The Stella corsicae is the rarest piece of old light on this planet. It came to earth with the other dying stars some billions of years ago now when that cosmic shiver scattered the metals which were too heavy for the angels to carry across space.
The best of this primeval rock went to Spain. There, the Romans flooded the rusty mountains of Las Médulas until the mineral veins of their crimson peaks bled shine dust. Most of the gold became coins and fibulae and other grave-good things.
But when the Stella corsicae arrived at the workshop of Pompeia Helena destined for such a banal transformation, the dimpled mass just would not melt. Rather, in the kiln of the aurivestrix, the gold went blue. The Muslim astronomer al-Birquq records after Pliny that the Stella corsicae was akin to “dusk and sapphire...with the lustre of any other [precious metal].”
News of the aureate curiosity spread quickly across the empire and the gold was soon shipped to Corsica for safekeeping. Subsequent conquests by the Goths revealed the aureate hiding place, however, and by the time of the Byzantines the Stella corsicae had been lost.
A fifteenth-century copy of Seneca’s Consolations, originally written during his exile on the island, writes of the gold: “And something flickered for a minute, then it vanished and was gone.”