramley attributes to Obsequens a passage for 216 B.C. in The Gods of Eden: "Things like ships were seen in the sky over Italy.... At Arpi a round shield was seen in the sky.... At Capua, the sky was all on fire, and one saw figures like ships." The surviving text opens at 190 B.C., and Stothers places the ships in Livy at 218 B.C. and the parmae seen at Arpi in Livy at 217 B.C. Colavito, following the French researcher Dominique Caudron, traces a widely repeated tale of ships and men in white over Apulia on the day of Cannae in 216 B.C. to Livy 21.62, 22.1 and 24.10, put together by an Italian UFO magazine in the 1960s, and notes that Guy Tarade repeated it in 1969 "adding a spurious citation" to Obsequens.

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