Astronomers Attempt to Date Sappho’s “Midnight Poem” Using the Stars

The moon has set
And the Pleiades;
It is midnight,
The time is going by,
And I sleep alone.

Sappho describes a night when the moon, and the star cluster Pleiades, set before midnight on the island of Lesbos. Now, in the tradition of trying to paint a biographical portrait of Sappho from her work, a group of astronomers and a physicist at the University of Texas, Arlington have attempted to seasonally date “Midnight Poem” using these bits of data.

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