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August 03, 2010

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The Odyssey astronomically accurate?

June 23, 2008
Courtesy Rockefeller University
and World Science staff

Schol­ars have long de­bat­ed wheth­er there are bits of truth to The Od­ys­sey—the an­cient Greek ep­ic of a king’s long sea­far­ing strug­gle to get home as he bat­tles or out­wits mon­sters.

Now, sci­en­tists say some of the ce­les­tial events men­tioned in the tale might be ac­cu­rate, rais­ing the pos­si­bil­ity that the story has more truth than sus­pected. Their find­ings include an spec­i­fic date for when King Ody­sseus would have re­turned home and—the story goes—slaught­ered a group of sui­tors who had court­ed his wife in his ab­sence.

Up­on his long-awaited re­turn home, Odys­seus slays a group of suit­ors who had tak­en ad­van­tage of his long ab­sence to court his wife. Above is The Re­turn of Odys­seus, an anon­y­mous en­grav­ing of un­known date. Al­though the pic­ture shows light en­ter­ing from the door, the po­em sug­gests an eclipse oc­curred on this date: "Poor men, what ter­ror is this that over­whelms you so? Night shrouds your heads, your faces, down to your knees—cries of mourn­ing are burst­ing in­to fire —cheeks river­ing tears—the walls and the hand­some cross­beams drip­ping dank with blood! Ghosts, look, throng­ing the en­trance, throng­ing the court, go troop­ing down to the realm of death and dark­ness! The sun is blot­ted out of the sky—look there—a le­thal mist spreads all across the earth!" (trans­la­tion by Rob­ert Fa­gles)

Scholars have long debated whether there are bits of truth to The Odyssey—the ancient Greek epic of a king’s long seafaring struggle to get home as he battles or outwits monsters. Now, scientists say some of the celestial events mentioned in the tale might be accurate, raising the possibility that the tale has more truth than suspected. The researchers studied possible references to astronomical events in the poem, and matched them with calculations showing the order in which these events must really have occurred. The match was excellent, the investigators say. The catch: some of the poem’s purported astronomical references are symbolic only. Among countless disputed details about the story, not the least whether it is all attributable to the poet Homer, is whether King Odysseus returns home to a total solar eclipse. The poet tells of a terrifying “night” in which the sun is “blotted out of the sky” on this day. The scientists focused their analysis on this event. Total eclipses, when the moon briefly but completely blocks the sun, are rare—so much so that if what the author describes is an eclipse, it might help historians date the fall of Troy, which purportedly occurred not long before the events described in Odyssey. Hundreds of years of discussions over this point among historians, astronomers and classicists have proved inconclusive. In the new study, scientists combed the Odyssey for astronomical references that could be precisely identified as occurring on specific days of Odysseus’s journey. Then, they aligned each of those dates with his date of return, the same day he massacres a group of suitors who had exploited his long absence to court his wife. The study is reported in this week’s online early edition of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The researchers are Marcelo O. Magnasco, head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics at Rockefeller University in New York, and Constantino Baikouzis of the Proyecto Observatorio at the Observatorio Astronómico in La Plata, Argentina. Magnasco and Baikouzis identified four celestial events in the Odyssey. The day of the slaughter is, as Homer writes more than once, also a new moon, which is also a prerequisite for a total eclipse. Six days before the massacre, the poem suggests that Venus is visible and high in the sky, according to the scientists. Twenty-nine days before, two constellations—the Pleiades and Boötes—are simultaneously visible at sunset. And 33 days before, they said, Homer may be suggesting that Mercury is high at dawn and near the western end of its trajectory. Homer actually writes that the god Hermes—whom the Romans called Mercury—traveled far west only to deliver a message and fly all the way back east again. Magnasco and Baikouzis interpret this as a reference to the planet Mercury. Such interpretations rest on a large assumption, Magnasco admits. The association of planets with gods was a Babylonian concept dating to around 1,000 B.C., but there’s no evidence those ideas had reached Greece by Homer’s time, several hundred years later. “This is a risky step in our analysis,” he said. It may be “stretching it, but when you go back to the text you have to wonder.” The four celestial events purportedly described in the book actually recur on different timescales. Thus they never recur in quite the same pattern. Baikouzis and Magnasco checked whether there was any date within 100 years of the fall of Troy that would fit the pattern in the book. They found one: April 16, 1,178 B.C., the day calculations show a total eclipse must have occurred. “Not only is this corroborative evidence that this date might be something important,” Magnasco said, “but if we take it as a given that the death of the suitors happened on this particular eclipse date, then everything else described in The Odyssey happens exactly as is described.” Ultimately, whether they’re right or wrong, the researchers say they’re interested in reopening the debate. “Even though there are historical arguments that say this is a ridiculous thing to think about, if we can get a few people to read The Odyssey differently, to look at it and ponder whether there was an actual date inscribed in it, we will be happy,” Magnasco said.