Celestial Clues Hint At Eclipse In Homer's Odyssey

[Knight-Dragon]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080623175435.htm

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2008) — Among countless other debates about Homer's Odyssey -- not the least of which is whether the entire poem can be attributed to Homer himself -- is whether Odysseus returns home to experience a total solar eclipse. But a Rockefeller University scientist and a colleague from Argentina believe they have found astronomical references in the Odyssey that provide corroborating evidence of this celestial event.

Total eclipses, when the moon briefly but completely blocks the sun, happen pretty rarely. In fact, they're so rare that if what Homer describes is truly an eclipse, it could potentially help historians date the fall of Troy, which was purported to occur around the time of the events described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. But after arguing about the point for hundreds of years, historians, astronomers and classicists finally agreed that there was no corroborating evidence and tabled the discussion.

Now, Marcelo O. Magnasco, head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics at Rockefeller, and Constantino Baikouzis of the Proyecto Observatorio at the Observatorio Astronómico in La Plata, Argentina, believe they have found some overlooked passages that, taken together, may shed new light on the timing of an epic journey.

The researchers combed through the Odyssey to find specific astronomical references that could be precisely identified as occurring on specific days throughout Odysseus's journey. Then, they aligned each of those dates with the date of Odysseus's return, the same day he murders the suitors who had taken advantage of his long absence to court his wife.

Magnasco and Baikouzis identified four celestial events. The day of the slaughter is, as Homer writes more than once, also a new moon (something that's also a prerequisite for a total eclipse). Six days before the slaughter, Venus is visible and high in the sky. Twenty-nine days before, two constellations -- the Pleiades and Boötes -- are simultaneously visible at sunset. And 33 days before, Homer may be suggesting that Mercury is high at dawn and near the western end of its trajectory. (Homer actually writes that Hermes -- known to the Romans as 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.)

Astronomically, these four phenomena recur at different intervals of time, so together they never recur in exactly the same pattern. Therefore Baikouzis and Magnasco looked to see whether there was any date within 100 years of the fall of Troy that would fit the pattern of the astronomical timeline. There was only one: April 16, 1178 BCE, the same day that astronomers had calculated the occurrence of a total solar eclipse. "Not only is this corroborative evidence that this date might be something important," Magnasco says, "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."

Magnasco acknowledges that their findings rely on a large assumption: Although the association of planets with gods was a Babylonian invention that dates back to around 1000 BCE, there's no evidence that those ideas had reached Greece by the time Homer was writing, several hundred years later. "This is a risky step in our analysis," he says. "One may say that our interpretation of the phenomena is stretching it, but when you go back to the text you have to wonder."

Ultimately, whether they're right or wrong, the researchers are 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 says.

"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!" -- Homer (translation by Robert Fagles)

The finding was recently reported in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

[Plotinus]

I don't see how anyone could possibly date the Trojan war by such a method, because why on earth should one assume that the Odyssey describes events which occurred immediately after that war in the first place? If the description in the poem really is of an eclipse, it would surely be more reasonable to assume that an eclipse happened in Homer's own time and he thought it would be a good thing to stick in the poem, not that an eclipse really happened when Odysseus really returned home after ten years of wandering the Mediterranean and that Homer knew this centuries later. So if this is going to date anything I'd say it's more likely to date the Odyssey, not the Trojan war.

When scientists try to interpret ancient texts astronomically they always do this sort of thing - assume that the text is really reporting an actual event that happened at the time of the purported events. It's like when astronomers try to work out what the star of Bethlehem was in order to date Jesus' birth. The notion that Matthew might have put the star in for any reason other than that it really did appear at the time of Jesus' birth never seems to occur to them.

