Welcome to Current TV Homer's "Odyssey" may have historical fact
Homer's possible reference to a solar eclipse helped scholars
date Odysseus' return from the Trojan War. It was on April 16,
1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and
spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of
researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science. Experts have long debated whether
the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War
and its aftermath. Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University
in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical
Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make
some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his
kingdom of Ithaca. But interpreting clues in Homer's "Odyssey"
as references to the positions of stars and a total eclipse of
the sun allowed them to determine when a particular set of
conditions would have occurred. "What we'd like to achieve is to
get the reader to