I'm a sucker for stuff like this:
Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of the Odyssey ("Theoclymenus's prophecy") to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s, Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. was total over the Ionian Islands and was the only suitable eclipse in more than a century to agree with classical estimates of the decade-earlier sack of Troy around 1192-1184 B.C.E. However, much skepticism remains about whether the verses refer to this, or any, eclipse. To contribute to the issue independently of the disputed eclipse reference, we analyze other astronomical references in the Epic, without assuming the existence of an eclipse, and search for dates matching the astronomical phenomena we believe they describe. We use three overt astronomical references in the epic: to Boötes and the Pleiades, Venus, and the New Moon; we supplement them with a conjectural identification of Hermes's trip to Ogygia as relating to the motion of planet Mercury. Performing an exhaustive search of all possible dates in the span 1250-1115 B.C., we looked to match these phenomena in the order and manner that the text describes. In that period, a single date closely matches our references: 16 April 1178 B.C.E.
Which would be the same day that this happened:
Then Mercury of Cyllene summoned the ghosts of the suitors, and in his hand he held the fair golden wand with which he seals men's eyes in sleep or wakes them just as he pleases; with this he roused the ghosts and led them, while they followed whining and gibbering behind him. As bats fly squealing in the hollow of some great cave, when one of them has fallen out of the cluster in which they hang, even so did the ghosts whine and squeal as Mercury the healer of sorrow led them down into the dark abode of death. When they had passed the waters of Oceanus and the rock Leucas, they came to the gates of the sun and the land of dreams, whereon they reached the meadow of asphodel where dwell the souls and shadows of them that can labour no more.
Reading the latest research on Homeric poetry brought back a powerful schoolhouse memory. It happened when the Baron was a young sprout---well, okay, a public high-school student---way, way back in the latter stages of the Nixon administration. The class was a senior course in English Composition, yet neither the students nor the teacher composed essays or exams for it. The teacher wasn't even a "teacher" in the conventional sense---he was the school's tennis coach, for godsakes, who had to spend so many hours teaching something besides tennis every year to keep his credentials valid. The class had but one assignment for the entire semester: To read one single book----The Odyssey, yep, the Fitzgerald translation---and we read it aloud, line by line and verse by verse, from start to finish for 18 straight weeks. Along the way, of course, we'd pause every few verses for lengthy discussions of the story, its historical and mythical components, its use of rhyme and metaphor, its depictions of character and its dramatic devices. While this could be a daunting and sometimes tedious task in a class full of 25 kids, the longer we stayed with it, the more rewarding the experience became for all of us, and when the class concluded in June, more than one student expressed the regret that we couldn't spend another 18 weeks reading The Iliad the same exact way. In terms of teaching us to be critical readers----and more critical thinkers, by implication---that high-school English class was far more engrossing and insightful than any literature class I subsequently encountered on the university level, and it left me with a lifelong love of language, for its myriad shadings and nuances, and with an equally strong distaste for writers who misuse language to manipulate and exploit an unwitting audience.
It's also a powerful reminder of the ability of public education to teach, instruct and influence kids for a lifetime, the next time you hear some GOP gasbag pontificating on the virtues of charter schools and vouchers. Most likely, you won't need to wait very long.
---Vitelius
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