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One joy of reading Homer is seeing how he mixes incongruent genres, as if poetry was equally suited for advice on farming or shield making as for reflections on bravery and love. Homer includes astrological observations in his epics as well, including one harrowing eclipse during The Odyssey: Greedy suitors have overrun Ulysses’s home when darkness suddenly appears at noon, an omen. A prophet decrees, “Shrouded in night are your heads and your faces and your knees beneath you ... the sun has perished out of heaven and an evil mist hovers over all.”
It’s natural that people would remember all this, since total eclipses occur only once every 370 years on any spot on Earth. In fact, that rarity has convinced two astronomers that they can pinpoint the exact day wily Ulysses returned to Ithaca more than three thousand years ago to take his revenge on the suitors.
Marcelo O. Magnasco, at New York’s Rockefeller University, and Constantino Baikouzis, at the Observatorio Astronómico in Argentina, have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which they claim that Ulysses made his homecoming on April 16, 1178 B.C. (The paper is available for free on the PNAS Web site.)
This duo first became interested in Ulysses when Baikouzis, who is Greek and was raised on Homer as some people are raised on the Bible or Koran, read a quote about the eclipse in an astronomy textbook.
Based on archeological digs and historical references by Plato and Herodotus, he and Magnasco narrowed down the fall of Troy (the war that kept Ulysses away from his home in Ithaca for two decades) to around 1190 B.C. They calculated backward to determine when eclipses would have fallen on Ithaca, and only one possible date fit the timeframe.
But along the way, they discovered another scholar had already done those calculations in 1926. The German astronomer Carl Schoch’s work had practically been booed out of academe by skeptical historians and forgotten. Baikouzis and Magnasco thought Schoch made sense, though, so they began to look in The Odyssey for independent, corroborating evidence, especially details about planets and constellations.
“The references to the constellations, for instance, indicate time of the year,” Magnasco explains. “In addition, Homer is meticulous in describing when a new day occurs, so you can frame these references rigidly in time.”
The most important references tracked Hermes (i.e., Mercury) and Venus. Even though Hermes and Venus appear only as characters in the text, Magnasco says he and Baikouzis felt justified equating the actions of the gods with the actions of planets.
“The text insists, a little bit too much, on certain characteristics,” he says. “Hermes travels close to the surface of the seas, while Mercury [the planet] cannot be seen far from the horizon ... and Hermes loudly complains a little too much about how far west he’s traveled,” and so on.
Overall, the movements of planets and clues about a religious festival happening near the spring equinox a few weeks before Ulysses’s slaughter led the astronomers to the exact same date, April 16, which strengthened their conclusion.
Magnasco admits that historians have criticized them for conflating planets and gods, since the association between planets and gods started with other cultures and may not have spread to Greece by 1178 B.C. However, Magnasco points out there’s no evidence against the associations in Homer either, and at least by Plato’s time, circa 400 B.C., Hermes was so closely linked with Mercury that Plato mentions it casually, as if readers should be quite familiar.
Regardless, the two astronomers stand by their work, and say it raises interesting textual questions. Homer wrote down the epic four hundred years after Troy fell, so either the details were passed down orally with incredible accuracy, or Homer was incredibly diligent when recreating details of an earlier era. Says Magnasco, “The Odyssey is one of the world’s most beloved classics, also one of the most influential books ever. To be able to even propose a change in the way it’s read is a major thing.”
Sam Kean is the associate editor of Science & Spirit.
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