SOURCE: Lombardo, Stanley. Introduction to Sky Signs: Aratus's Phaenomena, translated by Stanley Lombardo. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1983, np.

[In the following excerpt from the introduction to his translation of the Phaenomena, Lombardo remarks on Aratus's poetic vision and provides a structural outline of the poem.]

Aratus' Phaenomena is a semiological celebration of the sky in 1154 Greek hexameters. The sky has not changed much since the time of its publication (c. 270 b.c.) and it may be that the literary climate today is conducive to the revival of a work in which visual signs—celestial, meteorological and verbal—form the very stuff of poetry. The poem certainly did not lack appreciation in antiquity. Numerous ancient commentaries, laudatory epigrams, Latin verse translations (one by Cicero), adaptations, allusions and an exceptionally strong manuscript tradition all attest to the fact that the Phaenomena was one of the most successful poems in the classical world. When Ovid wrote

Aratus shall endure with the sun and the moon

(Amores I.15)

he was not being merely rhetorical. The Phaenomena's status as the classic poem of the starry heavens was firmly established by Roman imperial times. And since the heavens are unchanging and Rome's destiny was to preserve both her own and Greek culture forever. … But Ovid has not been proved wrong yet.

Aratus of Soloi (to distinguish him from the statesman Aratus of Sicyon) was studying Stoic philosophy and writing poetry at Athens when he caught the attention of the Macedonian monarch Antigonus Gonatas. It was at Antigonus' court in Pella, and possibly at Antigonus' suggestion that Aratus composed the Phaenomena. Whosever the idea was, it was a good one. Research material for a poem on the visual appearance of the sky was readily available in the form of two prose treatises. For the astronomical part of the poem Aratus used Eudoxus' Enoptron (“The Mirror”), a systematic survey of the constellations and their positions on the celestial sphere. Theophrastus' Diosemeiai (“Sky-Signs”) was his source for weather lore. The Stoicism Aratus had been studying provided the philosophical framework. The early Stoics (Zeno lived in the generation before Aratus) were developing the idea of an articulated, harmonious universe permeated and ordered by a providential deity who manifested himself to mankind through natural signs. It was a fresh theme, a welcome departure from the tedious mythological epics of the previous century and a return to the sensible poetic economy of Hesiod. At the same time it satisfied the cultivated Hellenistic reader's desire for scientific knowledge in a literary format. It was an age of intelligent amateurs, and the Phaenomena became a kind of elegant handbook to the heavens. Later, in Roman times, it appealed as well to the amateur astrologer, although astrology as such is not part of the plan of the poem. On the purely literary side, here was a poem that conceived of the constellated and atmospheric heavens as the ultimate aesthetic object, an ecphrastic text that recreated the experience of observing and interpreting the visible universe. It is a compelling idea for a poem, and Aratus had the sense of style and form necessary to turn the idea into an exquisite finished product.

Although the Phaenomena is an ecphrasis, a literary description of an esthetic object, it is not static. The poem begins in the first person plural and remains throughout a communion between the poet and the observer-reader. There is some narrative interest in the form of myths, but Aratus was careful not to turn the sky into a crowded mythological reliquary, as some later and lesser authors felt obliged to do. There is only one speech—the four lines spoken by the Maiden Justice before she departs for the stars. The non-rhetorical style of the poem prompted Quintillian to call it ‘static’ and of limited use to Roman orators (although it was required reading for any cultured person). But the Phaenomena is not static: it is dynamic, subtly so, and on a scale commensurate with celestial phenomena. A brief sketch of the movement of the poem will make this clear.

