In Shakespeare ’s '' Julius Caesar '' ( 1599 ) , Caesar 's wife remarks on the fateful morning of her husband 's murder : " When beggars die there are no comets seen . The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes . " In 1997 , two scholars at the University of Illinois at Chicago – John T. Ramsey ( a classicist ) and A. Lewis Licht ( a physicist ) – published a book comparing astronomical/astrological evidence from both Han China and Rome . Their analysis , based on historical eyewitness accounts , Chinese astronomical records , astrological literature from later antiquity and ice cores from Greenland glaciers , yielded a range of orbital parameters for the hypothetical object . They settled on a perihelion point of 0.22 AU for the object which was apparently visible with a tail from the Chinese capital Chang ' an ( in late May ) and as a star-like object from Rome ( in late July ) : A few scholars , such as Robert Gurval of UCLA and Brian G. Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , leave the comet 's very existence as an open question . Marsden notes in his foreword to Ramsey and Licht 's book , " Given the circumstance of a single reporter two decades after the event , I should be remiss if I were not to consider this i.e. , the comet 's non-existence as a serious possibility . "
husband 's murder
Assassination of Julius Caesar
Caesar's Comet