The astronomical program determined what time of the year 2500 years ago the poem Sappho was written.

Physicists got to the love lyrics - and used their software tools

Sappho (about 630 BC - about 570 BC) is a legendary ancient Greek poetess, known for her love lyrics. Her poems and hymns were performed at weddings, feasts and festivals of the fias, the closed cult community of girls and women. Sappho herself headed one of these fias dedicated to the goddesses Artemis and Aphrodite.

Sappho was so revered by contemporaries and descendants that statues and paintings of her image were created in ancient Rome after many centuries. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the biography of this talented woman, except for the fact that she was born on the island of Lesbos, wrote about love and passion, and was “violent, sweet-smiling, pure,” as her friend poet Alkey said.

Sappho's seven volumes of poems were kept in the famous Library of Alexandria, but together with other masterpieces of world culture and knowledge were destroyed by fire and then by Christians as part of a religious struggle against paganism. To date, only a few fragments have survived. One of them - a personal poem to an unknown lover or mistress, imbued with a sense of loneliness. It contains interesting lines from an astronomy point of view.
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The moon has gone. Pleiades disappeared,
It's the middle of the night,
Time passes, -
And I'm alone in bed.

Researchers have always been interested in this poem, because it contains a very specific reference to the Pleiades astronomical object - the M45 star cluster, named after the seven sisters, daughters of the titan Atlanta.

The Pleiades or Atlantis (after the father) served as nymphs in the artemis of Artemis and, being in the constellation Taurus, were well known to contemporaries of Sappho, and indeed to the whole ancient world.


^{Pleiades, as seen through the telescope of the Palomar Observatory, 2004}

A group of physicists from the University of Texas at Arington, together with an astronomer from the National Research Institute of Astronomy in Thailand, set the task to calculate at what time of year the Moon and the Pleiades enter before midnight. They used Starry Night software, with which astronomers compiled a star map in arbitrary time and place. For the experiment, they took 570 BC. - the year of death of Sappho.

Scientists also visited the university planetarium to recreate a starry sky map and determine how much was visible from the bed in the Sappho room.

Previously it was assumed that the poem was written at the end of winter or early spring - the usual time for love lyrics. The purpose of the study was to test this theory with the help of modern software.

The program was calibrated to display the starry sky over Mitylena (the largest city of Lesbos) in 570 BC. - and found that the researchers' guesses are correct. Definitely, the poem is written between January 25 and March 31.

The discovery can not be called extremely important for human civilization, but this is a good example of how the natural sciences can even help fellow humanities. A kind of creative symbiosis of physicists and lyricists.

The results of scientific work published in the journal Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage .