Gazing at the Stars

Ancient love and loneliness

I remember a schoolteacher, long ago, commenting that the ancients knew a lot about stars because, in the absence of artificial light, they had nothing much else to do at night but stargaze.

Of course there were other night-time activities, and both Sappho and Plato - the philosopher himself - wrote poetry connecting the sky to amatory reflections.

A haunting short poem attributed Sappho (c. 600 BC) runs:

The moon has left the sky,
the Pleiades are gone.
Deep night: the hours go by,
and I - I sleep, alone.

Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες, μέσαι δέ
νύκτες, πάρα δ' ἔρχετ' ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

Plato wrote an elegiac epigram for an admired friend whom he calls Aster, "star":

You're gazing at the stars, my star. If only I could be
the sky to gaze upon you - with so many eyes to see.

ἀστέρας εἰσαθρεῖς ἀστήρ ἐμός. εἴθε γενοίμην
   οὐρανός, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω.

The Plato epigram came to mind because my review of James Romm’s Plato and the Tyrant was published today in the Times Literary Supplement: this and another epigram by Plato, mourning his friend (and possibly lover) Dion, are taken to be genuine. The classical scholar Maurice Bowra one wrote that “the poems quoted are so good that they cannot be the work of a forger”, and in this case I agree.