Is an eclipse mentioned in ancient Odyssey poem?

On April 16, 1178 BC, a solar eclipse may have marked the return of Odysseus, legendary King of Ithaca, to his kingdom after the Trojan War. From the article:

"Is an eclipse mentioned in ancient <i>Odyssey</i> poem?
Space 23 June 2008
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An eclipse more than 3000 years ago may have been mentioned in Greek mythology. This image of a solar eclipse was taken from the former Mir space station on 11 August 1999 (Copyright: CNES)
A solar eclipse that occurred more than 3000 years ago may be mentioned in the Odyssey, an ancient poem based on Greek mythology, a new study suggests.

The poem, attributed to the poet Homer, describes the 10-year journey that its hero, Odysseus, took to return home to Ithaca, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, after the end of the Trojan War. The war was waged over the beautiful Helen of Troy, a daughter of the god Zeus.

Days before Odysseus returned home to kill the 108 suitors courting his wife, a prophet predicted the men’s doom. “The Sun is blotted out of heaven, and a blighting gloom is over all the land,” the sage said.

In fact, a total solar eclipse – in which the disc of the Sun was blocked by the Moon – is calculated to have taken place on 16 April 1178 BCE over the Ionian Islands.

That is around the estimated end of the Trojan War, which despite its appearance in mythology may represent an actual conflict or series of conflicts in the city of Troy in the 12th century BCE.

But scholars have largely dismissed the idea that the Odyssey refers to an actual eclipse, since the poem emerged centuries after the legendary war.

Now a new analysis of the text suggests the poem may indeed refer to a sequence of astronomical phenomena that occurred in the year 1178. “It’s going to be hugely controversial of course,” says study author Marcelo Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York, US. “But if you look at the numbers, statistically speaking, this is too good a coincidence not to report.”

God Hermes
Magnasco and colleague Constantino Baikouzis analysed the text describing the last 34 days of Odysseus’s journey.

The researchers compared references to the New Moon, constellations, and the positions of Venus and Mercury against historical astronomical data to narrow down the potential dates.

In 135 years around the estimated dates for the fall of Troy in the Trojan War, only one time period – culminating with the 1178 eclipse – fit the data.

“If our interpretation of the passages as astronomical phenomena is correct, then there’s a very low probability that these events are aligned by chance,” Magnasco told New Scientist.

But the study does require some creative interpretation of the text. The motions of Mercury, for example, are drawn from a description of the god Hermes’s travels. Without the Hermes connection, Magnasco says, there are more than a dozen other dates in the 135-year interval that might also work.

Seeing things
Some say these references leave a lot of room for interpretation. “Over the decades, I’ve seen many such claims come and go,” says Brad Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, US. “People try to find things encoded into books, but the human mind is great at pattern recognition and can find anything that it wants to find.”

If the Odyssey is riddled with precise astronomical references, it also raises other questions. How could the poem emerge with such detailed information, centuries later? Does this mean the Odyssey is actually a historical account?

Magnasco agrees that the analysis has a number of limitations. 'We are imposing a modern interpretation of what the lines mean on an ancient poem, and that is fraught with uncertainty,' he told New Scientist. 'We just hope that some people will look at this benevolently and go and read the Odyssey again.'”