Colin Wells at the Dublin Review of Books:
Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the European side of the Hellespont in northeastern Greece. Pliny’s younger contemporary, the Greek biographer Plutarch, wrote that the locals still worshipped the scorched brownish metallic boulder, the size of a wagon-load, that was left after the explosion; it remained on display in Pliny and Plutarch’s time, five centuries later.
Both writers connect the meteorite with the Greek scientist Anaxagoras, who had a widely-known theory that heavenly bodies are made of the same sort of matter found on earth. The amazed Greeks took the stone as spectacular confirmation of this crazy idea, and Anaxagoras’s name would be linked to it forever afterward.
To get a better idea of this meteorite’s figurative impact, consider a parallel from closer to our own time.
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