Act III, scene I of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar features one of his most famous soliloquies, delivered by the play’s eponymous character in response to the request of Metellus Cimber for Caesar to rescind the banishment of his brother. This failed entreaty is followed in kind by Brutus. The request is denied by Caesar thusly:
I could well be moved, if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fixt and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber’d sparks ,
They are all fire, and every one doth shine;
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place:
So in the world,—‘tis furnisht well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive’
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaken of the motion: and that I am he,
Let me a little show it, even in this,—
That I was constant Cimber should be banisht,
And constant do remain to keep him so.
I have, on several occasions, found that reflection upon the stars and recitation of Shakespeare's poetry in the early pre-dawn hours when I can’t sleep, pacing back and forth in the backyard, is a treasure of solitude and spiritual insight that can only be discovered, never shown.
Observing the heavens slowly revolve around the world axis of Polaris alone with one’s thoughts is to realize that the stars are the repository of all memory. They have watched us, been wished upon by our ancestors before they were even "us", and read our minds through our eyes as generation after generation contemplated the same mysteries of the one constant of experience that contrasts the frail transience of man. Realizing that Shakespeare drew his brilliant and elegant soliloquy from gazing on the same cosmos whirling around the single "true-fixt" star that I see to this day on a clear night is quite a thing indeed.
To watch Polaris is to stretch a fingertip out into the void and back five hundred years, finding Shakespeare reaching out to the future to meet you. Perhaps Shakespeare wondered the same of Caesar. It is at that singular point of light that the astronomy and astrology—the scientific and the spiritual—intermingle to generate a timeless and beautifully poetic irony.
Caesar may have done well to consult the heavens themselves rather than the soothsayer or haruspex when speculating on his fate. As it so happens, because of the precession of the zodiac resulting from the slow gyroscopic wobble of the Earth repeating every 26,000 years or so, Shakespeare and Caesar would not have been looking at exactly the same sky. During the time of the Empire, there was no northern star at all; the exact point of the Earth’s axial rotation was a void approximately equidistant between α Ursae Minoris (Polaris) and β Ursae Minoris. For those familiar with the constellation Ursa Minor—also known as the Little Dipper—the two stars are the tip of the tail and the tip of the nose of the bear respectively. In fact, it is noted with no small consternation by Caesar’s contemporary astronomers that the universe appeared to have left out a psychologically pleasing detail.
From a mythological standpoint however, the Roman universe could not have been more perfectly constructed. Rome was founded by the twins Romulus and Remus who were born of Rhea Silvia and Mars, abandoned in the Tiber, and suckled by a she-wolf as depicted in countless Roman mosaics and statuary. Likewise, the Roman Republic had two consuls, thus ensuring that no one man would ever rule the Roman people unchecked.
It would appear that the heavens held a curse for any man who sought to fill the void between those two endlessly swirling brothers for whom the city of Rome owed its name and the Republic its birthright. As there are seven visible stars in Ursa Minor, so too in Shakespeare are there seven conspirators who brought him down. In reality, the fifty-nine stars in the constellation are as close an approximation as can be known to how many men descended into the frenzied murder of Caesar according to history.
In the end, it is as much a fascinating mystery as it is a coincidental trifling. Numerology is perhaps the most easily adapted pseudoscientific method for generating half-truths and conspiracy theories. However, for me it doesn’t matter; Shakespeare and Caesar are as correct as they are incorrect, but infinitely more beautiful in spirit than in fact. That is the soul of art, and the secret pleasure of the early hours alone with the stars.