ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of the topics covered in this study were presented by J. Ramsey at a faculty seminar at the University of Illinois at Chicago in November 1993 and also in a paper delivered in December of that year at the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association in Washington, D.C. We gratefully acknowledge the advice and encouragement offered on those two occasions by friends and colleagues.

In addition to the acknowledgements that are found in the notes, we wish to express our gratitude to the following:

We thank the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and its staff for its kind cooperation in responding to our questions and for permitting us to consult its rich collection of early books on astronomy. In particular we thank Dr. Eric Carlson, astronomer, Dr. Evelyn Natividad, library administrator, Dr. Marvin Bolt, assistant curator of the History of Astronomy Department, and Mave Lawler also of that department. We are indebted to Nancy Romero, cataloguer of the rare book collection at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for a xerox copy of the 1715 edition of Sir Edmund Halley's Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets. Dr. Tai Wen Pai, Chinese librarian of the East Asian collection in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, very kindly helped us secure copies of all the Chinese texts that attest the comet of 44 B.C. At our own institution, Kathleen Kilian, the interlibrary loan librarian, provided invaluable assistance by securing copies of difficult to find monographs and articles that were relevant to our study.

We have benefitted greatly from an extensive correspondence and quite a few conversations over more than three years with Dr. Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In September 1996, Dr. Marsden very kindly read our manuscript, and his comments have led to the introduction of numerous improvements and new ideas.

We are grateful to the following scholars for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of parts, or the whole of this study: Profs. G. W. Bowersock, G. P. Goold, Alexander Jones, David Pingree, D. R. Shackleton Bailey, F. Richard Stephenson, and Gary Kronk. We are grateful as well to the two readers for the APA who commented on our manuscript: Prof. Robert Gurval and a second referee, who remains anonymous. In response to their suggestions and queries, we now devote greater space to such topics as the reliability of the Chinese sources that attest the comet of 44 B.C. , whether there was one comet or two in that year, and why it is that Cicero makes no mention of the sidus Iulium (a silence that is bound to raise questions). We also assess the potentially suspicious historical tradition that not only a comet but also an eruption of a volcano (most likely Etna) occurred not many months after the portentous Ides of March. For guidance in evaluating the exciting new evidence from the GISP2 ice core in Greenland that appears to confirm our literary sources that report an eruption of Mt. Etna in 44, we thank Prof. Gregory Zielinski of the Glacier Research Group of the University of New Hampshire.

Our colleague John Rohsenow in Linguistics kindly read through the sections of our manuscript dealing with the Chinese sources and their interpretation, vetting those pages for consistency in adhering to the conventions of Romanization. Members of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England assisted on numerous occasions in connection with issues having to do with the East Asian sources. In particular we thank Dr. Ho Peng Yoke, Director, Dr. Christopher Cullen, Deputy Director, and Mr. John Moffett, librarian, all of whom corresponded with us.

Shortly before his untimely death, Prof. Pierre Brind'Amour very kindly reviewed the parts of our argument having to do with the Roman calendar. He also provided us with his splendid SkyClock v. 1.1 for MS.DOS (SKCL), comprising two programs copyrighted 1988: "Clock" for converting dates to a host of different calendars and "Sky", an electronic ephemeris, for calculating the position of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars as seen from any location on Earth, at any given hour, in any given year. We used "Sky" to produce the data in Table 2 and to verify some of the calculations that we had arrived at by means of a program written by L. Licht.

Of course, none of the above-mentioned scholars who advised us and commented on our work is to be held responsible for any of the views expressed here.

Ramsey's work was supported by a Fellowship for College Teachers, awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the year 1993-94, and by a grant for the purchase of word-processing equipment from the Campus Research Board of the University of Illinois at Chicago. We thank the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Campus Research Board for providing funds for typesetting this book. We thank Tim Northrup of UIC Publications Services for typesetting the manuscript and our colleague Alexander MacGregor for his unstinting help with page proofs. Last, but by no means least, we express our special thanks to the editor of this series, Prof. David Blank, for his constant support and encouragement of our work. This book could not have been brought to fruition without his expert guidance.

J.T.R. & A.L.L.

Chicago
December 1996

e-mail to authors: comet@uic.edu