[aidenn0]

For a more modern example of why you can't reliably date poems by their in-universe information, consider the song "Tom's Diner"[1], which has a series of events that is impossible for any single day in New York in the range of time that the author could have composed it.

Since the composer was around to ask, she was able to relate that it was a composite of several days of events, which is quite reasonable.

As a side note, the wikipedia link assumes that the newspaper story about the actor was a front-page story, which is reasonable, but not necessarily true, so we don't even know that Vega was referencing the NY Posts' article on William Holden.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#.22Tom.27s_Diner...

[p4wnc6]

I feel this is a silly idea. Of course physicists (many of whom love poetry) understand the difference between a literal depiction of a real event (as is clearly the case in the Sappho poem) and an artistic description that seeks to establish value through means other than a literal description.

Acting like Cuntz, et al., must have pursued the assumptions and analysis they pursued because they have some kind of infantile understanding of poetry, literal vs. non-literal depiction, literary devices, etc., is ridiculous. No one, certainly not Cuntz, et al., is going around saying all parts of poems that resemble literal descriptions must therefore be perfect eyewitness accounts of actual events.

And all of that is irrelevant to the task of astronomically dating the poem by assuming a certain literal description. The result is implicitly modulo that assumption, and if the assumption turns out wrong, that's not a criticism of the work otherwise based on it.

[tremon]

if the assumption turns out wrong, that's not a criticism of the work otherwise based on it.

True. It is however, a criticism of everyone that conveniently forgot to mention that critical assumption, and that starts with the UTA press release.

Acting like Cuntz, et al., [..] have some kind of infantile understanding of poetry

That's not the most damning criticism in the article though. The most damning is that they seem to have copied entire paragraphs off Wikipedia, which suggests they have some kind of infantile understanding of science.

[p4wnc6]

> That's not the most damning criticism in the article though. The most damning is that they seem to have copied entire paragraphs off Wikipedia, which suggests they have some kind of infantile understanding of science.

I agree about this. If the other article had been about this and a small amount about the continually beaten dead horse of qualifying your research (or qualifying media headlines) with caveats and assumptions, then it would have been reasonable.