My letter to the editor from 5 February 2008 (2nd continuation):

The change from one spring constellation to the next meant a collapse of the old order and the beginning of a new era for ancient man.

Like a good historical novel, Homer’s Iliad describes the collapse of an old city-state system of rule and the beginning of a new age of natural and enterprising aristocratic warriors. It shows how the earthly order around the rich city state of Troy, which had been firmly established for a long time, came to an end with the inevitability of a clockwork.

The old celestial order had already broken before, when the old polar star Thuban (Alpha Draconis), the celestial equivalent of earthly Troy, had been pushed out of the North Pole position as a result of precession until the year 2000 B.C. and had removed the celestial justification from the old order (Florence and Kenneth Wood: Homer’s Secret Iliad. The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded, London 1999).