[In the following preface to his translation of Aratus's Phaenomena, Poste briefly summarizes the poet's life and antique commentaries on his writing.]

A little observation of the nightly skies inspired a curiosity to see what an ancient poet, now seldom read, had to say on the subject; and a moderate amount of pleasure having been derived from the perusal, the thought occurred that other students of Astronomy or Meteorology, to whom Aratus in his Greek garb was inaccessible, might feel the same curiosity. Hence the following translation.

The monosyllabic character of our language, at least of that portion of it which poetry has appropriated, causes even a prose translation of foreign verse to assume more or less of iambic rhythm. A little malice prepense on the part of the translator has aided this tendency, though, bating a few slight sacrifices to euphony, he has never departed intentionally from the most simple and direct rendering of the original. Once courted, however, the iambus intruded rather more than had been designed, and has prevented the following nondescript, which only aspires to the praise of fidelity, from being styled in the title-page, what at starting it was meant to be, a prose translation.

Of the life of Aratus little is known. He was by profession a physician, and lived about 270 b.c., and was therefore a contemporary of Euclid and Theocritus. He was a native of Soli, afterwards called Pompeiopolis, in Cilicia; but being invited to the court of Antigonus Gonatas, King of Macedonia, he spent there the remainder of his life.

The Skies, or Phenomena, owe such astronomic doctrine as they contain to the works of Eudoxus, who was a contemporary of Plato, and, as an ethical speculator, placed Pleasure on the throne of attainable goods; as an astronomer, invented the theory of the crystalline spheres. The Weather-Forecasts, or Diosemia, borrowed their materials from a treatise on the same subject by Theophrastus, disciple and successor of Aristotle. This treatise, at least in the form of copious extracts, is still extant.

The Skies of Aratus, about a century after it was written, was the subject of a commentary by Hipparchus, the illustrious astronomer who discovered the Precession of the equinoxes, and who respectfully but unrelentingly points out many inaccuracies of Aratus and Eudoxus. This commentary still exists. The Skies and Weather-Forecasts were translated by Cicero, who has unadvisedly incorporated many fragments of his indifferent verse in his immortal prose. The Skies was translated by Germanicus, adoptive grandson of Augustus; and, three hundred years after, both the Skies and Forecasts were translated, or rather paraphrased, by Festus Avienus. These versions, which are of considerable poetic merit, are still extant. To Englishmen Aratus probably is most extensively known from the fact that half a line in the beginning of his poem was quoted by his countryman, the apostle Paul, in his address to the Athenians on the hill of Mars.

Ovid says of Aratus: ‘Cum sole et luna semper Aratus erit.’ Quintilian more soberly: ‘Arati materia motu caret, ut in qua nulla varietas, nullus affectus, nulla persona, nulla cujusquam sit oratio; sufficit tamen oneri cui se parem credidit.’

The reader of Aratus should have before him a map or globe containing the imaginary figures of the constellations. In the absence of maps containing these figures, he may with advantage check the statements of Aratus by means of the maps to Dunkin's ‘Midnight Sky,’ or Proctor's ‘Half-hours with the Stars,’ For instance, a comparison of the maps for March and October in ‘Half-hours with the Stars’ explains at once why Bootes takes so much shorter time to rise than to set: when he rises he is stretched at full length on the horizon; when he sets he is standing upright.