While the idea of a classical literary tradition is uncontroversial, a scientific one is less so: Copernicus tends to be seen as a sharp break from ancient models, the founder of our rational, empirical age. But G.'s careful reading of Aratus and the tradition he inspired is premised upon the idea that there is ‘no unbridgeable gulf’ (p. 3) between the Copernican universe and that of Aratus, whose Phaenomena was one of antiquity's best-loved poems. This is a sound premise: recognising the continuity in western astronomy allows us better to inhabit the mindset that made Aratus so popular for so long. In G.'s estimation, this popularity derives from Aratus' synthesis of two ideas that have long been of cardinal importance in the western scientific tradition. This synthesis can be seen in the poem's title itself: in antiquity, phaenomena could refer both to observable data and to what was manifest in the imagination. Aratus drew on both senses, combining the raw data of astronomical observation with moralising cosmology that depicted the universe as the product of intelligent design. That the Phaenomena was one of the first works to perform such a synthesis – and that it did so in the language of poetry – is what led to its longstanding influence.
G.'s book traces this influence throughout antiquity, beginning with the Phaenomena itself in the 270s b.c. and ending with Avienus' fourth-century a.d. translation. Along the way she considers not just Aratus' earlier Roman translators (Cicero and Germanicus), but the broader impact of the Phaenomena on poets such as Lucretius, Virgil and Statius, whose engagement with Aratus is demonstrated through close intertextual study. Particular attention is paid to how the ‘cosmological shell’ (p. 17) of the poem takes on new meanings with each author, as Aratus' data is put at the service of various viewpoints.
One of the work's prevailing threads is the ongoing antiphony between Aratus' poem and the Platonic tradition of astronomical cosmology. Chapter 1, ‘Poetic Justice’, considers this relationship from the point of view of Aratus himself, examining the antecedents for the myth of Dike (Ph. 96–136), perhaps the poem's most intertextually marked passage. An appendix (Appendix A) provides the passage's references to Hesiod, whose myth of ages in WD has long been recognised as Aratus' major point of departure, but G. argues that another model, Empedocles (whose universe cycles between the reigns of Love and Strife), complicates Hesiod's account of linear decline. By joining Empedocles' philosophical poetry to Hesiod's didacticism, Aratus reclaims cosmogonic myth from Plato, who had shifted truth-telling about the universe from poetry to (prose) philosophy.
Plato also plays a major role in Chapter 2, ‘Roman Justice’, which turns from Aratus to his Roman interpreters, examining how they adapted the myth of Dike alongside Platonic cosmology to emphasise a very Roman cyclicality: just as the universe cycles through phases, so Romans will forever repeat the cycle of civil war. Virgil is the primary focus, and G. studies how, in Eclogue 4 and Georgics 2, he combines Aratus with Plato's Politicus to suggest that Rome will cycle from its age of civil conflict back to the Saturnian Golden Age. Aratus' translators also pick up on the contrast between civil war and Golden Age: Cicero more subtly, Germanicus more explicitly. Because this same complex of ideas occurs in Lucretius, the chapter ends with the hypothesis that he first linked Aratus' age of strife with civil conflict, becoming the Roman intermediary between Aratus and his translators. Though I do not doubt Lucretius' importance in this tradition, it is odd to insist on his primacy, especially since elements of this idea are also found in Cicero's Aratea, and since G. goes on to demonstrate the extent to which Lucretius drew on Cicero's poem.
The next two chapters, ‘Wandering Stars’ (Chapter 3) and ‘Lucretius’ Aratea' (Chapter 4), are, in many ways, the core of the book. G. convincingly shows that Lucretius was in constant dialogue with Cicero's Aratea. Appendix B, a list of over 40 pages of verbal reminiscences between the two, strengthens the claim. The universe of Aratus, predicated on intelligent design, subject to rational explanation and fashioned to benefit mankind, stands in fundamental opposition to Epicurean atomism, and Lucretius' sustained use of ‘polemical allusion’ to Cicero's translation in the astronomical section of DRN 5 is the focus of Chapter 3. There is also a compelling picture of Aratus' importance in late Republican Rome, and of what amounts to an intellectual altercatio between Lucretius and Cicero: Lucretius dismantles Cicero's orderly universe for Epicurean randomness, and Cicero reclaims his poem for intelligent design with its quotation in De natura deorum.
Chapter 4 examines how Cicero's Aratea is used elsewhere in the DRN. As G. shows, allusion to Cicero was pervasive throughout the poem, and often found in passages with programmatic significance, such as the proems of Books 1, 3 and 5, where Epicureanism is contrasted with Cicero's opposing philosophy. Lucretius also frequently refers to the few episodes of ‘disorder’ in Cicero's poem, broadening their focus so that they apply to the whole of his disorderly universe. Such allusions to Cicero's translation allow Lucretius to conduct philosophical debate on an intertextual level.
Lucretius' polemical use of the Aratean tradition had a long afterlife in Roman poetry. Chapter 5, ‘Planetary Motion’, demonstrates that early imperial authors, perhaps thanks to a Lucretian intermediary, also use Aratus to express ideas of cosmic disorder, often in relation to civil war; in this they follow Virgil and Germanicus, discussed in Chapter 2. To show this, G. examines the appearance of Aratean elements of disorder in Manilius, Lucan, Seneca and Statius. While in Aratus these were outliers in an otherwise orderly universe, in the Roman tradition they become central, and are yoked to the universal disorder that results from civil war. Like Lucretius, these authors see Aratus as a paradigm of celestial order; turning his rational universe upside down is a forceful way to demonstrate the pernicious effects of civic strife.
Chapter 6, ‘Late Antique Aratus’, considers Avienus' unusual translation of the Phaenomena, whose extreme divergence from the original is demonstrated in Appendix C, a comparison of their respective proems. In order to contextualise these divergences, Avienus' translation is fruitfully read alongside the contemporary works of Firmicus Maternus, Julian's Hymn to Helios and the Latin panegyric tradition. This is uncharted territory for Aratean scholars, yet understanding Avienus' fourth-century context helps make sense of the work's Neoplatonic elements, as well as the association of Jupiter with the sun. Drawing on these culturally relevant themes, Avienus made Aratus' intelligently designed universe comprehensible for his audience. In doing so he revitalised a poem that was, for many reasons, quite congenial to fourth-century adaptation.
A brief epilogue returns to Copernicus, who was, as G. shows, in many ways a successor to the Aratean tradition. Recognising that Copernicus too combined cosmology with data brings into focus a major benefit of studying Aratus and his interpreters as a group. Each adaptation of Aratus' moralising cosmology shows just how malleable this concept is in the face of the ‘real’ universe, which always remains tantalisingly out of reach.
G.'s book is impressive both for the breadth of literature it surveys and for the careful, oftentimes quite subtle, conclusions drawn from that material. In any intertextual study, readers will always find some reminiscences more persuasive than others, but I believe all will agree that G. has done an admirable job charting Aratus' popularity – and how that popularity was manifested at the level of language itself – over a 700-year period.
