Homer got back to Ithica on or about April 16th of 1178 B.C

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Nicholas Gruen
Posted in History

Who knows if this speculation is true, but it gives me a thrill the way the human mind can deduce things so far from its immediate knowledge by a process of inference and deduction. Just like we can know things about the universe and about what goes on inside atoms from the tiniest clues, so by a process of cross referencing - the same kind of thing a detective does to solve a murder mystery, we might be able to pinpoint the day something happened in Homer.

Read all about it.

2 Comments

  1. Pavlov's Cat
    July 1, 2008

    Thanks for that great story -- it's made my day, for the kinds of reasons you give. It's similar to the thrill one gets when new technology is used to solve old mysteries -- carbon dating, DNA testing and so on. Some determined scholar once did a similar number on Wuthering Heights by painstakingly charting all the moon-phase dates for the whole 25-year period of the novel's events and using clues in the story in the same way these researchers did, but that would have been child's play by comparison.

  2. Nabakov
    July 1, 2008

    Speaking as as long time aficionado of Homer's Odyssey (the Rieu and then Fitzgerald translations mainly. Though I've heard the Fagles one is pretty shit hot) that's a bloody fascinating link.

    Yes, the stars are sending us electromagnetic streams of billion year old information we've only just learnt to read while also allowing us to now do the math on myths we've been reading for thousands of years. It's not a bad time to be alive is it?

    "...the same kind of thing a detective does to solve a murder mystery"

    Ahem, Tey's "The Daughter of Time."