Neglected in the past, Cicero's poetry has in recent years enjoyed a modest scholarly comeback. The much-maligned De consulatu suo has been interpreted as a daringly innovative work with multiple connections to larger agendas of Ciceronian self-fashioning, while the Aratea, previously considered a piece of lightweight juvenilia, is now being read as a stylistically and ideologically foundational text of classical Latin poetry. It is thus very welcome to find a new edition with commentary of Cicero's best-preserved and best-known poetic effort, the first since Soubiran's 1972 Budé, and one that features the most extensive commentary on the Aratea ever published.

In fact, what P. has produced, in one and the same year, are not one but two commented editions of Cicero's translation from Aratus, a confusing state of affairs that needs some untangling. It turns out that the first (‘Pisa’) publication is a bilingual (Latin–Italian) text of the entirety of Cicero's Aratean efforts – his translations of both the astronomical first part of Aratus' poem (Aratea) and the second one about weather signs (Prognostica) – with an extensive introduction and ample notes cued to the translation. The second (‘Bologna’) edition consists of a Latin text of the Aratea to fr. 34.222, including the description of the constellations but not the discussion of planets, celestial circles and simultaneous risings, let alone the weather signs; it further contains an introduction and a substantial commentary, apparently based on P.’s 2013 Padua dissertation. The Bologna edition is thus on the face of it the more scholarly effort, appearing in a highly academic series (‘Testi e manuali per l'insegnamento universitario del latino’), while the Pisa edition, part of a series ‘Il mito’, is a more popular effort directed at students and ‘il lettore meno esperto’. As a matter of fact, however, the Pisa edition turns out to be a full-fledged text-cum-commentary on which the Bologna edition is to some extent parasitic, referring the reader to its sister publication for certain types of basic information while concentrating on the commentary itself.

The introduction of the Pisa edition provides a detailed discussion of the problematic date of Cicero's poem(s): on the one hand, Cicero claims (Nat. D. 2.104) that he wrote his Aratea as an adulescentulus, on the other, he tells Atticus to expect a copy of his Prognostica only in 60 b.c.e. (Att. 2.1.11). Following A. Traglia, P. believes that this means that Cicero translated the astronomical part of Aratus' work in 90/89, attracted by the work's stylistic sophistication, but produced his Latin version of the weather signs only in 60, when the topic of divine signs was of particular interest to him, as seen in De consulatu suo of the same period. This is a plausible hypothesis, though not, in my opinion, intrinsically more convincing than the other options (that Cicero was sending Atticus a copy of his old translation, or that he was revising part or all of his poem in 60); the similarity between the doom-and-gloom portents of De consulatu suo and the winsome cows and frogs of the Prognostica seems less than pronounced to me.

The remainder of the Pisa edition's introduction is dedicated to a general discussion of Cicero's creative adaptation of Aratus through what P. terms ‘reduction’ and ‘expansion’, and to the greater vividness and pathos of the Latin poem vis-à-vis the more sober Greek original. By contrast, nearly the entirety of the introduction of the Bologna edition (after a brief mention of the dating issue, which refers to the more detailed discussion in the Pisa publication) is taken up with P.’s interesting argument that Cicero presents a more pessimistic outlook on the cosmos than the cheerful Aratus. While the Hellenistic poet rewrites Hesiod by making the unfathomable Zeus of the Works and Days into the Phaenomena’s providential benefactor, the Roman translator, by means of window-allusions to the Archaic intertext, reintroduces Hesiodic uncertainty and Iron-Age resignation.

When it comes to the Latin text, the Bologna edition once more signals its dependence on its Pisa twin. There, we learn that P.’s text, presented without an apparatus, is that of Soubiran, with 32 changes listed on pp. 37–8 and justified in the notes (the commentary of the Bologna edition contains the same discussions, but no concordance is provided). The modifications, mostly based on variae lectiones or earlier conjectures, are more or less convincing, but always well argued and all within the realm of the plausible. The context of all fragments is provided in the notes by the Pisa edition, and at the bottom of the text by the Bologna edition.

In the commentaries, there are significant verbatim overlaps between the two editions. As expected, the Bologna edition provides more detail, especially in the discussion of grammar and style, the quotation of parallel passages and the reference to secondary literature (P.’s mastery of the scholarship is generally impressive and comprises titles published right up to the appearance of his editions). Even so, the Pisa edition on 62 pages of small print (compared to 145 of larger print in the Bologna edition) manages to convey a plethora of information on astronomy, myth, textual matters, style and poetics, far exceeding what one would expect of the ‘notes’ of a bilingual text. Sadly, eight tables with computer-generated star charts are reproduced on such a small scale as to be illegible without a magnifier. By contrast, the four early modern prints that illustrate the Bologna edition (including Dürer's famous star map with Aratus' portrait) are both visible and aesthetically pleasing.

The upshot? If you are looking for an attractively produced text of Cicero's Aratea and Prognostica with an up-to-date introduction and helpful commentary at a reasonable price, snatch up the Pisa edition. If you are specifically working on the description of the constellations, you should consult the Bologna edition as well. Finally, be advised that the latter is only Part 1 of an envisaged two-part publication: Part 2, P. announces, will contain indexes and linguistic and stylistic appendices, but not, apparently, discussion or text of the remaining parts of Cicero's translation.