Julius Obsequens’s book, Liber Prodigiorum: A Roman era record of meteorite falls, fireballs, and other celestial phenomena

Abstract

Julius Obsequens was the pseudonym of a Roman historian presumably living in the 4th century ad, whose life is shrouded in mystery. All that is known about Obsequens’s biography is that he was the author of a book entitled Liber Prodigiorum (Book of Prodigies), a collection of prodigies deduced from Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Founding of the City). The Liber Prodigiorum covered the period from 190 to 11 bc and gathered a chronological list of portents of various kinds (e.g., births of monstrous animals or men, statues that shed blood, voices from beyond the grave, epidemics, earthquakes, unidentified flying objects). Among these extraordinary reports, chronicles of celestial phenomena were also included. The interdisciplinary approach adopted in this research has clarified the nature of the events described in the text and has enabled the identification of new Italian meteorite falls that are not included in the Meteoritical Bulletin Database.

To be or not to be, that is the question: The Marsala meteorite (Italy, 1834) and the role of the doubtful meteorites in the history of meteoritics

“…Nevertheless, when historical sources reported stone showers, these events usually described meteorite falls or volcanic ejecta (e.g., Franza and Pratesi 2020). It should be noted that ancient chronicles can also report the fall of icy stones.…”

The catalog of the meteorite collection of the Italian Museum of Planetary Sciences in Prato (Italy)

“…Celestial objects that fall to the Earth from space have captivated the human imagination for millennia. It is therefore not surprising that meteorites have not only undoubtful scientific importance, being the only physical materials, together with samples returning by missions, available on Earth to understand the formation and the evolution of the solar system (e.g., Grady et al, 2014;Russell et al, 2018), but also bear remarkable social and cultural meanings (e.g., Chen et al, 2018;Franza & Pratesi, 2020a;Golia, 2015;Hamacher & Goldsmith, 2013;Hartmann, 2015). So, it is not by chance that, in his classical critique, Burke (1986) argued that meteorites were one of the oldest puzzles humans attempted to solve.…”