After celebrating Zeus, the stoicized sky-god who arranged the celestial phenomena as signs for our benefit, the poet begins to orient us to the celestial sphere, pointing out the constellations near the North pole and then working down to the ecliptic in repeated swaths until the entire northern hemisphere (including the zodiac) is filled with constellation figures. Then the same is done for the southern sky, or as much of it as was visible from Greece. Some of the constellations come to life briefly as myths and then recede into the starry background. Some are weather portents and our fantasy drifts for a moment to darkening skies and storms at sea. For each constellation we are given only the essential information needed to make out the pattern. We are told to look in a certain place, relative to other already identified constellations, for the figure of a Lion or a Dog or a Dolphin of a certain size and brightness, and the figure emerges from the starry background. A few details might be sketched in, but not many are necessary, for contrary to common belief the old constellations really do resemble what they are said to resemble. Imaginative participation is necessary, yes, for it turns out that Zeus gave only a potential order and significance to the stars. In an important passage (346-62) Aratus tells us that the constellations had their actual origin in the activity of the human mind. Some nameless, primordial astronomer formed the images and the sky has henceforth been a system of signs.

Having pointed out all the constellations of the fixed stars, the poet gives brief notice of the planets, erratic wanderers, variables in an otherwise steady system. He then gives more stability to the system by drawing the reference lines on the celestial sphere: the equator, the ecliptic and the two tropics. These are all great circles and he uses another great circle, the Milky Way to illustrate the concept. Once the celestial sphere is complete, the poet gives it a spin and the constellations begin to rise and set, limned against the horizons. Time has been introduced, and while we are looking at the stars setting in the west, the crescent moon appears on the evening horizon. The moon goes through her phases and we begin to notice lunar atmospheric phenomena. Then the sun rises, and as it moves through the sky we see halos and parhelia and other weather signs connected with the sun. The last stellar sign that we see is the Manger, a dim star cluster in Cancer, and then the poem begins to move down to earth with signs for wind, rain, calm, storm, harvest, winter and draught seen in the behavior of herons, petrels, ducks, gulls, clouds, thistledown, thunder, lightning, meteors, frogs, crows, oxen, worms, ants, centipedes, chickens, jackdaws, gnats, lamps, cranes, bees, wasps, sows, ewes, goats, comets, wolves, crabs and, at the very end, fieldmice tossing straw with their paws. The sky is not lost sight of: comets and meteors and the weather itself continue to fulfill the promise, ‘The sky is our song.’ But what we realize in the poem's coda, after our descent from the ideal astral images formed from pure points of light to the world of fitful creatures who sniff the air and live in its moisture, is that all of nature is Zeus expressed through signs, and that all phenomena, earthly crabs and crows no less than their starry apparitions, are eminently worth our close attention.

We are left with a poetic vision of the world as sign. This is didactic poetry at its best. The true didactic poet—a Hesiod, Lucretius, Vergil or Aratus—does not merely versify a curriculum. He writes a poem instead of a prose treatise not for reasons of tradition, mnemonic utility or palatability, but because he perceives that there is a special consonance between the system of knowledge that is his subject matter and the poetic process itself. He is attempting to convey not so much the explicit instructional information proper to his subject as the inner experience associated with an intimate understanding of the subject: an imaginative, intuitive grasp of the subject as distinct from an objective knowledge of the subject as a formal system. Didactic poems do, of course, impart a certain amount of factual information, some more than others (the Phaenomena more than most) but this is not the index of a didactic poem's value. There have been successful ventures into agriculture based on Vergil's Georgics, and the Phaenomena is still a useful guide to the 48 ancient constellations, but this is not why they are great poems.

There is another dimension to the relationship between a didactic poem and its subject matter that is unique to this genre and creates interesting possibilities. Any successful poem, whether lyric, elegy, epic, dramatic, or whatever can be expected to illuminate and explore its subject, to create an imaginative world in which the reader experiences for himself the vision of the poet. But when the subject matter of the poem is a system of knowledge, when it is a system of knowledge that the poem is illuminating and imaginatively recreating for the reader, then the relationship between matter and form can become unusually close: the poem, itself a system of ordered significance, is the embodiment of another such system. The Phaenomena is an excellent, almost paradigmatic, example of the relationship between the didactic poem and its subject matter. A brief analysis will make this clear.

The matter of the poem, celestial and meteorological phenomena presented as signs to be interpreted by mankind for their benefit, is seen in a double aspect: first as a system ordered and given inherent meaning by a providential deity:

for this is He who set the signs in the firmament,
Who demarked constellations and devised for the year
the principal stars that signal to farmers
the march of the seasons, so their works might all prosper.

