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Airy argued that his personal experience of eclipses was necessary for interpreting
the eclipse of Thales as a total one. In particular, it was only the “sudden and awful”
experience of seeing a total eclipse that could have disrupted a pitched battle. Similarly,
a reference in Xenophon to the surrender of the besieged city of Larissa when a cloud
covered the sun was interpreted as a total solar eclipse, that being the only way to
explain the terror of the well-fortified citizens.
5
Thus the establishment of the fact of
an eclipse's magnitude was dependent on claims about the psychology of seeing such a
phenomenon.
Airy was convinced that the texts containing these reports were highly reliable. An
amateur classicist, he took “great enjoyment” in studying Greek texts, and reported that
as a student he spent as much time reading the classics as he did mathematics.
6
He read
Herodotus and the other Greek authors as realistic history, a nearly universal practice
in the Victorian period.
7
For example, he spent significant time analyzing the eclipse
seen by Agathocles as the tyrant fled Syracuse. The eclipse seemed promising for astro-
nomical use except that the text did not tell whether Agathocles sailed north or south
from Syracuse, thus obscuring the critical fact of where the eclipse was seen. Airy
thought he could solve this problem through deep historical investigation, including
classical naval strategy, the logistics of armies, and the proper identification of certain
North African quarries. He was convinced that his classical sleuthing had revealed
Agathocles' route, and thus that he had achieved “perfect certainty” regarding the data
of this eclipse.
8
Airy's confidence in the accuracy of these ancient texts was even more
remarkable given his well-known obsession with precision and highly disciplined observ-
ing regimes.
9
Not all astronomers were willing to credit these moves as producing reliable data,
however. In the American astronomer Simon Newcomb's lunar theory “the ancient total
eclipses of the sun, which have been so much discussed during the present century, are
here thrown aside.”
10
Newcomb's journey to professional astronomy was quite different
from Airy's classics-steeped gentlemanly education. Virtually self-taught, as a youth he
literally walked out of the woods of Nova Scotia and managed to impress the astronomi-
cal community with his extraordinary skill in calculation. Known for his manic energy
and “massive head,” he wrote extensively on the need to bring scientific methods to
bear on all aspects of society.
11
While he was a close friend of Airy's, he felt strongly
that science was far above all other forms of human activity, and could not be contami-
nated by insecure historicism.
Newcomb began his criticism of Airy's use of Greek sources slowly. Perhaps, he said,
Airy was not justified in assuming that all eclipses in the ancient chronicles were total.