 

[Maimonides]

I wonder how their date of 1178 BCE compares to the archaeological dating of the destruction levels found at Troy. It's very odd that the article doesn't mention whether or not the two corroborate. Radiocarbon & geological dating would be infinitely more accurate than astronomical suppositions regarding the text (a text that probably changed over the centuries). Their astronomical dating is interesting in that it could corroborate the much more scientific archaeology & help determine which destruction level Homer was writing about.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

It seems strange to me that 1178 BC would be the date, I thought the Sea Peoples' invasion was around 1200 BC, and so the Mycenaeans and Hittites (of whom the Trojans were most likely vassals) would be gone by then?

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

The Trojan War went for a while, did it not?

That and the initial Sea Peoples invasion seemed to have been focused more to the south, at first. That makes 1178 reasonable.

Also it is unlikely that astronomical events would have correlated with actual happenings by pure chance. The Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them were possibly written centuries later, but that is not to discount the possibility of earlier, now lost, versions which kept consistency and might have, in the realm of possibility, kept details of astronomical events (which have for millenia before then be viewed as divine acts and interventions). For the sake of argument, the Mycenaeans attacked Troy for greed in both real-life and in the Iliad, and the Iliad has them using Helen of Troy as an excuse.

This seems slightly related to chronology in Assyriology (the study of Assyria, Babylon, Sumeria, etc.). Namely there exists three dating systems for the ancient near east - Long Chronology, Middle Chronology and Short Chronology. Long Chronology was long touted as the true system in the late 19th Century but has since been thoroughly discounted. That system gave the most extremely ancient dates which do not in any way, shape or form correspond with archaeology. Middle chronology is whether the Babylonian 2nd dynasty ruled between the 1st and the 3rd, and Short chronology says the 2nd dynasty was a non-ruling dynasty overlapping 1st and 3rd. Archaeology between the two is murky because unlike millenia difference from the Long Chronology, the Middle and Short differ only by centuries. And texts are a bit unclear on the matter. Middle Chronology is prefered by Assyriologists. But Short Chronology corresponds with near perfection to recorded astronomical events.

 

[Ferocitus]

Flash, bang - the thread rekindled!

After reading the paper, I went looking for criticisms. It was a delight to find
that the original was discussed here on cfc many years ago!

I've only included the Summary and Conclusion to avoid possible copyright violations.

Peter Gainsford,
Odyssey 20.356-57 and the Eclipse of 1178 b.c.e.: A Response to Baikouzis and Magnasco
Transactions of the American Philological Association 142 (2012)

SUMMARY
The recent argument of Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo Magnasco that Odyssey
20.356–57 preserves a reference to the solar eclipse of 26 April 1178 b.c.e.
has received widespread attention in generalist publications.
Unlike Carl Schoch’s 1926 argument, which came to the same conclusion,
the new argument cannot be dismissed on the basis of the passage’s context.
Baikouzis and Magnasco require several other tacit assumptions, however, and
many of these may be rejected with great confidence.

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the attractiveness of Baikouzis and Magnasco’s argument should
be pointed out. Their hypothesis is framed as an argument based on the chro-
nology of the Odyssey, but its real appeal comes from its striking coherence,
and from the lure of interpreting almost anything as historical information
where there is a dearth of historical data. This latter temptation is essentially a
Euhemeristic urge. It can often lead to an over-optimistic view of how central
one’s evidence is (Baikouzis and Magnasco 2008: 8828):
The whole poem might then be structured to follow what the stars dictate,
because the references mandate how long Odysseus has to build his raft, when
he should be sunk, or how long he must remain hidden in Ithaka before re-
vealing himself.
But an argument from coherence is at best epistemologically problematic—
especially when that coherence is illusory, as we have seen 47 ; and when dealing
with the historical reality (if any) that underlies a poetic text like the Odyssey,
the fact that we want to fill in gaps in history carries no evidentiary weight,
either. And in any case, assigning a central evidentiary role to Homer runs
the risk of confirmation bias.
Baikouzis and Magnasco themselves stress that their argument is conjectur-
al. There is an important distinction here, and it is not a matter of skepticism
or cynicism, but of logic. A conjecture is something that is unproblematically
controvertible by new evidence; affirmative evidence is something that be-
comes problematic if new evidence contradicts it. Baikouzis and Magnasco’s
argument is certainly not affirmative evidence that the Odyssey refers to the
1178 eclipse; the considerations presented here show that it is not a plausible
conjecture either. These are two separate arguments, though, and one hopes
that the appealing character of the eclipse interpretation will not mislead
future discussions of the “eclipse”—if any—into conflating them.

