Homeric Astronomy?

Scientific American published an article about an upcoming paper that suggests that Homer (pictured sans wang below), in his Odyssey, referred to a specific eclipse that occurred in 1178 BCE.


In the original, Odysseus is about to put a cap in the collective asses of the suitors vying for access to Penelope's poozle, and as a portent of this momentous thrashing, there is an eclipse. Cool beans. Big, mythic, memorable--the stuff of epics.

A number of celestial events appear in the Odyssey, including appearances by both the star cluster of the Pleiades and the constellation Bootes. The morning Odysseus arrives in Ithaca, Venus is in the morning sky. There is the aforementioned eclipse, and then this reference: "But the crucial clue came from a reference to the god Hermes flying west to the island of Ogygia. The researchers propose the god's voyage actually refers to the planet Mercury, which hangs low in the sky and reverses course from west to east every 116 days." What the authors did was look for a moment in history when all of these events could have lined up.

I am using Samuel Butler's translation, which is free, and they use the Latin names, so don't be confused. Hermes and Mercury are the fleet-footed messengers of the gods in their respective traditions.

The crucial passage, it seems is this, from right near the beginning of the poem:

And Minerva said, "Father, son of Saturn, King of kings, if, then, the gods now mean that Ulysses should get home, we should first send Mercury to the Ogygian island to tell Calypso that we have made up our minds and that he is to return. In the meantime I will go to Ithaca, to put heart into Ulysses' son Telemachus; I will embolden him to call the Achaeans in assembly, and speak out to the suitors of his mother Penelope, who persist in eating up any number of his sheep and oxen; I will also conduct him to Sparta and to Pylos, to see if he can hear anything about the return of his dear father- for this will make people speak well of him."

OK. The Odyssey is not The Da Vinci Code. It is abundantly clear that the reference is to a character, not to a planet. The parallelism between what Mercury does and what Minerva does (going to make ready for the return of Ulysses) pretty much proves that they weren't talking about the planets. It accomplishes plot, indeed gets it moving along. To mistake the character who is a messenger for a planet in this case is as about as ridiculous as saying: "Big gas ball, son of other, slightly less big gas ball with rings!"

What you have here, I think, is a species of faux archeoastronomy, much like people trying to decide what the Star of Bethlehem was (it was a dramatic element of the story added long after Jesus was born--deal with it). Even the article in Scientific American points this out:

Taking Mercury out of the mix leaves 15 matching dates in the 135-year search period.

So, not insanely uncommon by astronomic standards (it occurs more than once every ten years), but if you add one event that is almost certainly not mentioned in the epic, you narrow it down to one. How convenient.

You know, this sort of goofy interpretation of the Homeric epic is symptomatic, I suspect, of perhaps 1) a failure of the sciences and the humanities to communicate, 2) a more sinister, explicitly sensationalist non-astronomy for public consumption, or 3) another example of really baseless and whimsical lines of inquiry in the style of The Naked Archaeologist, in this case, The Naked Archeoastronomer.

Let me briefly look at some of the flawed assumptions that seem to undergird this particularly silly interpretation of the Odyssey. See for example the SciAm statement:

According to Magnasco, the references imply that Homer chose to set the slaying of the suitors on the day of the eclipse.

The two words that I would challenge here are "Homer chose." Homer probably did not exist. Sure, there is a tradition that ascribes the Iliad and Odyssey to Homer, but that's like saying Moses wrote the first 5 books of the Bible (including the bits, oddly, about what happened after his death)...it is a tradition. Epic poetry was performative, acted out in public, and was part of an oral culture. The original singers were illiterate, and every bit of the poem is designed for the purposes of mnemonic retrieval--the hexameter that Greek epic verse was written in, the exotic (memorable) characters, villains and happenings, the characters who embody a single memorable characteristic (Ulysses=wise, Achilles=rage, Beowulf=strong)--these are all part of the oral tradition. In this sense, details can arise simply for the reason of filling out the line--something that the authors don't address. Also, the path of transmission suggest that the story is much older than the earliest fixed (written) version of it. Imagine playing a game of "telephone" that lasted for hundreds of years--clearly, whatever the original poet "chose" is of little direct consequence of the version that we have. Additionally, there probably was not even a single originator of this poem. Several traditions converge in this story. It is a compilation, stories woven together like a textile (text and textile have the same roots, and epic poets are often called "weavers of words").

In this environment and under these condidtions, the notion that the "poet" would have "set" the story under a particular eclipse is ridiculous. The computations that would be required to figure that out would have required, if nothing else, literacy. The poet came from an oral tradition. I believe it was Walter Ong who said that the characteristics of a primary oral culture (one without a sense of language as a permanent "object"--words on a page broken up and forever unchanging) are irrevocably lost when literacy arrives. Literacy reorders the mind and makes new types of sustained, abstract syllogistic thought possible, including, I would argue, mathematics. It is, of course, a possiblity that the literate person who finally wrote it down (was he just close to a highly oral culture or did he transcribe it verbatim from a bard?...we can't really know), that he interpolated the calculations...but that would almost certainly mean that he was not taking it down verbatim ("Hold it, Homer...What if I just put in a little bit of hidden astronomy. It'll be our little secret.")

I'm sorry, but this article seems to me to be beneath SciAm. I wait with baited breath for the article to be published to see whether or not any of these issues are addressed. I'm just saying that the whole proposition sounds highly improbable and will need really first-rate evidence to be anything more than, well, a little goofy and a transparently bad reading of the original.

HJ