When the Assyrian rulers withdrew from Cilicia between 650 and 630 B.C.,

Homer and his fellow scribes became unemployed. They cultivated the art of poetry and gave lessons, preferably in astronomy, in order to turn hungry landlubbers into navigation-safe sailors.

The excellent astronomical star charts of the Assyrians, with whose help Thales of Miletus could later predict the solar eclipse of 28 May 585 B.C., helped them to learn astronomy.

Homer and his poet colleagues quickly saw that they had to pack the astronomical mnemonic sentences into exciting stories in order to achieve learning success with his sluggish students.

The future seafarers got to know the course of the stars with the war correspondent Homer, they learned which heroes killed which other heroes and sent them to the underworld, i.e. at which star ascents which other stars sank and so on.

Homer succeeded in turning the simple stories of the stars into great literature, which became a subject of instruction everywhere.

It was not until the 3rd century BC that Aratos wrote a new astronomical educational poem, which replaced Homer’s significance as an astronomy book, but not as school reading.

And even Lucian knew in the 2nd century A.D. that the love adventure of Aphrodite and Ares (Odyssey 8, 266-366) referred to the conjunction of the planets Mars and Venus in the starry sky (Lucian, Astrology 22).