Sky mapping software dates Sappho poem - CNET

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Not a lot is known about the Greek poet Sappho. She was probably bo sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and she is thought to have died in around 570 BCE after retuing to Lesbos from exile.

Thanks to a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington, we now know for certain that she was alive until at least 570 BCE. This is because of a poem fragment called "Midnight Poem", and astronomy software called Starry Night version 7.3 and Digistar 5 from the Inteational Planetarium Society, which can recreate the night sky over Greece during Sappho's lifetime.

The moon has set
and the Pleiades;
It is midnight,
The time is going by,
And I sleep alone.
(Henry Thoton Wharton, 1887:68)

The team took the information provided in this fragment -- that the star cluster known as the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus had set at midnight -- and ran it through the software. They calculated that the earliest date the poem could have been written was on January 25, 570 BC, when the Pleiades set at midnight. Their research was published in the Joual of Astronomical History and Heritage.

The team also calculated the latest date that the poem could have been written. The poem, after all, doesn't state that the Pleiades set at midnight. They could have set any time after twilight. The last date that the Pleiades would have appeared in the night sky after twilight was March 31, 570.