My letter to the editor from April 9, 2001 (continued):

Since Aratos created a more modern star map in a new astronomical teaching poem in the third century B.C., Homer was understood above all as the poet of two heroic epics, but Lucian still knew in the second century A.D. that the love adventure of Aphrodite and Ares (Odyssey 8, 266 – 366) referred to the conjunction of the planets Venus and Mars in the starry sky (Lucian, Astrology 22).

In 1969 Hertha von Dechend described in a groundbreaking work the astromic foundations of many European and Asian legends (Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend: Hamlet’ Mill).

In 1999, in “Homer’s Secret Iliad”, Florence and Kenneth Wood brilliantly analysed the relationship between the Greek war on earth against Troy and the movements of stars and constellations in the night sky.

When we see Venus shine in the sky – as it is now – we can remember with Homer that it was her victory in the first election of a Miss Universe that triggered the Trojan War.