 

[Flying Pig]

I can't see much argument there other than what we had above - that there are some questions that don't have good evidence to answer them, and may not even be particularly good questions. 'When did the Trojan War happen?' is one of those questions. As the authors you've quoted and the Plotinus of 2008 realised, we shouldn't rush to a flimsy explanation on the grounds that it's better than admitting ignorance. The opposite is true.

EDIT: To add to that, eclipses were a well-worn omen in Classical times - Alexander the Great even stopped a battle because he saw one, and both sides agreed that it couldn't be anything good. Much like the Star of Bethlehem, there are good reasons why a poet would have wanted an eclipse to happen in the Odyssey, and 'because a real eclipse happened then' is quite far down that list.

 

[Ferocitus]

I can't see much argument there other than what we had above - that there are some questions that don't have good evidence to answer them, and may not even be particularly good questions. 'When did the Trojan War happen?' is one of those questions. As the authors you've quoted and the Plotinus of 2008 realised, we shouldn't rush to a flimsy explanation on the grounds that it's better than admitting ignorance. The opposite is true.

EDIT: To add to that, eclipses were a well-worn omen in Classical times - Alexander the Great even stopped a battle because he saw one, and both sides agreed that it couldn't be anything good. Much like the Star of Bethlehem, there are good reasons why a poet would have wanted an eclipse to happen in the Odyssey, and 'because a real eclipse happened then' is quite far down that list.

Well there you are then: CFC is just like Academia without the annoying students and other ne'erdo wells.

Eclipses do play an important role in dating some events in the Pacific Islands, which is how I stumbled on
the original Baizoukis paper.
Maori oral tradition also mentions a battle occurring during a (long) eclipse.
That helped to pinpoint some other events which seemed ridiculously late or early when crude techniques like
ascribing a number of years per generation were used to date them.

 

[Kyriakos]

I can't see much argument there other than what we had above - that there are some questions that don't have good evidence to answer them, and may not even be particularly good questions. 'When did the Trojan War happen?' is one of those questions. As the authors you've quoted and the Plotinus of 2008 realised, we shouldn't rush to a flimsy explanation on the grounds that it's better than admitting ignorance. The opposite is true.

EDIT: To add to that, eclipses were a well-worn omen in Classical times - Alexander the Great even stopped a battle because he saw one, and both sides agreed that it couldn't be anything good. Much like the Star of Bethlehem, there are good reasons why a poet would have wanted an eclipse to happen in the Odyssey, and 'because a real eclipse happened then' is quite far down that list.

Eclipses were studied at least since Thales, ie 7th or even 8th century BC. According to Diogenes Laertios (and probably far earlier sources too; DL was 2nd century AD ie two centuries short of a millenium after that event ), Thales was said to have informed Croesus of one such eclipse taking place during his first major battle with a persian kingdom, which triggered an alliance due to the eclipse being seen as divine omen by those persians (?). Croesus later on lost the war, of course.
Astronomical observations were an important part of philosophy since Anaximander (student of Thales), and famously under Anaxagoras, just after the second greek-persian war.

 

[Ferocitus]

Eclipses were studied at least since Thales, ie 7th or even 8th century BC. According to Diogenes Laertios (and probably far earlier sources too; DL was 2nd century AD ie two centuries short of a millenium after that event ), Thales was said to have informed Croesus of one such eclipse taking place during his first major battle with a persian kingdom, which triggered an alliance due to the eclipse being seen as divine omen by those persians (?). Croesus later on lost the war, of course.
Astronomical observations were an important part of philosophy since Anaximander (student of Thales), and famously under Anaxagoras, just after the second greek-persian war.