(13-16)

and then as a puzzling multitude out of which human intelligence itself must make sense:

stars that some primordial astronomer
noted, grouped into patterns, and named.

(351-52)

This double aspect of the phenomena corresponds to Aratus' own function as poet. As Zeus is to the phenomenological universe, the didactic poet is to his poem. Each uses a system of accepted significance—one the visual language of the constellations and weather signs, the other a highly visual poetic idiom of written Greek—to communicate to men matters of practical importance. But Aratus also insists that Zeus' language is one of only potential significance, made actual by human intelligence. As teacher, he represents the system as already understood: as writer, he represents the psychological process involved in ordering understanding and in using the complex phenomena of a world which man did not create.

We may form a somewhat different analogy, equally valid and perhaps more instructive, from the same data: as Zeus is to the phenomenological universe, the poet is to the poem: and as man is to the phenomenological universe, the reader is to the poem. Aratus insists that man is not simply given the signs from the gods without any effort on his part: he must see for himself, interpret, become involved with the phenomena:

Train yourself in their lore …

(748)

Disregard none of these [signs] …

(957)

Survey all signs together throughout the year …

(1136)

These admonitions and others like them have a double value. First they define the proper relationship of man to a universe that reveals itself through providentially ordained signs: in this sense they are addressed to the reader as a man going about the business of living and surviving in such a universe. But they are also addressed to the reader as reader, a man reacting to a written text: in this sense they are an invitation to participate in the imaginative world of the poem.

There are other such invitations. One in particular is worth noticing because it is itself a sign, a verbal constellation in the matrix of the text. Lines 783-787 of the Greek text begin with the letters ΛΕΠΤΗ spelling out the Greek word meaning ‘subtle, slender, slight.’ That this is a deliberate and not an accidental acrostic is evident from the fact that ΛΕΠΤΗ is not only spelled out vertically but is the first word of the first line (783), calling attention to the word in a way that ordinary acrostics do not. In the translation the word and the acrostic are rendered as SLIGHT (772-777). In the text ΛΕΠΤΗ and SLIGHT refer to the appearance of the crescent moon as a weather sign. But ΛΕΠΤΗ was also an important term in Hellenistic literary criticism. Callimachus, a contemporary of Aratus and the period's dominant literary figure, uses the word in an important programmatic passage (Aetia I.24) to indicate the preferred style in contemporary poetry. He uses it again in an epigram on the Phaenomena, and two successive epigrammatists repeat the word, whether in imitation of Callimachus or because they too noticed the sign and the style we cannot tell. There may be other acrostics or near-acrostics glimmering in the Greek text,¹ for Aratus tells us

… it is good to observe
signs upon signs: two signs in agreement
confirm you in hope, but confidence comes
with concurrence of three.

(1128-31)

The point of the acrostic is to call attention to the text as a subtly designed semantic construct and to remind the reader of the similarity between the hermetic experiences of reading a poem and making out the signs in the sky. Some might think the point too subtly made, but Aratus is constantly making the reader into an active observer:

You need not peer through the night to see her distinctly …

(195)

Beneath Boötes feet you may mark the Maiden …

(97)

… if you look aside from his
belt you will find the first coil of the sinuous Dragon

(182-83)

Addresses to the reader such as these, of course, are proper to the didactic tradition, but they function as more than incidental genre motif. They are part of the poet's strategy to create an idealized illusion of the experience of celestial observation. By this I mean that the poem not only equips the reader with al (or much) of the information needed to become a knowledgeable observer and interpreter of celestial and meteorological phenomena, but that it also, and more importantly, provides an ideal version of what it actually feels like to learn and experience the starry heavens and the rest of the natural world as a system of signs. The poem is an ideal version of this experience not in the sense that it lacks realism or fidelity to it, but in the sense that it embodies the experience in a continuous artistic whole unlike anything that could be achieved in real life.

