Aratus’ Phaenomena calls upon its reader to scrutinize the letters of the text as carefully as the stars and constellations that form its subject matter.Footnote ¹ The poem abounds with clever letter-play and wordplay, and its reception too is characterized by verbal cleverness, as later authors vie with Aratus and one another to create ingenious textual effects.Footnote ² Among the best-known examples is the word ἄρρητον (‘unspoken’) at Phaen. 2, a witty hidden sphragis for Aratus, who nowhere in his work directly names himself.Footnote ³ Later poets picked up on this pun: Callimachus speaks of the λεπταὶ ῥήσιες Ἀρήτου (Anth. Pal. 9.507.3-4 = 27 Pf.), repeating the verbal root of ἄρρητον in ῥήσιες and its sound in Ἀρήτου. Leonidas of Tarentum meanwhile rates Aratus ‘second after Zeus’ (Διὸς … δεύτερος, Anth. Pal. 9.25.5-6), acknowledging the hidden sphragis, which follows directly after the invocation of Zeus in line 1 of the Phaenomena.Footnote ⁴

Beyond the hidden sphragis in ἄρρητον, it has been suggested that internal anagrams or near-anagrams of the name ΑΡΗΤΟΣ (or in the Doric form ΑΡΑΤΟΣ—ancient authors give both forms) may constitute a similar form of playful authorial self-identification.Footnote ⁵ Such internal anagrams may appear tenuous; after all, it is hardly rare to find these letters within a word, and all the less so if we are prepared to count alternate case-forms and ‘near-misses’.Footnote ⁶ To corroborate the significance of any given anagram, then, we must look, in the words of Alan Cameron, for ‘a pointer in the context or structure of the text’.Footnote ⁷ We suggest that two anagrams of Aratus’ name are marked as significant by several such textual pointers in Phaen. 367–85.Footnote ⁸ Here, Aratus relates how an unnamed ancient observer (τις ἀνδρῶν οὐκέτ᾽ ἐόντων, 373) once picked out discrete groups of stars, likened them to physical forms and gave them names. In this way, the once intractable multitude of individual stars passing overhead became an array of recognizable constellations. The passage is studded with repeated words of ‘naming’ in both positive (ὀνομαστὶ καλέσσαι, 374; ὀνομαστά, 381) and negative forms (νώνυμοι, 370; οὐ γὰρ κ᾽ ἐδυνήσατο … ὄνομ᾽ εἰπεῖν, 375–6; οὐκ ὀνομαστά, 385), corresponding to those groups of stars ‘fitted together in distinct shapes’ (καθαροῖς ἐναρηρότες εἰδώλοισι, 383) and thus able to be named on the one hand and on the other those (beneath the constellation Λαγώς) which are too unclear or too ‘murky’ (πάντα μάλ᾽ ἠερόεντα, 385) to be given a form and a name.Footnote ⁹ Within this description of star-groups, the letters ΑΡΗΤΟΣ are found in the participle ἐναρηρότες (383),Footnote ¹⁰ while in the adjective ἠερόεντα (385) we find either the accusative form ΑΡΗΤΟΝ or else the ‘near-miss’ ΑΡΗΤΟ. In addition to the repeated references to names and naming in the surrounding passage, these anagrams are further signposted by the semantics of the words in which they appear. In the first instance, a compound of ἀραρίσκω (‘to fit together’) is a fitting-enough place for an internal anagram that the reader must ‘fit together’.Footnote ¹¹ The difficulty of discerning such anagrams, meanwhile, is captured in the adjective ἠερόεντα (‘murky’).Footnote ¹² Finally, we note as a more general thematic consideration that the work of the ‘unnamed observer’ whose devising and naming of the constellations is described in this passage is comparable to Aratus’ own activity as poet of the Phaenomena.Footnote ¹³ This makes the hidden presence of Aratus’ name here all the more pointed and appropriate.

Did later authors recognize these features of the text and create their own anagrams of Aratus’ name, just as they imitated other forms of Aratean wordplay? It has recently been suggested that Ovid at the beginning of the Fasti includes such an anagram in the words terras orta (Fast. 1.2).Footnote ¹⁴ We suggest that Leonidas of Tarentum in his epigram in praise of Aratus (Anth. Pal. 9.25) also includes anagrams of the poet's name, and even recreates the context of the anagrams at Phaen. 367–85. Leonidas’ epigram contains extensive echoes of Aratus’ account of the activity of the unnamed observer.Footnote ¹⁵ Beyond the merely verbal similarities, Leonidas takes over Aratus’ bipartite description of the astronomer's working process and applies it to Aratus’ composition of the Phaenomena: unable to account for all of the stars (ἀστέρας, Phaen. 380) individually, the unnamed observer organized them into groups and gave them names (ἐφράσατ᾽ ἠδ᾽ ἐνόησεν ἅπαντ᾽ ὀνομαστὶ καλέσσαι, 374) as constellations (ἄστρα, 382). So too, according to Leonidas, Aratus after observing the stars (ἀστέρας ἐφράσατο, Anth. Pal. 9.25.2) made them more conspicuous as constellations (ἔθηκ᾽ ἄστρα φαεινότερα, Anth. Pal. 9.25.6). In Leonidas’ epigram, each step of this process conceals an anagram of Aratus’ name: the Doric form ΑΡΑΤΟΣ can be read in the verb ἐφράσατο. At Phaen. 374, the final omicron of this verb is elided; Leonidas’ restoration of the vowel (perhaps not accidentally) serves to complete the anagram. In the final word of the epigram, φαεινότερα, meanwhile, we find in reverse the letters ΑΡΕΤΟΝ, an echo of Aratus’ name (and also of ἄρρητον) within a word that is itself a play on the title of his poem.Footnote ¹⁶ By this engagement with Aratean wordplay, Leonidas reproduces in miniature the distinctive compositional mode of the Phaenomena, which calls upon the reader to apprehend dynamically multiple structures of meaning out of the elements of the text, just as the astronomer discerns the order of the cosmos through the construction of constellations.