The moon has set
And the Pleiades;
It is midnight,
The time is going by,
And I sleep alone.
(trans. Henry Thornton Wharton, 1887)Cuntz and his co-author, Levent Gurdemir, used the software of the UT-Arlington planetarium, where Gurdemir serves as director, to recreate the night sky of ancient Greece for 570 B.C. They found that the Pleiades would have set at midnight on January 25 of that year, and would set earlier and earlier as the year progressed.
Cuntz admitted that timing was tricky, since the ancient Greeks relied on water clocks, not mechanical time keepers. But the latest date that the setting of the Pleiades would have been visible from the isle of Lesbos was March 31. So they concluded that Sappho would have written her poem between mid-winter and early spring of that year—just as historians had estimated.
via Gizmodo
Image: NASA/ESA/AURA/Caltech
