[In the following essay, Sale explores the reputation of Aratus's Phaenomena, discussing the work as a guide to the stars, an astrologer's handbook, and a poetic blend of science and Stoicism.]

One of the tasks which any historian of Hellenistic literature must look upon as providing a definition of the term “thankless” is to explain why the Phaenomena of Aratus, which seems in most of its parts tedious, was so enormously popular from the third century b.c. until at least the fourth of our era. That it was popular cannot be gainsaid. The polymath Eratosthenes, given the sobriquet “Beta” by unkind contemporaries to underline his status in their eyes as someone second best at everything, included among his manifold activities the production of an ancilla to Aratus; the astronomer Hipparchus was so alarmed at the success of the poem that he wrote a treatise to protect those who were charmed by its verse from believing in its astronomical accuracy; the Stoics made it a classic, and it gave birth to Latinizations by Cicero, Vergil, Germanicus Caesar, Manilius, and Avienus. During its first two hundred odd years it was subject to mutilation to serve the purposes of astrologers; but so valuable a task was it to preserve the purity of the tradition of a work no longer considered scientifically infallible that such butcherings were no match for the labors of conservative Alexandrian editors. Our text probably goes back to the edition of Theon of Alexandria, who seems to have done everything he could to learn what Aratus really said, and seems furthermore to have convinced most subsequent editors and translators that he was successful at that task. Theon's work was popularized early in our era with the creation of the Φ-edition, as Jean Martin calls it: whoever put this together added Eratosthenes' handbook as a running commentary, and accompanied the earlier parts of the poem with many handsome illustrations to please the reader to whom the text itself may have been somewhat obscure. From the Φ-edition were taken the scholia to Germanicus' poem, the catasterisms of Pseudo-Eratosthenes, and various other relics of the original handbook; from it was made the barbarous Aratus Latinus of the seventh century.

Perhaps even when the Φ-edition was put together Aratus was no longer so thoroughly admired as he had earlier been, but he was certainly much more read than he is today. Why is it that a work so well suited to the taste of so many centuries of humanity can become so thoroughly neglected? Obviously it was liked for more than one reason. Of a work of genius we can argue that during its periods of popularity it was admired because it was good, and that the times that neglected it were times incapable of literary appreciation. Genius therefore can afford to be single-minded, because a work of genius will have its merit to make it live. But even great literature can satisfy a variety of needs and tastes, including those which do not crave the qualities which make it great, and the reasons why great literature is admired can tell us much about the values of the era. For Aratus, who is less than great, to have pleased so many men of so many times argues that his virtues must have been multiple and that he had a peculiar affinity for more sets of tastes, for more cultures than one: this affinity will tell us much about those times.

But it is with the period of Aratus' greatest popularity that I am here concerned. I suppose it is possible that a particular craving for a single peculiar quality could account for the preternaturally high esteem which his contemporaries and immediate successors felt for him. It is only fair to say that the neglect into which he has fallen nowadays is to some extent undeserved; genius was not his portion, but talent he possessed, and by approaching him aright we can make the fruits of that talent accessible. But we shall never appreciate the Phaenomena with the fervor achieved by his own age, of which he is part and parcel; whatever the reasons why later ages liked him, he gave Hellenistic Greece a wide variety of things that it especially longed for. I say “it especially” because I think that only by asking what it needed can we account for the unusual position Aratus occupied then; I say “wide variety”—even for this more narrowly defined period—because I cannot think that one lonely virtue in a second-rate poem could have merited the love of two whole centuries of an alert, sensitive and sophisticated race.

In fact each of the five parts of the poem tends to make a distinct contribution to the whole. Lines 1-18 are a prologue, a hymn to Zeus. There follows, in lines 19-450, a description of all the major constellations visible from the latitude of the Mediterranean Sea, interspersed with a few catasterisms, tales of how the Bears and the Maidens and the Horse came to enter the skies. After a brief confession of his inability to discuss the motion of the planets—and it must be recalled that, if we believe in the geocentric system, the movements of Venus and Mercury, at least, are extremely complex—Aratus goes on to describe the orbits: the two tropics, the equator, the Milky Way and the ecliptic. Then come the sυνανατολαὶ, the constellations that rise with each sign of the zodiac. Finally there is a long passage concerning terrestrial as well as celestial indications of weather to come.

