Software solves the mystery of a 2,500 year-old poem by Sappho

[Batu69]

Science illuminates the dark night when the Greek poet looked to the heavens, lonely for her lover.

Fragments of Sappho's poetry, though not "Midnight Poem," transcribed in the second century BCE.

 

The poet Sappho was so celebrated in the ancient world that the Roman Empire was still producing statues and paintings of her centuries after her death. Her work was organized into nine books of lyric poetry in the famous library at Alexandria, yet we know almost nothing about her life, except that she lived on the Greek island of Lesbos and wrote love poems to women. She remains famous to the present day, even though only a few fragments of her poetry have survived.

 

One of these fragments, called "Midnight Poem," was written in the mid-sixth century BCE to an absent lover. Due to tantalizing hints in the poem, scholars have long debated when it was written. Now, thanks to software used to simulate night skies in planetariums, scientists have figured it out.

 

"Midnight Poem" still conjures up a powerful image of loneliness. Here is Julia Dubnoff's translation from the original Aeolic Greek:

 

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The moon is set. And the Pleiades.
It’s the middle of the night.
Time passes.
But I sleep alone.

 

What has tantalized scholars about this poem is the highly specific reference to the celestial object Pleiades, an open star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters for its seven brightest stars. Located in the constellation Taurus, and known throughout the ancient world, the Pleiades would have been instantly recognizable to Sappho's readers. The question is, at what time of year would the moon and Pleiades have set before midnight?

 

To answer that question, a group of physicists and an astronomer turned to a software package called Starry Night, which astronomers use to plot the location of celestial objects over time. For the experiment, they assumed that the poem had been written in 570 BCE, the year Sappho died. Though we're not sure when the poet was born, the date of her death is fairly well-established, so it was a good outer bound. They also assumed that Sappho was writing in Mytilene, the biggest city on Lesbos.

 

Describing their work in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, the researchers write, "Previously, [it was] estimated that the poem was composed in late winter/early spring, a time frame that is not unusual for lyrics of an amorous nature. The aim of our paper is to revisit this earlier finding by using modern-day software."

 

It turned out that the humanities types who came up with that original guess on the season weren't on the wrong track. By calibrating the software to display a starry night in 570 BCE over the metropolis of Mytilene, researchers discovered that the poem was written between January 25 and March 31. University of Texas, Arlington, physicist Manfred Cuntz, an author on the study, explained that the date range was necessary to reflect the inexact nature of time keeping in the ancient world. In a release, he said:

 

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The timing question is complex as at that time they did not have accurate mechanical clocks as we do, only perhaps water clocks. For that reason, we also identified the latest date on which the Pleiades would have been visible to Sappho from that location on different dates some time during the evening.

 

Of course, all the scientific analysis in the world can't tell us whether Sappho was describing exactly what she saw–or evoking an image of the sky without its most beautiful objects purely for dramatic effect.

 

Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage [PDF], 2016.

 

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