This is probably something of a tangent, but related to the wrongness of Newton, and goes back before Galileo - quite a long way before Galileo. Looking at the posts above, I think there are people here who may be able to help with my suspicions about something reported the other year about Homer's Odyssey.
Some people had been investigating an incident near the end of that book which appears to describe an eclipse, and had used planetarium software to find one which had been over Ithaca at approximately the right date. They had backed this up by assuming that the account of Hermes visiting Calypso was of the movement of Mercury in the months preceding Odysseus' return home.
Having used such software, I am aware that they tend to arrive with a warning that the further from the present, the more likely that inaccuracies have crept in. It would only take a small error for totality of an eclipse to completely miss the target area. And as for thinking that Mercury would be where Mercury was three thousand years ago, that seems to ignore the Einsteinian effects of the Sun's gravity.
I tend to the idea that authors stick into their work what works for the plot, without regard for absolute accuracy of astronomical fact (or any other sort of fact), and find the idea that people preserved the information of a particular eclipse for eight or so centuries dubious.
Anyway, am I right in thinking that dating events involving the orbits of the Earth, the Moon and Mercury about 3000 years ago using current software is unlikely to be accurate?