"This book examines the innovations of the ancient philosopher Aratus in the field of astronomy"--Provided by publisher.

In Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in Its Contexts, renowned scholars address questions about what the ancient science of the heavens was and the numerous contexts in which it was pursued.

This carefully researched monograph is a historical investigation of the illustrated Aratea astronomical manuscript and its many interpretations over the centuries. Aratus' 270 B.C.E. Greek poem describing the constellations and astrological phenomena was translated and copied over 800 years into illuminated manuscripts that preserved and illustrated these ancient stories about the constellations. The Aratea survives in its entirety due to multiple translations from Greek to Latin and even to Arabic, with many illuminated versions being commissioned over the ages. The survey encompasses four interrelated disciplines: history of literature, history of myth, history of science, and history of art. Aratea manuscripts by their nature are a meeting place of these distinct branches, and the culling of information from historical literature and from the manuscripts themselves focuses on a wider, holistic view; a narrow approach could not provide a proper prospective. What is most essential to know about this work is that because of its successive incarnations it has survived and been reinterpreted through the centuries, which speaks to its importance in all of these disciplines. This book brings a better understanding of the history, changes and transmission of the original astronomical Phaenomena poem. Historians, art historians, astronomy lovers, and historians of astronomy will learn more specialized details concerning the Aratea and how the tradition survived from the Middle Ages. It is a credit to the poetry of Aratus and the later interpreters of the text that its pagan aspects were not edited nor removed, but respected and maintained in the exact same form despite the fact that all sixty Aratea manuscripts mentioned in this study were produced under the rule of Christianity.

After the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Phaenomena was the most widely read poem in the ancient world. Its fame was immediate. It was translated into Latin by Ovid and Cicero and quoted by St. Paul in the New Testament, and it was one of the few Greek poems translated into Arabic. Aratus’ Phaenomena is a didactic poem—a practical manual in verse that teaches the reader to identify constellations and predict weather. The poem also explains the relationship between celestial phenomena and such human affairs as agriculture and navigation. Despite the historical and pedagogical importance of the poem, no English edition suitable for students and general readers has been available for decades. Aaron Poochigian’s lively translation makes accessible one of the most influential poets of antiquity. Poochigian's interpretation of the Phaenomena reestablishes the ancient link between poetry and science and demonstrates that verse is an effective medium for instruction. Featuring references to Classical mythology and science, star charts of the northern and southern skies, extensive notes, and an introduction to the work’s stylistic features and literary reception, this dynamic work will appeal to students of Ancient Greece who want to deepen their understanding of the Classical world.

Flavian Poetry and its Greek Past breaks new ground by investigating the close interaction between Flavian poetry and Greek literary tradition and by evaluating the meaning of this affiliation in the socio-political and cultural context of the late first century CE. Authors examined include Martial, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus. Their interaction with Greek literature is not just thematic or geographical: the Greek literary past is conceived as the poetic influence of a variety of authors, periods, and genres, such as Homer, the Cyclic tradition, Greek lyric poetry, Greek tragedy, Hellenistic poetry and aesthetics, and Greek historiography.

How did the ancient Greeks and Romans envision the end of the world? What is the long-term future of the human race? Will the world always remain as it is or will it undergo a catastrophic change? What role do the gods, human morality, and the forces of nature play in bringing about the end of the world? In Apocalypse and Golden Age, Christopher Star reveals the answers that Greek and Roman authors gave to these questions. The first large-scale investigation of the various scenarios for the end of the world in classical texts, this book demonstrates that key thinkers often viewed their world as shaped by catastrophe. Star focuses on how this theme was explored over the centuries in the works of poets, such as Hesiod, Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan, and by philosophers, including the Presocratics, Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca. With possibilities ranging from periodic terrestrial catastrophes to the total dissolution of the world, these scenarios address the ultimate limits that define human life and institutions, and place humanity in the long perspective of cosmic and natural history. These texts also explore various options for the rebirth of society after world catastrophe, such as a return of the Golden Age or the redevelopment of culture and political institutions. Greek and Roman visions of the end, Star argues, are not calls to renounce this world and prepare for a future kingdom. Rather, they are set within larger investigations that examine and seek to improve personal and political life in the present. Contextualizing classical thought about the apocalypse with biblical studies, Star shows that the seeds of our contemporary anxieties about globalization, politics, and technology were sown during the Roman period. Even the prevalent link between an earthly leader and the beginning of the end times can be traced back to Greek and Roman rulers, the emperor Nero in particular. Apocalypse and Golden Age enriches our understanding of apocalyptic thought.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Ce livre propose une étude intertextuelle des descriptions d’aurores et de crépuscules dans la Thébaïde de Stace. Les images poétiques de l’Aurore aux doigts de rose ou du char solaire plongeant dans l’Océan cachent un travail minutieux sur la tradition littéraire antérieure. Les remarquables aurores et crépuscules de la Thébaïde illustrent parfaitement la façon dont les caractéristiques traditionnelles du motif peuvent être détournées pour transmettre un nouveau message. Chaque chapitre de cet ouvrage examine en détail un des aspects lié aux aurores et aux crépuscules : expressions formulaires, rôle structurant, fonction lumineuse et temporelle, potentiel métaphorique. This book offers an intertextual study of dawn and dusk descriptions in Statius’ Thebaid. Poetic images such as rosy-fingered Dawn and the fiery chariot of the Sun sinking into the Ocean are the result of learned work on the previous literary tradition. The striking dawn and dusk descriptions in the Thebaid offer a perfect illustration of the way in which the traditional characteristics of the motif can be remodelled to produce new meaning. Each chapter in this monograph examines one of the aspects associated with dawns and dusks: formulaic diction, structuring role, relation to time and light, allegory.

The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is integral both to the poem’s philosophical agenda but also to its wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and meaning—both inside and outside the text.

Publius Nigidius Figulus, renowned senator-scholar of the late Roman Republic, wrote numerous works on a wide variety of topics, of which only 130 fragments survive. This is the first collection of academic articles on this mysterious figure, who not only was famous for his learning, but also reportedly engaged in a number of divinatory practices and went down in history as a “Pythagorean and magus” (thus St. Jerome). A group of international scholars provide a variety perspectives on Nigidius’ politics, philosophy, mythography, biology, religious studies, linguistic thought, divinatory activities, and reception, throwing new light on this fascinating Roman polymath.

Literary Territories introduces readers to a wide range of literature from 200-900 CE in which geography is a defining principle of literary art. From accounts of Holy Land pilgrimage, to Roman mapmaking, to the systematization of Ptolemy's scientific works, Literary Territories argues that forms of literature that were conceived and produced in very different environments and for different purposes in Late Antiquity nevertheless shared an aesthetic sensibility which treated the classical "inhabited world," the oikoumene, as a literary metaphor for the collection and organization of knowledge. This type of "cartographical thinking" stresses the world of knowledge that is encapsulated in the literary archive. The archival aesthetic coincided with an explosion of late antique travel and Christian pilgrimage which in itself suggests important unifying themes between visual and textual conceptions of space. Indeed, by the end of Late Antiquity the geographical mode appears in nearly every type of writing in multiple Christian languages (Greek, Latin, Syriac, and others). The diffusion of cartographical thinking throughout the real-world oikoumene, now the Christian Roman Empire, was a fundamental intellectual trajectory of Late Antiquity.