Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of Homer’s Odyssey (“Theoclymenus’s prophecy”) to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse.

In the late 1920’s scientists computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. was total over the Ionian Islands and was the only suitable eclipse in more than a century to agree with classical estimates of the decade-earlier sack of Troy around 1192–1184 B.C.E. However, much skepticism remains about whether the verses refer to this, or any, eclipse.

We invite you on a literary and scientific journey with mathematical physicist Marcelo Magnasco as he sheds light on an ancient mystery by using modern tools.

“What we’d like to achieve is to get the reader to pick up the ‘Odyssey’ and read it again, and ponder,” said Magnasco in an article in Discover Magazine. “And to realize that our understanding of these texts is quite imperfect, and even when entire libraries have been written about Homeric studies, there is still room for further investigation.”

Marcelo Magnasco graduated from the University of La Plata in Argentina with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1987. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1992. He is currently a professor in Laboratory of Mathematical Physics at Rockefeller University. In 1991, Magnasco was named the University of Chicago’s Sydney Bloomenthal Dissertation Fellow and the William Rayney Harper Dissertation Fellow.