That Cicero as a young didactic poet embraced the traditions of Hellenistic hexameter poetry is well recognized.Footnote ¹ Those traditions encompass various forms of wordplay, one of which is the acrostic. Cicero's engagement with this tradition, in the form of an unusual Greek-Latin acrostic at Aratea 317–20, prompts inquiry regarding both the use of the acrostic technique as textual commentary and Cicero's lifelong concerns regarding translation.Footnote ²

Commentators have made famous the typically Hellenistic acrostics in the Greek didactic hexameter poems of Aratus and Nicander. Perhaps the most famous example, for modern scholars, and the earliest reliable one, is an early Hellenistic acrostic found in Aratus’ Phaen. 783–7, giving instructions for predicting the weather by observing the crescent moon:Footnote ³

In what is known as a ‘gamma’ acrostic because of its shape, similar to the Greek letter Γ, the same word begins a line as read left to right horizontally and also runs down the left margin as a vertical word read top to bottom. Here, the word is λεπτή, ‘slender’, which both describes the crescent moon discussed in the passage and echoes what Apollo told Callimachus at the start of the Aetia: ‘Poet, feed your sacrifice as fat as possible, but, my good man, keep your Muse slender’.Footnote ⁴ While Aratus’ acrostic serves as commentary on the quality of the poetry, Nicander's own name in acrostic form at Alex. 266–75, and again at Ther. 343–54, comments on authorship.Footnote ⁵ By the end of the Hellenistic era, acrostics were popularized and appeared in diverse texts such as funerary inscriptions, gnomic anthologies and school exercises.Footnote ⁶

The tradition of acrostics in hexameter poetry was known to the Romans, as we know from Cicero's own words. Not only is Cicero our main source for the existence of acrostics in Ennius and in the Sibylline verses, but he also proclaimed a view about acrostics that challenged common assumptions. Many Romans held the belief, traditional since at least Heraclitus, that the oracles contained in the Greek hexameter Sibylline books, which were consulted as part of the Roman state religion, were reliable, because the verses were uttered by the Sibyl μαινομένῳ στόματι, ‘with frenzied mouth’.Footnote ⁷ In Cicero's time, these oracles were destroyed by the fire of 83 b.c., and replaced by prophecies gathered from various remote places.Footnote ⁸ Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports, citing Varro, that the replacements were selected precisely because the presence of acrostics identified them as genuine oracles.Footnote ⁹ Acrostics were thus associated with truthfulness and divine inspiration. In his De diuinatione, however, Cicero's character Marcus (whose name causes him to be identified with Cicero himself) turns this idea on its head:

Thus, an acrostic does not guarantee that the text makes a true statement, but instead exhibits the skill and care of the poet creating it.

We know that Cicero read and admired both Aratus and Nicander for their eloquent poetic skill, while simultaneously declaring that those authors knew nothing about the technical subjects on which they wrote.Footnote ¹¹ Since he specifically comments on acrostics in Ennius and the oracles, and probably was exposed to acrostics in his early school-exercises, he may well have noticed the acrostics by those didactic poets. As a young man, in the early 80s b.c., Cicero composed a Latin version of Aratus’ Phaenomena, his Aratea, much of which survives.Footnote ¹² Since there is no evidence that Cicero either claimed or wanted to be an astronomer, and later strongly criticized Aratus’ technical knowledge, we must suppose that Cicero sought to emulate the poetic art of the earlier poem, rather than its scientific value.Footnote ¹³ These circumstances have prompted at least one scholar to wonder whether the lost portion of the Aratea might contain a translation of Aratus’ λεπτή acrostic.Footnote ¹⁴ While that is not available, the acrostic in the extant portion of the Aratea can help us to understand not only Cicero's participation in the tradition of acrostics but also his versatility in translation and fondness for a clever twist in language.