The intent of the translation is to make the Phaenomena more accessible as a poem to the general reader. I have aimed to make the translation both accurate and readable, but above all I have tried to capture something of the original's sense of restrained wonder at the phenomena it catalogues and describes. This quality is felt most strongly at the ends of compositional units: Aratus will have been describing a constellation or a weather-sign (or a series of them) and when he comes to the end of the passage he manages the closure so well that we feel we have been shown not only the appearance of what he has described but its essential nature as well. It is this that is responsible more than anything else for the Phaenomena's success as a catalogue poem: each item, whether treated briefly or extensively, assumes as the poet leaves it and passes on to the next item an imaginative stability, a sense of esthetic completeness that satisfies the reader with what has gone before and disposes him for what follows. I have therefore paid particular attention to the ends of compositional units and indicated them by spacing in the text.

This has a bearing on the metrics of the translation also, the rhythm usually emerging in its most resolved form at the end of a passage. The prologue, for instance, ends with the line:

for I pray for the sanction to sing of the stars.

This meter is best described as anapestic tetrameter: it constitutes the ideal form of the rhythmic line upon which the translation is based. The anapestic rhythm is felt throughout the passage but emerges clearly only at the end as a kind of resolution. Another example would be the concluding lines of Aratus' melancholy meditation on sailing, a passage in which the rhythmic variations keep pace with the thematic content but which closes with a fatalistic regularity:

while the waves beat the beach ever further away,
and a thin piece of timber protects us from death.

The caesura that is felt after ‘sanction,’ ‘beach,’ and ‘timber’ is a regular feature throughout: the basic pattern is a four-beat line with a strong caesura. The Anglo-Saxon associations of this line (frequently heightened by alliteration) may seem to some to be incongruent with Aratus' smooth hexameters. But the rhythm appealed to me for the variety it offered and for its slightly archaic, intriguing quality, a quality that Aratus' epic verse possesses and that runs like an undertone through his descriptions of the old constellations and weather lore. I have occasionally broken the line into shorter components where it seemed that some rhythmic variation was appropriate.

In the matter of constellation names I have usually translated the Greek titles directly into English rather than use the traditional Latin titles. Aquarius and Capricorn are two exceptions to this rule: ‘Water-bearer’ and ‘Horned Goat’ seemed too intractable in the passages where these constellations were mentioned. I have also permitted myself a few intruded glosses such as “Arctophylax the Bear-Ward,’ and “Cetus, the Sea-Monster.’ The Latin forms of all the constellations are given in the notes for the sake of reference. Several stars are identified in the notes by the nomenclature devised by Bayer in the seventeenth century and still in common use: each bright star in a constellation is denoted by a Greek letter followed by the genitive form of the Latin name of the constellation (e.g., ε Virginis).

The notes are not intended to form a complete commentary but merely to provide the reader with the basic information necessary to read the poem intelligently. As Hipparchus says, “the poem is clear and concise,” but this has not prevented the accumulation of a vast amount of marginal scribbling in Aratean manuscripts. Jean Martin's edition of the ancient scholia runs to some six hundred pages, or an average of a half page of comment for every line of the poem. The notes to this translation are in part derived from the scholiastic tradition and in part are a continuation of it.

STRUCTURAL OUTLINE

1-22 PROLOGUE: A Stoic hymn to Zeus, the all-pervasive, providential deity, who has arranged the stars as signs for the benefit of mankind (1-19); and an invocation to the Muses (20-22)

1-2 Zeus = ‘sky’ throughout the poem.

7 Cf. Acts xvii.28, where Paul says to the Athenians: “For in him we live, and move, and have all of our being; as certain of your poets have said, For we also are his offspring.” Cf. also Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus for this line and the Stoic spirit of the entire prologue.

19 This line is an interpretive expansion of the Greek ‘prior generation,’ a phrase that has been interpreted as (1) Zeus himself (a somewhat mystical notion); (2) the Titans; (3) the race of heroes; (4) the brothers of Zeus; (5) the first astronomers.

23-306 THE NORTHERN CONSTELLATIONS

25 The Axis: the celestial sphere and the stars on it rotate daily around the Axis, which points North, but not (due to precession of the equinoxes) to any bright star during classical times. Aratus was unaware of precession, which was discovered by Hipparchus c. 150 b.c.

30 Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and Lesser Bear, still known in Britain also as the Wains

Aetiological myth: the Bears who nursed Zeus = the Bears who guard the Pole.

