total at Thasos, but not at Paros. So we may assume that Archilochus was at Thasos in B.C. 648.[1]
Eclipse of Thales.
I come now to the most famous eclipse of antiquity, the eclipse predicted by Thales of Miletus. The narrative in Herodotus[2]—I use Dr. Godley's translation—runs as follows:
'There was war between the Lydians and the Medes for five years; each won many victories over the other, and once they fought a battle by night. They were still warring with equal success, when it chanced, at an encounter which happened in the sixth year, that during the battle the day was turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year in which the change did indeed happen. So when the Lydians and Medes saw the day turned to night they ceased from fighting, and both were the more zealous to make peace. Those who reconciled them were Syennesis the Cilician and Labynetus the Babylonian.'
Labynetus is of course Nebuchadrezzar, whose army had destroyed Jerusalem in the preceding year.
- ↑ Professor Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, i. 2 (1913), 351, shows that it appears from Aristotle, Rhet.' iii. 17, 1418 b 528, that the passage cited referred to Neobule, and from Dioscorides, Anth. Pal. vii. 351, that Neobule lived in Paros, which creates a slight presumption that the eclipse was observed at Paros. To make it total at Paros without undue violence to other elements in the motions of the Sun or Moon, I should suggest increasing the Moon's acceleration found by me from 10·8" to 11·4" per century and the Sun's from 1·5" to 1·8". This would slightly improve the agreement with results deduced from elements other than eclipses of the Sun, but would reduce the magnitude of the eclipse of Plutarch at Chaeroneia, in which many stars are said to have been seen in all parts of the heavens, to 11·92, where totality is 12. The Sun was 48° above the horizon at the time of the eclipse of Plutarch, and in the absence of evidence that any but the very brightest planets could be seen with the Sun at such an altitude unless the eclipse was total, I hesitate to make the correction, and adhere to my solution, which makes the eclipse of Archilochus total at Thasos, but not at Paros. Of course if the reference to a total eclipse and, as it would seem, to the corona in Plutarch, De Facie, 932 b, is intended to apply to the individual eclipse described in 931 d, e, this diminution in the magnitude of that eclipse will not be permissible.
- ↑ i. 74.
