[In the following excerpt, Bulloch recounts what is known of Aratus's life and writings.]

Apollonius' Argonautica is the only narrative epic to have survived intact from the Hellenistic period, and the only other major examples of epic hexameter writing are poems in the didactic tradition by Aratus and Nicander. The biographies of both authors are uncertain, but about Aratus we can make some reasonable inferences. He seems to have been a near contemporary of Callimachus, probably (at any rate according to most of our sources) rather older; he came from Soli in Cilicia and went, apparently after a period in Athens, to live and work in Pella, Macedonia, at the court of Antigonus Gonatas (ruled 276-240/239) who was a patron of the arts and himself a man of letters and philosopher. Amongst other writers at the court were the epic poet Antagoras of Rhodes, the dramatist and scholar Alexander Aetolus, and the philosophers Timon of Phlius and Menedemus of Eretria.

Aratus' work seems to have included scholarly work on the Odyssey, but essentially he was a poet. He wrote hymns, epigrams, elegiacs, funeral dirges (all of which may have been collected under the miscellaneous heading Catalepton, a title used later for the collection of miscellaneous poems ascribed to Virgil), but much of his output was on scientific themes, such as the hexametrical medical poem Iatrica, the Canon (Table) which dealt with the harmony of the spheres, or the Astrica (On stars) which had at least five books. The most famous of his works, and the only one still extant, was the Phaenomena, which deals with astronomy (ll. 1-732) and meteorology (ll. 733-1154). Appropriately one of Aratus' teachers is said to have been Menecrates of Ephesus who, like Hesiod, wrote a hexameter Works on agricultural topics; but the most important literary context in which the Phaenomena has to be read is the whole tradition of didactic poetry which goes back to Hesiod. In some respects Aratus' poem, as a technical work, is less akin to the ‘wisdom’ poetry of Hesiod than to the later ‘scientific’ works of writers such as Xenophanes, Parmenides or Empedocles, but there is no doubt that Aratus himself and his contemporaries saw the Phaenomena as a ‘Hesiodic’ poem (though later critics seem to have debated whether Aratus wrote more in the style of Homer or Hesiod). Others too seem to have written poetical astronomy before Aratus: Cleostratus of Tenedos, cited in ancient sources as author of an Astrologia, and one Sminthes, author of a Phaenomena, probably wrote before the Hellenistic period, and Alexander Aetolus is also said to have written a Phaenomena.

The ancient taste for poetical works such as the Phaenomena is difficult for modern readers to appreciate, but the success of Aratus' poem is beyond question: one of the ancient Lives (III) comments that although numerous poets after Aratus wrote Phaenomena they were (in comparison) worthless. Our sources record some twenty names of writers who subsequently wrote commentaries on Aratus or astronomical poems; a large body of commentary and interpretation in both Greek and Latin still survives, and, quite apart from the manifest influence of Aratus on Lucretius and Virgil, we possess Latin versions and adaptations by Cicero (fragmentary), Germanicus and Avienius. Although Aratus' subject was astronomy and not astrology, we do have to remember that he was appealing to something that has captivated popular imagination in all ages, the charting of the night-sky with systematic description. Aratus' poem is an elegantly written and clear treatise—it can be used as a hand-book or guide and is not to be classified with the other type of Hellenistic didactic poetry, such as Nicander's poems, whose raison d'être consists in literary ornamentation of the least plausible topics. To a large extent Nicander's success, in as much as that is an appropriate term, is in proportion to the grotesqueness of his material, and he stands directly in the tradition of art as perversity; Aratus, on the other hand, who relied on the specialist prose treatise of the famous fourth-century mathematician and astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus (also titled Phaenomena), was making his model more available, not more obscure, by his adaptation. Some later commentators, beginning with Hipparchus in the second century b.c., argued that Aratus had done nothing but versify Eudoxus, but the blunt fact is that Aratus continued to be read and still survives whereas Eudoxus has long since disappeared. In any case Aratus' work should be considered as part of the same process of popularization as produced the calendar of Saïs, discovered in 1902 at al-Hiba in Egypt, which was compiled with an astronomical introduction around 300 b.c. by someone concerned to propagate Eudoxian principles (Hibeh Papyri no. 27). The last section of the poem, the Weather signs, seems clearly indebted to a meteorological work, but its exact relationship to the treatise On signs which goes under Theophrastus' name is very uncertain; it is quite possible that both works depend on a common source, now lost.

The ancient Lives report that Aratus studied Stoic philosophy and associate him closely with the Stoic Dionysius of Heraclea (who late in life changed to Hedonism and was nick-named ‘The Turncoat’); his patron Antigonus Gonatas had strong Stoic sympathies. The Phaenomena is not a thoroughgoing Stoic work by any means (although Aratus' sympathies may have been a factor in the poem's popularity), but its introduction consists in a hymn to the Zeus of the Stoics, which clearly echoes the principles enunciated in the famous Hymn to Zeus of the philosopher Cleanthes (Powell 227-9):

From Zeus let us begin whom we mortals never
leave unmentioned; full of Zeus are all the ways,
and all concourse of men, and full is the sea
and the harbours. Everywhere we all need Zeus.
For we are also his offspring. Kindly to men
he gives fair signs, and rouses the people to work
prompting their living, and shows when the soil is best
for the ox and the mattock, and shows when the season is right
to break the earth open round plants, and to sow all the seeds.
For he himself set the heavenly bodies in the sky,
distinguishing constellations; and conceived for the year
the stars which would give the most constant signs
of the seasons for men, so that all would be sure to grow.

