#castor

[...] Her [Helen] star, called Urania, is said to hollow out an apple tree, and to bore through the bottom of a ship by blazing with so great a burning fire that the bronze is melted by the heat. When sailors observe this star fixed over a ship, they do not doubt that they will perish.

Second Mytographer of Vatican, 155. Translation by Ronald E.Pepin.

[...] Finally, according to a higher science or opinion, Helen’s star was thought to be harmful and the bringer of storms, but the stars of her brothers [Dioscuri] are propitious. Thus, suitably, Helen seems to have been a cause of evil. So it is written: ‘‘When now the Spartans’ sails were damaged by their sister’s fire, the brothers fled.

Third Mythographer of Vatican, 8. Translation by Ronald E.Pepin.

The "[]" are my additions.

Similar references to the destructive star of Helen, whose danger is counterbalanced by the stars of her Dioscuri brothers, apparently also appear in a scholium on Statius and in a text by Lydus (De Ostentis, 5). However, since I do not have access to these texts, I will include an excerpt from an academic article that, by citing these sources, gives us an idea of ​​their content:

There was no greater fear for maritime travellers than shipwreck in a storm – a fear which would been as acute in Nemanja’s day as in any age earlier, for ship technology had advanced little. A fear-inducing feature of Mediterranean storms were the electrical discharges known in the later Middle Ages as St Elmo’s Fire and earlier attributed to the Greek Helen and her brothers. A first-century description by Pliny48 was still referred to in Gregory’s own century, presumably because seamen continued to link the phenomenon with the trio. In De Ostentis, ‘On Signs in the Heavens’, the Byzantine clerk John Lydus (‘the Lydian’) (490-c.550) revisited the passage. On land and sea, he writes, stars are found showing ‘certain efficiencies’. Navigators at sea call one such ‘appearance or condition’ ‘Helen’. This was a light often seen on soldiers’ spear-tips and on the mast and other parts of ships, giving off a hiss like snakes, and flitting like birds in the unlucky vessel as it sank or falling into the drier parts and setting the boat on fire. Even so, as in other circumstances ‘the property of the deity shows providence’ (John uses the Greek word translated into Latin as numen rather than deus for god or an allusion to the Christian godhead). For immediately appear ‘two stars named Castor and Pollux’ which immediately cause the ‘star’ called Helen to flee. Another fifth-century revisiting of this sailor — lore was by Lactanius Placidus, a grammarian, scholiast on the Thebaid by Statius, a poet writing in Latin in the final decade of the first century but raised in the Greek cultural milieu of the Bay of Naples. The latter wrote, ‘Not otherwise [than in grief] in a blind hurricane at night, when the north-wester’ blows, does a ship know that she will perish, so soon as the brethren of Therapnae [the Dioscuri] have fled the sails their sister’s fire has doomed.’ Lactanius commented: ‘when they saw the star Helen —which it is said is Urania — such is the power of the fire that… if this star was rooted in a ship, the sailors knew they should fall… [but] are saved by the beneficial twin stars.’

In his Propempticon, ‘Send-off poem’, to Maecius Celer, Consul Suffect in 101, taking ship for on the Libyan coast, Statius also wrote, ‘Ye Gods whose delight it is to preserve adventurous ships, and to assauge the angry perils of the gusty sea, make the waters smooth and calm… Bring forth your favouring stars, Oebalian brethren [a reference to the warm springs of Baiae], and sit upon the twin horns of the yard-arm; let your light illumine sea and sky; drive far away, I pray, your Ilian sister’s [i.e. Helen of Illium, Troy] tempestuous star, and banish her wholly from the heavens’. The distinction between Helen’s threatening light and those of her brothers had clearly fallen away by the time the fire was attributed to St Elmo, petname of Erasmus, bishop of Formiae on the bay of Naples, though in the seventeenth century both were still collectively known to French seamen as feu d’Helene. I have argued that the name ‘St Elmo’ may have developed from the Greek ‘Elene’ via attribution of the fires to Constantine’s mother, St Helena. Gregory’s report of the tradition that Helen’s namesake, Constantine’s mother, calmed a storm with holy iron instead of threatening disaster with supernatural fire is a crucial piece of evidence in that direction. Van Dam’s comment on the bridle and diadem is suggestive, that the association between these relics and Constantine ‘neatly represented a fundamental confusion in Byzantine political philosophy between Christ and the emperor, who both acted as mediators with God’.