The popularity of the prologue is understandable, for it is a moving religious expression of the best-loved philosophy of the era. When Aratus says that the market places and harbors are “full of Zeus,” he indicates that the way to take the old religion and its epithets, ἀγοραι̑οs and λιμένιοs, is in terms of Stoic pantheism. “We need Zeus always, all of us,” for Zeus is that rational aspect of the Whole which we must comprehend not only to live well but even—so Aratus throughout his poem suggests—to survive on land and sea. We are his with respect to γένοs: not anthropomorphically his offspring, but modeled in his image. St. Paul's interpretation, “In Him we live and move and have our being,” perhaps goes a little far, but he knew this Stoic formula was not to be taken literally. Zeus set the stars in heaven to be signs for men, because the eternal Reason must be a purposeful one, and if that Reason is all-pervasive, each part of the whole must have a purpose.

That accounts for the enormous accumulation of weather signs in the to us rather tedious final portion. I have not counted the number of signs of storm or calm; the effect upon us is that no corner of nature is too obscure to give us some indication of weather to come: the sun and moon we expect, as well as the constellation of the Manger; swollen sea and the cry of the highest mountaintops seem natural enough; but birds of all sorts, all the domestic animals, petals, thistles, frogs, ants, centipedes, worms, midges, the lamp's flame, ashes of coal, spider webs and holm oaks, mastich and squill, crabs, mice, and the solitary wolf, all participate in what seems a universal response to the weather portended. And this is, I think, deliberate. The information conveyed is perhaps useful, up to a point—but the effect of this overwhelming accumulation is that all nature is active, alive, and directing itself, among other things, to fulfill the great purpose of revealing to the mind of man just how the whole is about to behave. Each little sign, whatever else it may be, is a portion of the universal intelligence, and participates in a sort of divine revelation, albeit quotidian.

One is struck, however, by the fact that much of the poem cannot be thus justified. The bulk of lines 19-450, the poetic star-map, is devoted to constellations which have very little to do with the weather, the seasons, or anything else of a pragmatic nature. I rather suspect that their purpose is much like that of any Handbook to the heavens that can be bought in a bookstore nowadays; these verses helped you to locate the stars in the sky just for the fun of it. It is partly this use to which Aratus was put that gave rise to Hipparchus' criticism, that Aratus was not invariably an impeccable guide. I am aware that in lines 558-732 Aratus seems to want to give his star-map a more utilitarian purpose. The zodiac, he tells us, is a kind of clock: “Not worthless would it be to one who is looking for day to observe when each of the parts of the zodiac rises.” And since sometimes clouds or hills get in the way, we must know which constellations rise with which signs of the zodiac: by observing them we infer what zodiacal sign is rising. I cannot help but wonder how many readers actually found it possible to tell time by the zodiac, let alone by the sυνανατολαί of the other constellations. This section has a more sinister use which we shall look at in a moment, but I am sure that in Aratus' mind it was part of the star-map; it gave people a north-south frame of reference with respect to the zodiac by which they could identify the constellations more easily.

The more sophisticated reader could take pleasure in the description of the orbits (462-558). Much of this portion of the poem does little more than tell you where the tropics, the equator, the Milky Way and the ecliptic are; but such remarks as that five eighths of the Tropic of Cancer are above the horizon and three eighths below (and vice versa for Capricorn) are more interesting to test (correct for 41.5° N, and therefore quite correct for Pella). And it will probably come as a surprise to some to learn that six whole signs of the zodiac rise every day, no matter whether the day is long or short. The scientifically inclined reader would no doubt get out papyrus and stylus at this point and test whether Aratus was really right.

The scholar also was given room for exercise. The best example is Aratus' introduction to the catasterism of the Bears: “if it is true, from Crete they entered heaven by the will of Zeus.” Everyone was supposed to see in this an oblique reference to the famous tag, “Cretans are always liars.” Callimachus used these words of Epimenides as a playful criterion to decide between two traditions concerning Zeus' birthplace, neither of which, of course, he believed; and Aratus introduces a story which he knows to be false with the words “if it is true,” as if the only reason for doubting it were its Cretan provenance. Of course the real reasons for such doubts are manifest: that a bear should become a constellation is not only an absurdity to any educated man, but Aratus himself says in lines 375-85 that the constellations are conventional, arbitrary, man-made groupings of stars. But all this was great fun for the knowledgeable reader. So too was the section on the catasterism of the Maiden, for then he could note just how Aratus dealt with his Hesiodic model. In Hesiod, when humanity degenerates, Aidos and Nemesis leave it to dwell among the gods. In Aratus, Justice dwelt among men in the Golden Age; with the eventual corruption she left to join the company of stars. Of course this has serious overtones, perhaps in keeping with a Stoic interpretation of Hesiod's myth of the five ages: the path to the ultimate conflagration might well be regarded as a downhill one morally. And the idea that justice is no longer ours for the taking, that we must struggle to reach with our minds to the stars, to the seat of the world-soul, in order to attain her, is both Stoic and powerful.

