here not the ten kingdoms into which the Roman empire was ultimately subdivided, but the ten general persecutions of the Primitive Church, which are well compared to ten horns, because they aptly represent those ten furious assaults which Satan gave to the Church, by urging against her the whole physical force of the Roman empire in those ten great persecutions. But be this as it may, commentators agree that the dragon in this vision symbolizes both Satan, in his organization of mankind under seven great monarchies, and in a more special sense the pagan empire of Rome, combined and connected as it so closely was with the devil in the persecution of the Church of Christ, And when the text says that "his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth," I understand by that, first, in reference to Satan, that portion of the angels whom he dragged down from heaven to become his accomplices in warring against God along with himself upon the earth by trying to defeat the designs of God upon mankind; and secondly, in reference to the persecuting action of the pagan Roman empire upon the bishops of the Catholic Church, who are elsewhere in the Apocalypse compared to stars: "The seven stars are the angels" or bishops "of the seven Churches."
