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).
My letter to the editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich (to the report about a Troy exhibition), published in the issue of April 9, 2001:
The war described by Homer in the Trojan plain did not take place on earth but in the sky. Participants in the war were not the Greeks and the Trojans on Earth, but the stars and constellations of the sky above Troy and the Aegean Sea. The goal of the war was not the conquest of Troy, but the memorization of celestial geography.
The listeners of the performances were not cultural nobles, but seamen who needed the exact knowledge of the starry sky in order to reach their destinations safely and by the shortest route before the discovery of the compass and clock.