Did the Odyssey really happen? The truth of poetry lies in weather

Now, goddess Child of Zeus tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning… We are once again looking for the beginning, but not of a model. Instead, we're looking at ancient weather observations in Homer's Odyssey — perhaps one of the greatest weather texts ever written.

We examine a paper that reconstructs the storm that shipwrecked Odysseus, exploring how modeling past weather relates to future forecasting and what it means to validate a 2,800-year-old poem as archival meteorological observation.

Paper

• Meteorological Assessment of Homer's Odyssey, Cerveny, 1993

Chapters

• 00:05:22 - A lil refresher of what went down in the book
• 00:13:16 - Paper time! Intro to reconstructing ancient weather
• 00:20:09 - Day-by-day on the Mediterranean sea
• 00:36:45 - Actually NOT reconstructing the weather, but validating the Odyssey's accuracy
• 00:41:52 - Why you, weather person, should read the classics

Recommended reading

• The Odyssey by Homer (Translated by Emily Wilson)
• Works & Days by Hesiod (Translated by A. E. Stallings)
• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin