Using a clever bit of retrospective stargazing researchers have managed to date Homer’s classic work The Odyssey. Another team has used a similar technique to shift Julius Caesar back in time by a few days.

First up: The Odyssey.

Marcelo Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis identified four astronomical events in the epic poem and calculated dates within 100 years of the fall of Troy that would fit in with the events described around Odysseus’s return home and the ensuing slaughter of men propositioning his wife. April 16, 1178 BCE was what they came up with (press release).

This is handy because it ties in with a previous theory that dates an eclipse possibly described in The Odyssey to the same date. Some have previously argued that the poem does not make reference to the eclipse at all and that the phrase “the Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world” is not an actual description of events (LA Times).

But Magnasco and Baikouzis’s work seems to offer support to the eclipse theory.

“We cannot say for sure that the events described in The Odyssey really happened, of course, because some of the events are really quite fanciful. But what we want to do is to get people to go back to the text and have another look,” says Magnasco (Independent).

“Under the very large assumption that there was an Odysseus, there were suitors that got massacred, that it indeed took 10 years for Odysseus to get back … yes, in that case the fall of Troy would have happened 10 years before the death of the suitors, thus in 1188BC. The current dating of the destruction layer of Troy VIIa is around 1190 plus/minus a few years.”

There are a number of caveats in their paper. For starters Homer would have had to have a pretty detailed knowledge of the celestial situation hundreds of years before he wrote The Odyssey.

The paper should appear here soon, on the PNAS website.

Part two: Caesar has landed

In a similar story that is getting less media coverage, researchers from Texas State University-San Marcos have rewritten history just a little bit. Using what they call ‘forensic astronomy’ the team says the date of Julius Caesar’s invasion of England took place on August 22-23 in 55 BC, not August 26-27 as previously stated (press release).

“Most history books say Caesar’s landing date was Aug. 26-27 and he sailed to the northeast of Dover to land on an open beach near Walmer and Deal,” says Donald Olson. “That cannot be correct. The afternoon tidal streams could not have carried his fleet to the northeast on that date.”

According to the press release, Caesar sailed across the channel and then turned either right or left when he reached the English coasts. Some historians have argued he must have turned right as the landscape in the other direction doesn’t match his descriptions. Some scientists have argued that the tides on the 26th would have pushed him left.

Combining an account by a 1st century AD Roman writer (which noted the tide was falling not rising as it would be doing on the 26) with a 1930s historian who identified a transcription error in the dates of the landing with reconstructions of the tides on that day, Olson concludes: “The scientists were right about the tidal streams, and so were the historians about the landing site. With our new result, our new date, everything is reconciled.”

The work will be published in the latest Sky and Telescope magazine, but doesn’t appear to be online yet.

Image top: an eclipse / NASA

Image lower: the landing of the Romans