"No fellow in the firmament"

When I was in high school my 10th grade English teacher made us each memorize a passage from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and then perform it in front of the class. I have trouble now sometimes remembering my phone number, but I can still recite the scene in which Mark Antony swears vengeance over Caesar’s bloody corpse: “O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth …”

But when I was reading the play again recently, I was surprised by a different passage. Caesar compares himself to the North Star to stress his steadfastness in refusing a pardon:

I could be well 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 fixed and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament.

The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;

They are all fire, and everyone doth shine;

But there’s but one in all doth hold his place. (Act 3, Scene 1)

Shakespeare refers to Polaris, Alpha Ursae Minoris, the brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Minor. The Little Bear is a northern circumpolar constellation, and Polaris is about a degree away from the north celestial pole. While all the other stars appear to wheel across the sky over time, the North Star looks unmoving, fixed, steadfast – like Caesar.

'Constant as the northern star'

Astronomers know that Polaris, like everything in the heavens, is moving. Polaris is the North Star now, but it wasn’t in the past and won’t be in the future. When I was a teen reading the play for the first time, I didn’t know about the precession of the equinoxes.

Because the Earth wobbles slightly like a top as it rotates daily in its revolution around the sun, the north pole points in different directions over time – creating a circle about every 26,000 years. In time, Polaris won’t be our North Star.

But that time is a long way off, thousands of years in the future. So maybe our distant ancestors will be enjoying a performance of “Julius Caesar” and for them the “Northern Star” won’t be the Little Bear’s Polaris but Gamma Cephei, a binary star system in the constellation of Cepheus. So good thing Caesar didn’t call himself Polaris.

Header image of Caesar from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

North star image credits: MICHAEL MOSELLE/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0)