The dating of Manilius' Astronomica and of the Aratea attributed to Germanicus are both long-standing problems of Latin scholarship.Footnote 1 The large number of significant correspondences between the two poems suggests a considerable degree of imitation and allusion one way or the other, but it is widely agreed that the internal evidence of the poems can shed no light on the direction of the influence. I would like to present a new observation, however, suggesting that the Aratea was already available to Manilius in some form by the time he came to compose his first book.
From what we have of his work, it appears that the Aratea poet's imitation of the original Phaenomena did not extend to the deliberate use of acrostics.Footnote 2 There is, however, one sequence of letters in the left margin – apparently an accident – that spells out a Latin word of significant length: the narrative of Iustitia (Δίκη) and the ages of man (German. Arat. 98–139) contains six lines whose initial letters spell SPARSV, supine of spargo ‘I scatter, sprinkle’.
Hilberg, who discovered the sequence, recognized it as a mere coincidence,Footnote 3 and there are two good reasons why it cannot have been deliberate. First, there is nothing in the adjacent passage to which it corresponds either in sense or etymologically.Footnote 4 The position of the acrostic, secondly, is too inopportune to be genuine. For while spargo and its cognates are occasionally used to describe the arrangement of stars,Footnote 5 the SPARSV sequence falls in a part of the poem to which a notion of scattering bears no relevance: the Aratean tale of the ages of man. While a narrative passage is a suitable location for an acrostic of general and obvious significance to a poem (as with Nic. Ther. 345–353 ΝΙΚΑΝΔΡΟΣ, housed within a narrative), sparsu cannot claim such an honour. It makes best sense, therefore, to treat it as simply a product of chance.
In contrast to the Aratea poet, Manilius has a keen eye for acrostics. Throughout Astronomica 1 – the part of his poem that corresponds most closely with the Phaenomena – he builds upon the precedent of Aratus' ΛΕΠΤΗ in a series of experimental word formations.Footnote 6 His interest in the Aratean acrostic, moreover, is likely to have spurred him to seek imitations of the figure in a Latin version of the Phaenomena. While he can have found no deliberate examples in Germanicus, the accidental SPARSV seems to have caught his eye, for the very same sequence occurs in his description of comets:
That we are dealing with a mere coincidence is ruled out by the extreme statistical unlikelihood of the event.Footnote 8 Moreover, this uncommon supine is just too strange a choice for Manilius to have made without some sort of precedent: while the notion of scattering is rather fitting for the passage in question (a discussion of showering meteors),Footnote 9 a passive form would have made a more intuitive choice than the verbal noun (‘by scattering’). Chance, however, had offered a precedent, in the form of Germanicus' accidental acrostic. The only plausible scenario is that Manilius, a man who likes to seek out meaningful patterns in the apparently random, had noticed the sequence in Germanicus and rehabilitated it in a part of his own poem to which the notion of scattering is more germane. For that to have been possible, Germanicus must have written before Manilius.
The borrowing of the SPARSV acrostic may, in fact, form part of a wider trend in Manilius. Damschen has identified a very similar example at 2.93–7, on the waxing and waning of the moon, where the initial letters spell SAETA, ‘shaggy’.Footnote 10 Taken on its own, the word is too far removed from the content to appear deliberate without some sort of earlier prompt. However, a very similar sequence occurs at Aratus, Phaen. 778–82 (ΣΑΑΕΤα), also located – significantly – in a passage on the moon, directly before the ΛΕΠΤΗ acrostic at 783–7. It seems, therefore, that Manilius was on the lookout for such peculiarities in his poetic models. Whether there are any further examples must, for the moment, remain to be seen; but sufficient grounds have already been given to have faith in the deliberate borrowing of the SPARSV sequence.
For the first time, an acrostic can provide us with more than just a textual or literary insight. While a number of seemingly insuperable problems still plague the absolute chronology of the poems, the discovery of the borrowed acrostic solves the puzzle of their relative dating: the Aratea attributed to Germanicus must already have been available to Manilius before he composed Astronomica 1. At last the door is open for a proper analysis of Manilius' use and imitation of his direct predecessor in the tradition of astronomical poetry.Footnote 11