I spoke earlier of another, more sinister use to which the poetic star-map and especially the υνανατολαί could be put. Who is it that really wants to know precisely when the signs of the zodiac are rising, so precisely that if they are covered even momentarily he will be anxious to have any source of information he can get his hands on? Not the ordinary seaman or traveler or lover, to whom the zodiac was a most inaccurate clock and who could certainly afford to wait a while until the eastern horizon cleared, or to make a calculation based on a visible zodiacal sign. It was the astrologer who wanted to know exactly when the first point of each sign—or better, the first point of each dodecatemory, each one twelfth of the sky—was rising. For the constellation rising in the east at the moment of birth is of course the horoscope, the predominant sign of the geniture. And it is not without significance that the συνανατολαί of Aratus are in fact based on the first point of each dodecatemory, whether he knew it or not. I do not mean to suggest that Aratus meant to help astrologers, or that the section is not by Aratus. For him this was part of the guidebook. But later ages stripped away the Stoic prologue, and detached the weather signs. They, at least, saw that the remaining portion, both the star-map and the συνανατολαί, could be useful for astrology (for to calculate the zodiac by the συνανατολαί you must be able to recognize all the constellations). And this is another reason why Aratus was popular.

But we have left much still unexplained. The poem is strewn with purple patches, some of which describe real experiences on land or sea, others of which are mythological and incredible. Much of the language itself is curious, for it speaks of the constellations as if they were what convention has made them to be. He speaks of the Scorpion as a “great beast” which Ophiouchus “tramples.” “Fearful is the Bear,” he says, “and fearful stars are nigh.” “You would say (of Cassiopeia) that she was distressed over her daughter.” And her daughter is a fearful ἄγαλμα; even here her arms are outstretched; even in heaven bonds lie on her. The misty south leads against her Cetus, the “great terror.” But Cepheus “warns him away” with his mighty hand on high. And Eridanus is a river “swollen with tears.”

I have no doubt that such passages were in Hipparchus' mind when he spoke of the χάριs of Aratus' verse, or in Cicero's when he called his lines ornatissimi atque optimi. Such terms could well be used of the catasterism of the Bears, of the Horse, of the Scorpion and Orion also. But are these passages really no more than ornament, intended only to relieve the aridity of the narrative? Such explanations leave me as impatient as they would if offered of an Aeschylean chorus or even a Euripidean one. I quite agree that this language and these passages can be interpreted Stoically, if they are treated freely enough: to the Stoics, the heavens were alive in another way, filled with the divine soul; is not Aratus saying the same thing more colorfully?

Perhaps so, but he is succeeding in doing more. When he calls the Bear fearful and Cassiopeia hapless and Cetus a great terror, he is filling the sky not just with life, but with gigantic men, and violent and frightening animals. There is a poetic vision here intermingled with the scientific vision, a poetic vision recalling a time more naive, when men might actually believe that the sky contained such life as this. These less sophisticated men might also conceive that the animals in the sky got there from the earth, that the step from earth to heaven was a short one. Such a primitive era as is presupposed by Aratus' language may never have existed, in fact probably did not. It was no more real than Vergil's Arcadia. But it was no less powerful on that account, no less capable of calling up in the hearts of men who live in sophisticated times a longing for an ideal age when such beliefs were possible—a longing for a time, as the English Romantics might have said, when human consciousness did not have to reach so far in order to encounter what it was conscious of. All nature was filled, not just with life, but with a life we can touch and feel and recognize as ourselves. Surely the same impulse which drew readers to pastoral Sicily, or to the lost heroic world which lies behind the Argonautica, drew them to Aratus' Urdummheit.

The Phaenomena is therefore a contradiction: the poetic vision is threatened by scholarship, which calls catasterism nonsense; by science, which recognizes the constellations as conventional and perceives the heavenly movements as mechanical and regular and quantifiable; even by Stoicism itself, which must reinterpret the heavens in order to make them sentient. Aratus indulges the values placed by the age on scholarship and science and Stoicism, but he puts in his poem and in his vision of the universe a powerful sense of regret for what these forces would remove. And this contradictory age, which loved to use the mind but seemed to sense what could be lost when the mind was used and truth revealed, found in this poem, highly intellectual yet filled with the color that the mind must not allow itself to see, an ideal expression of what it had achieved and what it thought it had betrayed.