There were many stunning achievements by Greek scholars and "scientists",
and we are the lucky beneficiaries of some of that work today.
However, I wonder whether there is some cherry-picking going on when the
sound ideas and work are used as examples to demonstrate the brilliance
of various eras in Greek history.

Some ideas and developments were not accepted in their own day, or until
comparatively recent times. For every Thales, or Democritus, there were
also many hopelessly incorrect theories and predictions.

There is much to admire in some of Aristotle's work, but blind adherence
by the catholic church to some of his beliefs, doctrines and proclamations
impeded the progress of science for many centuries.

Some Greek advances were laughably incorrect; others were seen as prescient
or highly advanced only today. Democritus' ideas of "atoms" is a prime example.

Another more recent example in Western science is the Grotthuss mechanism.
It seems uncanny that Grotthuss could have come up with that remarkable idea
before electrons and protons were discovered. Sometimes, some guys just get lucky.
(Yes, me, if you're reading this, oh partner of mine.)

 

[Kyriakos]

There is also the issue of specialized examination/knowledge of what those ancients did or wrote. Eg my own uni degree is in philosophy, and even in philosophical examination of the ancients i see a pleiad of false views. Most people -not just outside philosophy- have never even read what remains of their works, so have a view which - at best- is based on some later source, often millenia after the original text. For example virtually no one outside philosophy is aware that Aristotle was not at all popular in Athens, and his views are by all means anti-philosophy and pro-natural science. He was the one who suggested (as a sort of end to a huge debate in greek philosophy) that axioms are used in philosophy of most types, despite noting that axioms inevitably limit the scope of the subject.
Aristotle had some more famous failed ideas, eg he was very openly (even noted in the Physics books) against the (then new) method in math by a follower of Plato, a method where you got an approximation of pi by ever increasing the number of sides of a regular polygon inscribed into a circle and having a limit to that circle. Archimedes not only accepted that method but improved it by also using the analogous shape from the outside approaching the circular periphery.
Even less known is that Archimedes apparently was the first person to mistake what Zeno was saying as having to do with limits. Aristotle doesn't (makes other mistakes, though).
A main discussion in ancient greek philosophy is whether any natural philosophy (ie physics) is really a highly intellectual field, for the eleatics and most others thought that only the world of thought may be safe enough from the phenomena/ physical forms being identified only through problematic and particular senses.
Afteral, in the end of The Republic, Socrates makes a list of subjects he thinks are good for the Academy (a future school), and declines Astronomy to be among them, instead proposing volumetric geometry (3d geometry, which indeed was a subject in the Academy, and later on with people like Apollonius of Pergae and his conic sections)

Specialization is an issue, always. Eg i personally know very very little from math despite an enthusiasm since elementary school, and focus on the philosophical aspects, so i can see how others may do the exact opposite.

 

[Ferocitus]

