 "The
sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist has
overspread the world."
With those words in The Odyssey, Homer laid down not a
prophecy of doom but a description of a real-world total
solar eclipse, scientific sleuths announced today.
It has been known for decades that there was only one such
eclipse during the time period Homer wrote about in the
ancient Greek poem—on April 16, 1178 B.C. The blackout even
occurred at noon, as described in the epic poem.
But without additional evidence, the idea that Homer's
passage describes an eclipse has been pooh-poohed by Homeric
scholars.
Now scientists have looked into additional astronomical
descriptions in The Odyssey and found them to be consistent
with that date for the noontime darkness.
The references relate to moon phases and positions of
constellations and planets—phenomena that rarely occur in
the sequence described in Homer's work—physicist Marcelo
Magnasco said by email. Magnasco co-authored the new study
with fellow Rockefeller University scholar Constantino
Baikouzis, an astronomer.
The scientists used astronomical software to simulate the
Greek skies, night by night, over a 135-year period
surrounding the eclipse.
Even without using the eclipse itself in their calculations,
the researchers found only one date for the noontime
darkness: April 16, 1178 B.C.
Controversy Expected
Study co-author Magnasco said his findings, to be published
tomorrow in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, will be controversial.
The report does more than reinterpret Homer's writing,
though even the study authors admit Homer may not have been
referring to an eclipse.
The new findings also assume a level of astronomical
sophistication among Odyssey-era Greeks that many historians
would find unrealistic, Magnasco said. Little or no evidence
exists of Greeks during this time tracking the movements of
stars and planets in detail.
"The use of astronomical clues to set the dates of works of
art is a very intriguing field that has seen a recent
increase in popularity," astronomer Geza Gyuk of Chicago's
Adler Planetarium said by email.
"The ability to do this relatively accurately for ancient
solar eclipses is fairly new."
"Fairly Sound"
Jerry Oltion, a telescope maker, amateur astronomer, and
science fiction writer from Eugene, Oregon, finds the
astronomical reasoning "fairly sound."
From an artistic standpoint, he doubts Homer ever saw an
eclipse himself—though that has no bearing on whether an
eclipse , as Homer is thought to have lived in the ninth and
eighth centuries B.C., hundreds of years after the events
depicted in The Odyssey.
"Any writer who has seen an eclipse—or even heard one
described—would never put his characters indoors during the
climactic moment," he said.
The moment takes place at a luncheon as the oracle-like
Theoclymenus speaks the passage in question to suitors
courting the wife of the main character, Odysseus, who is
thought dead.
Also, Oltion notes that the story leaves out many details
about eclipses, such as the sun's corona.
"I don't believe Homer could have ignored all those
effects," Oltion said.
However the controversy resolves, the Adler Planetarium's
Gyuk lauds the study for making us think about Homer's story
in new ways.
"This article celebrates Homer and pays homage to the
Odyssey in the most sincere way," he said.
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