Hadria sky prodigy — ancient account, year disputed

Livy includes the Hadria episode in Book 24, chapter 10 of his Roman history, among prodigies reported during the Second Punic War. The brief notice says that an altar appeared in the sky with white-clothed men standing around it. It supplies no named observer, duration, distance, measured object, conversation, landing or journey. The surrounding passage concerns religious responses to reported portents from several communities. It does not call the altar a machine or identify its attendants as extraterrestrials. Livy's narrative context and the later nature of his writing distinguish this literary tradition from a contemporary modern investigation. The list's other marvels should not be merged into the Hadria scene or counted as repeated observations there. The Hatch-derived date is 213 BCE, whereas Bruce MacBain's scholarly index places Livy 24.10's prodigy list in 214 BCE. MacBain identifies this Hadria with Picenum; historical topographic references associate that town with modern Atri. The imported Florence-area coordinates therefore lack support from the compared sources. The plate uses a broad third-century-BCE title and visualizes the altar and white-clothed human forms without inventing a spacecraft. Ground observers, figure count, landscape and altar appearance are contextual artistic choices, explicitly labelled as an ancient literary account rather than recovered eyewitness detail.