I recently read the revised edition of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Phaenomena of Aratus (titled The Sky Is Our Song: The “Phaenomena” of Aratus) and thoroughly enjoyed it. This edition is lovely, too.

Spencer A. Klavan has extended comments of the poem in New Criterion titled “A phenomenal poet” and it is currently not behind a paywall. A highly recommended read while it’s freely available.

The Phaenomena was a triumph in its day. Cicero translated it into Latin; Virgil paid it the compliment of stealing liberally from it in his book of agricultural didactic poetry, the Georgics. It holds up less well today—the poet Aaron Poochigian made a valiant effort at an English version in 2010, as did the classicist Stanley Lombardo in 2025 [revised and expanded from the 1983 first edition], but a lot of the minutely structured wordplay is simply bound to get lost. Modern readers may find themselves tempted to agree with the Roman critic Quintilian that “Aratus’s subject matter is lacking in motive force. It has no variety, no feeling, no characters—not even any speeches!” But that’s not quite right. Dense and difficult as it may be, the Phaenomena is ablaze with one character above all: the character of the divine mind. Aratus, as one of his contemporaries wrote, “is like the second-in-command of Zeus: he made the stars shine brighter.”

That must have been what Saint Paul saw in Phaenomena. It was a model of how scientific knowledge can inform poetic reverence, rather than destroy it. From the level of the quantum to the vastness of space between galaxies, there is more information on offer today about the universe than Eudoxus could have hoped to possess. There is more we know, and more we know that we don’t know, by orders upon orders of magnitude. As the Hellenistic era demonstrated and our own digital age has confirmed, more knowledge can mean more disarray—but it can also mean more panoramic vision and more intricate design. That is what Aratus invites us to expect. His most brilliant insight was that the world, like a poem, is inexhaustibly layered with hidden meaning. “For we humans do not yet know all that comes from Zeus,” he wrote. “But much is yet hidden which Zeus, if he wills, shall give us in time.” No great poem gives up its secrets in one go. It reveals more every time you read it. If the world is a poem, then perhaps every generation is another reading. And perhaps its author still has more to reveal—as some of our own poets have said.