Homer and astronomy
Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco have argued that the individual who described the killing of the suitors in the Odyssey (whom we know as Homer) has situated his story at a particular date, or rather at a specific moment in time, viz. a particular solar eclipse. I give you the authors’ abstract: ”Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of the Odyssey (‘Theoclymenus’s prophecy’) to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s, Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. was total over the Ionian Islands and was the only suitable eclipse in more than a century to agree with classical estimates of the decade-earlier sack of Troy around 1192–1184 B.C.E. However, much skepticism remains about whether the verses refer to this, or any, eclipse. To contribute to the issue independently of the disputed eclipse reference, we analyze other astronomical references in the Epic, without assuming the existence of an eclipse, and search for dates matching the astronomical phenomena we believe they describe. We use three overt astronomical references in the epic: to Boötes and the Pleiades, Venus, and the New Moon; we supplement them with a conjectural identification of Hermes’s trip to Ogygia as relating to the motion of planet Mercury. Performing an exhaustive search of all possible dates in the span 1250–1115 B.C., we looked to match these phenomena in the order and manner that the text describes. In that period, a single date closely matches our references: 16 April 1178 B.C.E. We speculate that these references, plus the disputed eclipse reference, may refer to that specific eclipse.“
You can download the full article from the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/search?fulltext=magnasco&submit.x=6&submit.y=6.
Please note that the argument here is NOT one about the historicity of Iliad and Odyssey; it is about the fact that a poet writing an epic had astronomically reliable knowledge about a solar eclipse which took place at the alleged time of the story being told. Which would of course raise questions about the way in which this knowledge was transmitted: would this kind of astronomical detail be preserved in an oral poetic tradition? or would it be introduced at some stage into this tradition from a different source?
Filed under: Archaeology, General, Greece, History, Religion | Leave a Comment
No Responses Yet to “Homer and astronomy”