(Phaen. 1-13)

What follows is a mixture of nomenclature, technical observation and information about the constellations with comments on weather or seasons and, occasionally, mythology. The writing is clear and, within limitations, elegant. Typical is the section on the Charioteer:

But if you should wish to look at the Charioteer
and his stars, and report has come to you of the Goat
herself or the Kids which on the darkening sea
often watch men as they are tossed and scattered,
you may find the whole of him lying near to the left
of Gemini, huge, and the top of the Great Bear's head
turns opposite; and set upon his left shoulder
is the sacred goat, which is said to have offered its breast
to Zeus, and his priests call it Olenian.
The Goat is large and bright, and by the wrist
of the Charioteer the Kids shine faint.

(Phaen. 156-66)

But the Phaenomena is not essentially a technical work; although for its scientific material it looks to Eudoxus, its poetic stance is, in characteristic Hellenistic fashion, archaizing and Aratus' manner is that of Hesiod. This emerges most clearly in some of the digressions, and notably in that on the constellation Virgo (ll. 96-136). After remarking that some accounts identify Virgo with Justice (cf. Hesiod, Works and days 256-7), Aratus alludes, in modified form, to the Hesiodic myth of the five ages (Works and days 109-201) describing how in the Golden Age (which, in markedly Hellenistic fashion, was a period of work and civilization, unlike Hesiod's) Justice lived on earth with men until the coming of the new generation:

She was there so long as earth nourished the golden race.
But with the silver race she mixed only little and not
quite readily, for the ways of the people of old
she missed. Even so still in that silver age she was there;
she would come towards evening down from the echoing hills
by herself, and conversed with none with soothing words.
But when she had gathered crowds to fill the great hills,
then she would threaten, assailing their wicked ways,
to come no more, or appear when they called.
‘See what an inferior race your fathers left
from the golden age, and you shall produce worse.
Yes, and men shall have wars, I think, they shall have
the strangeness of murder, and be pressed by miserable grief.’
So saying she made for the mountains, and so she left
the people all gazing after her still.

(Phaen. 114-28)

In spite of the Hesiodic material and manner of this passage (with clear allusions to the iron age of Works and days 174-201), there is no mistaking the tone as that of a Hellenistic poet. Hesiod expresses the indignation of a moralist, whereas Aratus replaces social commentary with a detached romanticism in which it is the psychology of atmosphere that is central (Justice comes ‘towards evening down from the echoing hills’); the wistfulness of the last lines is reminiscent of Apollonius' description of the departure of the Argo.

Aratus' Phaenomena was greatly admired by contemporary writers. Leonidas of Tarentum wrote an epigram (Anth. Pal. 9.25) praising the author for his hard work and fine conception (leptos, a current Callimachean term), one of the Ptolemies, possibly Philadelphus, commented in verse that of astronomy poets ‘Aratus holds the sceptre of fine (leptos) expression’ (Life of Aratus 1), and to Callimachus the work was an important achievement of style too: in Ep. 29 he remarks that ‘Hesiod's is the song and his the manner’, and he greets the poem as ‘fine (leptos) writing, a mark of Aratus' sleepless nights’. We do not know if Aratus ever visited Alexandria (though the above comments of approval by writers resident in Egypt and the mention of an Aratus in Theocritus, Idylls 6 and 7 suggest that he did), but he was certainly conversant with the discussion of literary principles going on there. Not only does Callimachus speak of Aratus in clear programmatic terms, but Aratus himself embedded in his work an explicit endorsement of the Callimachean mode: in the meteorological section of his poem, at ll. 783-7 when describing observation of the moon as a weather determinant, Aratus not only uses the key terms of Callimachean criticism leptos and pachus but even spells out the acrostic lepte with the initial letters of each line. Use of the acrostic was to become a favourite technical trick amongst later writers, but this instance, the earliest extant example,¹ is worth more to the modern reader than an incidental display of virtuosity, for it shows that Aratus almost certainly saw himself, at least in his Phaenomena, as aligned with the avant-garde of Alexandrian poetry. Didactic poetry played as important a part, for Aratus at any rate, as narrative epic or elegy in the literary debate of this period.

Note

1. First pointed out by Jacques (1960).

Works Cited

Jacques, J. M. (1960). ‘Sur un acrostiche d'Aratos (Phén. 783-7)’, Revue des Études Anciennes 62: 48-61.

Powell, J. E. (1939). The history of Herodotus. Cambridge.