If anyone is interested in a little extra-curricular reading, try The Mask of Nostradamus by James Randi– very enlightening.
And I believe the OP was inspired by this column by Cecil.
The column has one of my favorite Cecil Adams’ lines, but I see that it was cleaned up in the online version…a phrase in the question was cleaned up as well.
The original line by Adams (according to my copy of The Straight Dope), page 51 read:
Love it. 
[sub]And why bother cleaning up the language of our Perfect Master on his own website? Especially when the original is so much fun?[/sub]
Hm. I think this got cleaned up because we initially posted it to America Online when we had a site there, and they had a thing about Bad Words. Never mind, I’ll fix it. One wants the unvarnished truth.
Hmm…
Cecil claims that Nostradamus was using the word Hister to mean the classical name of the river Danube. But earlier on he scorns the notion of Nostradamus using the classical term for Elba (Aethalia).
Is Cecil contradicting himself here? One minute, the idea of Mikey-boy using classical phrases is laughable. The next minute he’s using them willy-nilly with no problem.
Anyway, I dug around in my collection of Nostradamus quatrains and I found the following (I wonder what it refers to?):
In the year of eagles, fire and war, evil will flourish
Many will perish though some will eat nectar
The humming bird shall sing aloft as below the great city crumbles
Oh and Cecil Adams will contradict himself in a column about me dated 13 July 1984
Well, Nostradamus apparently didn’t use the term Aethalia (but he did use the term Hister, which however is on the one-hand a well-attested classical term for the Danube, and on the other hand is a pretty poor spelling of “Hitler”), he used the term Itales. “Itales” sounds more like “Italy” than “Aethalia” to me, but I’m no classical scholar.