39 Cynosura = ‘Dog's Tail,’ from an earlier name of the constellation, our Ursa Minor.

40 Helice = ‘Twister,’ from its motion round the Pole, our Ursa Major.

40-47 The first mention in the poem of the importance of the stars for navigation, a recurrent theme

47 Sidonians = Phoenicians

48 Draco, identified by later mythographers as the Dragon who guarded the apples of the Hesperides

51 The Bears were circumpolar (i.e., they never set) for most of Greece during classical times. Cf. Homer, Iliad v, 5-6; xviii, 489; Od. v, 275. Ocean = ‘horizon’ here and elsewhere in the poem.

60 Hipparchus points out it is the Dragon's left temple that faces Helice's tail.

62-63 The Dragon's head was just beyond the circumpolar region: it rose almost due north and set almost due north.

67 The Man on His Knees, elsewhere translated simply as the Kneeler, was identified as Heracles by every astronomical author after Aratus, who seems curiously anxious to create an air of mystery about this constellation, our Hercules, and who wishes to avoid excessive mythologizing.

70 Hipparchus corrects ‘right foot’ to ‘left foot.’

72 The Crown, sometimes called the Northern Crown (Corona Borealis) to distinguish it from the Southern Crown (see line 377).

Aetiological myth: the Crown is Dionysus' commemoration of his mortal wife Ariadne.

76 Ophiouchos, identified by later authors as Aesculapius holding a Serpent that symbolizes the healing art.

79 Mid-month moonlight: Aratus frequently uses the visibility of stars at the time of the full moon as an indication of their brightness. The magnitude system still in use today was devised by Hipparchus a century after Aratus.

85 Scorpio, the eighth sign of the Zodiac

90 The Claws were converted into our Libra, the Scales, about the time of the Julian calendar reform.

93 Boötes. Arctophylax means “Bear-guard,” as does Arcturus. Boötes is literally “Herdsman,” here envisioned as following an oxcart. His double identities correspond to those of Ursa Major.

97-100 Aetiological myth: the Maiden, in Latin Virgo, associated with Demeter (hence Spica, the ear of wheat) but also with the goddess Dike who figures prominently in Hesiod's Works and Days, which is also the source of the myth of the three ages (five in Hesiod).

101-112 The Golden Age

103 Justice = the goddess Dike

108 Absence of navigation in the Golden Age

113-125 The Silver Age

120-21 Cf. Horace Odes III.6.46-47: ‘The generation of our fathers, worse than their sires, begot our generation, more wicked still, and we will soon bear a progeny still worse.’

126-130 The Bronze Age

135-142 The Vintager, our Vindemiatrix (ε Virginis: see Preface): the fact that this inconspicuous star has a name has never been satisfactorily explained. It was associated with the grape harvest. Note that it does not actually form any part of the figure of the Maiden.

The stars surrounding the Great Bear: the Great Bear includes many more stars than the seven familiar to us as the Dipper and to the Greeks as the Wagon.

142 Unnamed: in contrast to the Vintager

143 Gemini, the third sign of the Zodiac

144 Cancer, Leo: respectively, the fourth and fifth signs of the Zodiac. The sun entered Leo about a month after the summer solstice.

148 Etesian wind: a northerly wind that blows during the summer in the Mediterranean for fifty days beginning with the rising of the Dog-Star, at which time the sun is in Leo.

152 Auriga, the Charioteer

153 Capella (the Goat), Haedi (the Kids): the Goat and her (two) Kids were an older star-group which came to be incorporated, rather incongruously, into the Charioteer. They were associated with bad weather at sea.

158 Aetiological myth: Amalthea, the goat who nursed Zeus = the bright star Capella.

160 Olenian: from the Greek ὠλενίη; lit., ‘on the arm,’ from the position of the Goat on the arm of the Charioteer.

164 Taurus, the second sign of the Zodiac

165-68 The verisimilitude of the bull as a constellation

170 The Hyades: Proverbial from Homer onwards as a sign of storm at sea. Cf. Tennyson's ‘when the rainy Hyades vexed the dim sea.’

174-75 Hipparchus criticizes this passage: the two constellations do not actually rise simultaneously.

176 Aetiological myth: all of the characters in the story of Perseus' rescue of Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, from the sea-monster (Cetus) are depicted as constellations. Aratus alludes to the story at various points in the poem but does not relate it continuously.

180-181 Hipparchus disagrees here with Aratus: Cepheus' feet are closer together than the distance from either of them to the tip of Cynosura's tail.

185 Cassiopeia: the familiar w-shaped figure in the northern sky, here likened to double folding doors. This is one of the few similes in the poem, and the most elaborate.

194 Andromeda

200 The heavens as an eternal repository of myth

202 Pegasus, called by Aratus simply the Horse and not endowed by him with wings, although later Greek astronomers recognized him as a winged creature.

203-4 The Great Square of Pegasus, a familiar asterism in the autumn evening sky

208 Taurus also appears only with his forequarters, a curious fact for which no adequate explanation has been given.

209 Aetiological myth: Pegasus on Helicon, the Mount of the Muses, bringing forth Hippocrene, the spring of poetic inspiration

216 The heavens as a repository of myth open to all

217 Aries, which because it is on the celestial equator (as are the Claws and Orion's belt), has the longest possible circuit to make. But the celestial sphere revolves as a whole, and Aries completes his long revolution in the same time (twenty-four hours) as Ursa Minor does her small one.

225 Triangulum: Called ‘Deltoton’ in Greek from its resemblance to the capital delta. Note the geometical overtones.

227 The stars at the base of the Triangle are brighter than others in the immediate vicinity, but that is all.

230 Pisces

234 This star, α Piscium, is only of the fourth magnitude today and may have faded since classical times.

236 Perseus: Aratus does not mention the head of Medusa, which later Greek astronomers represent by the variable star β Persei, commonly called by its Arabic name Algol.

241 ‘Dusty with stars’: Perseus lies in a rich region of the Milky Way.

242 The Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, daughters of Atlas and Pleione. The story is that one of the seven faded from sight: either Merope out of shame for having married a mortal when her sisters mated with gods; or Electra, out of grief at the destruction of Troy which her son Dardanus had founded. Hipparchus explains that the seventh star is actually visible, although very dim.

The Pleiades were a very important agricultural constellation, its risings and settings marking the important dates in the farmer's calendar. Cf. Hesiod, Works and Days, 383ff.

255 Lyra, the Lyre. The story about Hermes' invention of the lyre is founded in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, where, however, he gives the lyre to Apollo.

259 The Phantom—the Kneeler, or Hercules

261 Cygnus, the Swan, called by Aratus simply the Bird. It lies across the Milky Way, hence ‘ruffled with stars.’

269 Aquarius, the Water-Bearer, the eleventh sign of the Zodiac

270 Capricorn, the Goat, the tenth sign of the Zodiac. Aratus does not allude to its fish aspect, but associates it with the storms of winter: the sun was in Capricorn at the winter solstice, at which time the sun turns back to the north.

279-83 These lines are remarkable for their evocation of the melancholy sense of helplessness associated with sailing, a point missed by Longinus (On the Sublime x, 5-6) when he compares line 283 with a similar line from Homer (Iliad xv, 268).

289 Sagittarius, the Archer, the ninth sign of the Zodiac

289-90 The sting of the Scorpion is strikingly realistic in the sky, as is the entire constellation.

295 Sagittarius, the Arrow

300 Aquila, the Eagle. There is a play on the word ἄητοs ‘eagle’ and ἀετόs ‘wind-blown.’

301 Delphinus, the Dolphin. There is an implicit comparison of this exquisite asterism to a piece of jewelry.

305 ‘The sun's slanting course’ = the ecliptic.

307-425 THE SOUTHERN CONSTELLATIONS

307 Orion: One of the few constellations mentioned by Homer, it is a brilliant and unmistakable star group.

311 Canis Major

315 Sirius, by far the brightest of the fixed stars. The play on ‘searing’ is in the Greek.

317 A reference to the Dog-days

322 Lepus, the Hare. Like Orion and the Scorpion, the Dog and the Hare form a pursuit scene based on the constellations' diurnal motion.

325 Argo. Again the poet makes use of the diurnal motion of the stars.

330 The Milky Way runs through Argo.

332 An ironic contrast: the Rudder is free to swing about but is at the same time immutably fixed in the sky.

334 Eridanus: a mythological river located somewhere in Europe, sometimes identified with the Po, here called a ‘river of tears’ because the Heliades, sisters of Phaethon, wept into the river after their brother fell into it from his disastrous ride in the Chariot of the Sun. The river was burnt up when Phaethon fell in it, hence now a ‘remnant’ survives in the sky.

346-62 Nameless stars: the poet has come to a region of the sky where the stars do not form any constellation, and this occasions an explanation of how the constellations were formed. The emphasis here is on human intelligence making sense out of a confusing multitude of data rather than, as in the Prologue, on Zeus creating the constellations for men.

Hipparchus discusses this passage and defends it as a fine explanation of the origins of the constellations.

364 Piscis Austrinus, marked by the bright star Fomalhaut which shines in splendid isolation in the southern sky

366-68 More nameless stars, not grouped to form a constellation

375 The Water, part of Aquarius

377 Corona Australis is never far above the southern horizon for observers in the northern latitudes.

379 Ara, the Altar

384-405 The Altar as a sign of storm at sea. ‘Primeval Night,’ rather than Zeus, established this sign. This is a Hesiodic notion: Night in the Theogony is a cosmic power that antedates Zeus, who, when he assumes power, leaves the old dispensation as undisturbed as possible.

406 Centaurus: a continuation of the storm scene

417 Lupus, the wolf, styled the Beast here

419 Hydra, the Water Serpent

423 Crater, the Cup

424 Corvus, the Crow

425 Procyon: The brightest star in Canis Minor. It rises slightly before Canis Major, hence its name “Before the Dog.”

429-37 THE PLANETS

Unnamed here and passed over quickly because they do not serve any purpose as signs for agriculture or navigation.

Aratus' neglect of the planets is strong evidence that he had no interest in promoting astrology.

437-553 THE CELESTIAL SPHERE

437-43 The four circles of the celestial sphere

444-49 The Milky Way as a standard of size for the circles on the celestial sphere.

456-58 The Equator and Ecliptic are equal in size to the Milky Way; the two Tropics are smaller.

459-77 The Tropic of Cancer in its relation to the constellations

475-77 The two stars marking the eyes of the Crab are the same stars otherwise known as the Asses (see 11.884-99).

478-82 The geometry of the Tropic of Cancer

481-82 ‘Tropic’ is from the Gk. ‘trope’ = ‘turn.’ The Tropic of Cancer marks the sun's turning south at the summer solstice.

483-88 The Tropic of Capricorn in its relation to the constellations

489-92 The geometry of the Tropic of Capricorn

493-508 The Equator and the constellations on it

509-23 The orientation of the four circles with respect to each other

513-17 The four circles conceived as a system of metal hoops welded together by an artisan: the substructure of the heavens as a work of art.

520-23 The Ocean represents, as usual, the ideal horizon. Aratus means the distance between the rising of the sun at mid-winter and its rising at mid-summer.

524-27 The Zodiac, like the Equator, is a Great Circle of the Sphere. The radius of such a circle = ‘the ray from your eye to the heavens’ for the observer is at the center of the celestial sphere. The radius of a circle when inscribed within it subtends one-sixth of its circumference.

528-36 The twelve signs of the Zodiac, beginning with the Crab, the sign at which the Zodiac joins the Tropic of Cancer.

537-38 The Zodiac, being a Great Circle, is always half above and half below the horizon.

540-41 This is true regardless of the relative lengths of night and day.

542-52 The Zodiac as a celestial clock that indicates the hours remaining in the night until dawn

546-52 The value of knowing the risings and settings of the constellations

553-732 THE RISINGS AND SETTINGS

553-73 The constellations on both horizons as Cancer rises

563-69 The slow setting of Boötes is due both to its size and its position in the northern sky. Although it sets slowly in a perpendicular position, it rises quickly in a horizontal position (see 11.597-98).

