When the Greek poet and shepherd, Hesiod, composed “The Works and Days” sometime around 700 BC, he used the night sky of his time as a reference point.

The poem, an admonishment to Perses, the poet’s lazy brother, to give up his lazy ways and start working, includes a calendar which uses astronomical signposts to guide farmers on when they should perform various tasks throughout the year, such as ploughing, sowing and reaping. How did the sky look all those centuries ago? On the 17th February 2004, a public lecture conducted by Dr Pat Cronin of UCC’s Science Faculty, revealed how a fascinating detective story unfolded.

Traditionally Greek scholars, who have studied “The Works and Days”, have focused their attention on the question of when within the year Hesiod’s astronomical signposts were observed. Dr Cronin was the first scholar to consider the question of where on the poet’s landscape they were observed. He enlisted the help of two colleagues, Dr Michel Vandyck and Mr Pat Twomey, of UCC’s Physics Department. It wasn’t long before they were able to provide him with a star chart for 700 BC, showing the configuration of the sky as Hesiod himself would have seen it from his home village of Askra (today called Askri), which nestles in the Valley of the Muses near Thebes in central Greece.

Armed with sky charts for the period, Dr Cronin travelled to the valley, stood where Hesiod might have stood and, after a period of careful study of the evidence, concluded that the poet’s calendar was specific to the valley and to the farmers living and working there in 700 BC.

At the 4th International Conference of Boeotian Studies, held at Livadia in 2001, Dr Cronin presented a paper giving the results of this particular research project. Tuesday’s lecture will be a revised version of that paper.

At an earlier conference at Thebes in 1996 Dr Cronin had addressed another intriguing question relating to the “Works and Days”: why in the catalogue of instructions drawn up for his brother did Hesiod omit olive growing, despite the fact that the olive was well established in Greece by 700 BC? Cronin suggested that the answer may be found in the way the family farm was divided on their father’s death, the olive grove having fallen to the poet: if Perses did not own an olive grove, instructions on its cultivation would have been superfluous in a poem intended primarily for him.

A former Director of the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies in Athens, Dr Cronin is a regular visitor to Greece and will lead a guided tour there next April.