While the Aratea is often called a ‘translation’ of the Phaenomena, Cicero incorporates substantial additions and modifications of his own, in keeping with Hellenistic practice.Footnote ¹⁵ Furthermore, it has long been remarked that Cicero sometimes appears to translate the scholia rather than the words of the poem.Footnote ¹⁶ Several additions occur in a section listing the constellations of the zodiac, which corresponds to Phaen. 541–9. Besides elaborating the list of constellations, Cicero adds a comment on the proper nomenclature for the zodiac, as well as an acrostic. At Phaen. 544, Aratus has Ζωϊδίων δέ ἑ κύκλον ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν, ‘they call this circle by the name Zodiac’. Cicero's acrostic spans Aratea 317–20, which starts with an expanded version of Aratus’ statement:

The acrostic incorporates the horizontal text and a vertical dimension. Shaped like Aratus’ ‘gamma’ acrostic, the vertical word, read top to bottom, intersects with zodiacum and spells out zona, ‘belt’, in its genitive form zonae if the reader chooses to maintain the diphthong beginning the fourth line.Footnote ¹⁷ Its location is highly marked. Very few Latin words begin with the letter z, which was incorporated into the Latin alphabet to accommodate Greek words.Footnote ¹⁸ To see such a novelty starting both a line and a sentence would be quite noticeable, drawing attention to the acrostic.Footnote ¹⁹ In such a prominent position, the letter may even have been enlarged or otherwise emphasized.

In the horizontal text of his version, Cicero translates Aratus’ statement with both a Latinized transliteration of the Greek ζῳδιακός and a compound Latin term, signifer orbis, literally ‘sign-bearing circle’. By juxtaposing Greek and Latin, he uses a technique also found in Ennius’ Annales. For example, Ennius supplements a Latinized accusative of the Greek word for wisdom, sophiam, with an immediate Latin translation: sapientia quae perhibetur, ‘which is called wisdom’.Footnote ²⁰ Another example parallels Cicero's lines more closely: uento quem perhibent Graium genus aera lingua, ‘on the wind, which the Greek race calls aera in its language’.Footnote ²¹ But unlike Ennius, who uses present tense to announce what terms are in use by the Greeks and the Romans, Cicero uses the future form perhibebunt, as if to announce a new name. Also unlike Ennius, Cicero injects the notion of truth. He declares, rather hubristically, that the new name is not only Latin but also ‘true’.

Scholars have generally considered that these lines establish signifer orbis as the Latin name for the zodiac.Footnote ²² Indeed, Cicero, in later prose works, and other contemporary and later authors adopt part or all of that term, which appears first in the Aratea.Footnote ²³ For Cicero to refer to this as a ‘name’, however, seems at odds with Cicero's usual Latin usage. perhibeo, in the sense of naming or calling something by name, expects a proper name expressed in a single word.Footnote ²⁴ Cicero uses it that way elsewhere in the Aratea, as does Ennius in the examples shown above.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, nomen, ‘name’, particularly in the ablative, as used here, usually qualifies a single denoting noun, not a descriptive noun-adjective phrase.Footnote ²⁶ The words nomine uero appearing at the end of the line thus invite the reader to expect a single noun stating a ‘true’ name at the beginning of the next line, again causing the eye to be drawn to the location of the acrostic. There is indeed a single noun there, orbis, which translates Aratus’ κύκλον, ‘circle’. But Cicero adds the adjective ‘sign-bearing’—which he need not have done simply to translate Aratus’ verse, and which is contrary to the readers’ expectations. The reading having been interrupted by this slight surprise, we can imagine a reader looking for a third time to the left margin to see if perhaps a line has been skipped, and now noticing the acrostic.

The acrostic zona, once noticed, introduces additional layers of meaning that both contradict and supplement what Cicero says. It presents a second nomen, a single Latin noun to substitute for the Greek name zodiacus, adding a twist to Aratus’ model gamma acrostic by being bilingual in Greek and Latin.Footnote ²⁷ While zodiacum is a transliterated Greek word apparently of Cicero's invention, zona had been borrowed from Greek much earlier, was used by Plautus,Footnote ²⁸ and by Cicero's day had become an established Latin word for ‘belt’. Furthermore, the vertical zona is actually a more ‘true’ name for the zodiac than the orbis in the horizontal text. Soubiran points out, as do other commentators, that in reality the zodiac is not a circle but a belt, having a width covering twelve degrees of arc, according to ancient authorities.Footnote ²⁹ Cicero's contemporary Vitruvius accurately uses the term lata zona, ‘wide belt’, to refer to the zodiac in De arch. 9.1.3.Footnote ³⁰ Manilius, in another didactic hexameter poem, Astronomica, closely imitates the same lines 541–4 of the Phaenomena as Cicero. But Manilius supplements Aratus’ inaccurate description of the zodiac as a ‘circle’ with rotundae … orbem zonae, qua signa feruntur, ‘the circle of the round belt, where signs are carried’, at 1.554–5.Footnote ³¹ Unlike Manilius, Cicero does not openly correct Aratus. Yet, if we supplement the horizontal text with the acrostic in its genitive form, we can obtain orbem signiferum zonae, ‘sign-bearing circle of the belt’, a remarkably close parallel to Manilius’ phrase. Manilius, whose interest in acrostics is notable, could very well have taken his cue from Cicero.Footnote ³² Alternatively, the nominative form zona may be taken with nomine to state the expected name.Footnote ³³ In either of these readings, the alternative ‘true’ Latin name for the zodiacal belt, zona, is placed so that it both (1) visually intersects with zodiacum, the transliterated Greek name for the same thing, and (2) visually surrounds orbem, the literal translation for Aratus’ ‘circle’, like a kind of vertical belt.