There is also the issue of specialized examination/knowledge of what those ancients did or wrote. Eg my own uni degree is in philosophy, and even in philosophical examination of the ancients i see a pleiad of false views. Most people -not just outside philosophy- have never even read what remains of their works, so have a view which - at best- is based on some later source, often millenia after the original text. For example virtually no one outside philosophy is aware that Aristotle was not at all popular in Athens, and his views are by all means anti-philosophy and pro-natural science. He was the one who suggested (as a sort of end to a huge debate in greek philosophy) that axioms are used in philosophy of most types, despite noting that axioms inevitably limit the scope of the subject.
Aristotle had some more famous failed ideas, eg he was very openly (even noted in the Physics books) against the (then new) method in math by a follower of Plato, a method where you got an approximation of pi by ever increasing the number of sides of a regular polygon inscribed into a circle and having a limit to that circle. Archimedes not only accepted that method but improved it by also using the analogous shape from the outside approaching the circular periphery.
Even less known is that Archimedes apparently was the first person to mistake what Zeno was saying as having to do with limits. Aristotle doesn't (makes other mistakes, though).
A main discussion in ancient greek philosophy is whether any natural philosophy (ie physics) is really a highly intellectual field, for the eleatics and most others thought that only the world of thought may be safe enough from the phenomena/ physical forms being identified only through problematic and particular senses.
Afteral, in the end of The Republic, Socrates makes a list of subjects he thinks are good for the Academy (a future school), and declines Astronomy to be among them, instead proposing volumetric geometry (3d geometry, which indeed was a subject in the Academy, and later on with people like Apollonius of Pergae and his conic sections)

Specialization is an issue, always. Eg i personally know very very little from math despite an enthusiasm since elementary school, and focus on the philosophical aspects, so i can see how others may do the exact opposite.

I have always been amused by the extrapolation of fragmentary writings
to the entire "philosophy" of some ancient scholars. We know how much
words and phrases can change meaning in comparatively short times, so
heaven only knows how subtle variations could have changed the meaning of
ancient texts. Maybe that's why philology was such a popular choice of
study during the 19th century. Shrug.

I had a similar, but opposite, experience with philosophy and maths to you.
I've always liked reading philosophical works, or rather commentaries,
interpretations etc than actual analytical works, but I disliked the
way it was taught so I never took any formal classes.
Same with maths. I hated university actually, and dropped out in 2nd year.
The drinking, drugs and music culture were fun! (After I turned 30 I
stayed home and looked after the baby while my wife went off to get a law
degree.) Self-study was far more fun and I could get enormous amounts done
without having to conform to stupid timetables and administration.
I was lucky to have published enough as an under-grad to get a doctorate,
but I only did that to get a tax-free scholarship and avoid "real" work
for a few years.

Good luck with your studies. I hope you find somewhere warm and safe to
continue your pursuits!

 

[Kyriakos]

Not all are just fragments. Eg Plato still has thousands of pages, and he was of the habit to discuss most presocratics as well. Aristotle is another important secondary source, eg if it wasn't for him we wouldn't even have 9 of the "paradoxa" of Zeno.

 

[Ferocitus]

Not all are just fragments. Eg Plato still has thousands of pages, and he was of the habit to discuss most presocratics as well. Aristotle is another important secondary source, eg if it wasn't for him we wouldn't even have 9 of the "paradoxa" of Zeno.

They're Ok. It's the ones where less than a page is expanded upon by using references written decades or centuries later that I have difficulty with.

 

[Ferocitus]

Do you have very recent, good references to the latest ideas on the
origins of the "Sea Peoples"?
Last I read, it was proposed that they could have been "outcasts" from
various cities around the Aegean which were struggling to support
their population.
The "outcasts" (my crude, ignorant term) were voluntary exiles, or forced
if enough volunteers were not forthcoming.

 

[Kyriakos]

Sometimes they make up for it with being beyond awesome. Eg afaik the only phrase always attributed to Anaximander (to whom all sorts of important and innovative things are attributed, including the first use of trigonometry in the sun dial, and the very term for "Infinite" as a noun) is that:

All things are born in the Infinite, then move to the Worlds, then return to the Infinite when they perish

You can hardly find a more important term than infinite, not just in philosophy, but our entire world of thought, really

Prior to him, infinite seems to have only existed as an epithet (eg in Homer, for the boundless sea).

 

[Ferocitus]

You can hardly find a more important term than infinite, not just in philosophy, but our entire world of thought, really

It still creates some enormous difficulties for the foundations of mathematics that are not yet resolved.
Finitism, and ultra-finitism, went out of "fashion" for several decades, but the issues it raises still haven't been put to rest satisfactorily.