574-79 The constellations on both horizons as Leo rises

580-90 The constellations on both horizons as Virgo rises

591-617 The constellations on both horizons as the Claws (our Libra) rise

596-607 The slow rising of the Kneeler (Hercules) along with three Zodiacal signs is due to the constellation's size and its position far north. Compare the description of Boötes' slow setting (563-69).

612-17 The Andromeda-Cetus-Cepheus tableau as these constellations set together

618-54 The constellations on both horizons as Scorpio rises

620-31 Aetiological myth: Orion and the Scorpion. The Orion story never received canonical form. Aratus' version is designed to take into account the positions of the constellations on the celestial sphere: as the Scorpion rises, Orion is setting.

634-637 As Cepheus reaches the nadir of his orbit around the pole, the Great Bear glowers down at him from the zenith. Cepheus was not a circumpolar constellation in classical times.

638-43 The unseemly posture of Cassiopeia as she sets: her punishment for boasting she was more beautiful than the sea-nymphs

650-68 The constellations on both horizons as Sagittarius rises. The constellation is divided into the Bow and the Archer himself.

669-78 The constellations on both horisons as Capricorn rises

678-86 The constellations on both horizons as Aquarius rises

687-694 Constellations on the horizon as Pisces rises

695-699 Constellations on the horizon as Aries rises

699-712 Constellations on the horizon as Taurus rises

713-20 Constellations on the horizon as Gemini rises

721 One of the poem's keynote lines, and a transition between the constellations and other celestial and meteorological signs.

722-46 Calendric phenomena

722-28 The phases of the moon and the lunar month

729-40 The zodiacal signs as clock and as calendar for agriculture and navigation.

741-44 The Metonic Cycle: a cycle containing a whole number of lunar months and solar years (235 lunar months = 19 years) devised by Meton, an Athenian in the fifth century b.c., for calendric purposes. Orion's belt and Sirius were the first and last phenomena on Meton's calendar. Stars of Poseidon: those of nautical importance. Stars of Zeus: those of agricultural importance.

747-53 The necessity and rewards of scientific study of the signs

754-61 The element of uncertainty in interpreting the signs: Zeus' revelation is not yet complete.

762-66 The sources of weather signs: 1) the moon 2) the sun 3) other celestrial and terrestial signs.

767-807 Signs from the Moon

767-87 The Crescent Moon

772-77 The acrostic (see Introduction).

SLIGHT here translates the Greek ΛΕΠΤΗ.

788-799 Other phases of the moon

799-807 Halos around the moon

808-77 Signs from the Sun

808-66 The rising and setting sun

849-52 Comparison to solar eclipse

863-66 Halos around the sun

867-75 Parhelia: bright circular spots on a solar halo, north and south of the sun. Also known as mock suns and sun dogs.

878-93 The Manger as a weather sign. The Manger (Praesepe, also called the Beehive) is an open cluster of dim stars in Cancer, visible to the unaided eye as a faint, luminous patch about the size of the full moon. The information that Aratus gives for the Manger as a weather sign is plausible except for lines 896-99.

894-917 Signs of wind.

918-70 Signs of Rain.

970-995 Signs of Fair Weather.

996-1025 Signs of Storm.

1021-24 Snow and Hail Hearthfires

1024-80 Long-range weather forecasts

1025-42 Holm-oak, mastich, and squill as long-range prognosticators

1043-52 Wasps, sows, ewes, and goats as long-range prognosticators of winter storms

1053-50 Cranes as signs of the arrival of winter

1062-69 Oxen and sheep as long-range prognosticators

1070-72 Comets as a sign of drought

1074-80 Island birds as long-range prognosticators

1081-1122 Weather signs noticed by men in special occupations

1084-92 Shepherds and their sheep

1093-1104 Plowman and oxherd

1105-22 Coda

110-12 Period of applicability for signs

1123-26 Concurrence of signs

1126-31 The Zodiac as calendar

1130-35 The period before and after New Moon

1136-37 Envoi

Note

1. See Wm. Levitan's “Flexed Artistry: Aratean Acrostics,” Glyph 5, 1979.