Cicero is thus not quite telling the whole truth if we limit his meaning to include only the horizontal locution signifer orbis as the declared ‘true’ name for the zodiac. By hiding zona in the margin just at this point, he indicates, without question, that he knows the Latin term, and knows that it is a suitable name for the zodiac. Furthermore, Cicero's willingness to express knowledge of astronomy exceeds that of Aratus. While Aratus declines to address the motion of the planets, claiming a lack of confidence, Cicero forges ahead with a description of planetary motion.Footnote ³⁴ We can infer that Cicero is aware that calling the zodiac a circle falls a little short of the truth, and that he is making a choice by doing so.

This choice of directly translating Aratus’ original, less accurate κύκλον, ‘circle’, as orbis—without correction in the horizontal text—seems to deviate from the freer translation usual in the remainder of the passage.Footnote ³⁵ In his later life also, Cicero sometimes expresses a pragmatic approach to translating Greek words that is not bound to strict literalness. For instance, while he is not averse to adopting some Greek terms, with or without transliteration,Footnote ³⁶ he is also willing to reject a word-for-word translation where the sense is contrary to Latin usage,Footnote ³⁷ or would require a new word non satis apti, ‘not sufficiently suitable’.Footnote ³⁸ He even prefers to choose a synonym where a Latin equivalent already in use inconveniently lacks some of its cases.Footnote ³⁹ He opines that, while literal translation or periphrasis has its place, cum intellegitur quid significetur, minus laborandum est de nomine, ‘as long as what is meant is understood, we need not trouble so much about the name’.Footnote ⁴⁰ And in the Aratea, as already noted, it seems that Cicero had few qualms about incorporating the scholia or adding his own interpretation where strictly translating the text would be insufficient or misleading.

The Aratea acrostic seems to show us a hybrid. It begins with a mechanical transliteration of a Greek word to create a new Latin term, zodiacum. Then, in the horizontal text, orbem, a direct translation for Aratus’ κύκλον, appears even though zonam would have been more correct and equally convenient, and would have fitted the metre just as well. Cicero, however, does not disregard the better alternative word, but writes it in—as an acrostic down the margin. He thus uses the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the text to incorporate three different ways of expressing the idea of the zodiac. He (1) respects Aratus’ original idea of a circle by translating it, and (2) adopts Aratus’ original Greek word for the zodiac by transliterating it. Plus, he (3) visually wraps both of them with a vertical word for the more accurate ‘belt’, just as if it were a physical belt around the horizontal text. Rather than overtly correcting Aratus, he has thus subtly ‘belted’ him, not with a physical blow, but with a hidden poetic rebuke.

But which does Cicero intend to be the declared ‘true’ future name for the signifer, ‘sign-bearing’ zodiac—orbis or zona? By declining to correct Aratus in the horizontal text, but instead placing the corrective, more accurate and rather showy Latin word in the vertical margin for observant readers, he creates ambiguity by incorporating both words. Thus, Cicero inserts a puzzle in the guise of clear teaching, a clever and very Hellenistic technique of didactic poets.Footnote ⁴¹ Further, he adds to the bare name a significant adjective, ‘sign-bearing’. It is possible to interpret the presence of the acrostic itself as joining either orbis or zona as the signifer named in the passage, making the acrostic a sign just as the constellations of the zodiac are signs.Footnote ⁴² He succeeds here in proving what he later expresses in Diu. 2.54.111–12 about what acrostics signify. The acrostic is not a sign that Cicero makes a true or divinely inspired statement, but rather is a sign that the poem is artfully crafted. It signifies that Cicero's poem is the product of poetic art and careful attention, of the sort that is widely associated with Hellenistic poetry.