The sky is our song
and we begin with Zeus, for men cannot speak
without giving Him names. The streets are filled,
the sea and its harbors are flooded with Zeus,
and in Him we move and have all our being.
For we are His children, and He blesses our race
with beneficent signs, and wakes man to his work,
directing his mind to the means of his life. He shows
when the soil is ready for mattock and ox. He shows
what season is best for trenching circles around trees
and when to scatter every kind of seed.
For this is He who set the signs in the firmament,
Who demarked constellations and devised for the year
The principal stars that signal to farers
The march of the seasons, so their works might all prosper.
For this men propitiate Him both first and last,
and I praise Him as Father, man’s great Benefactor,
and with Him our ancestors, who first watched the skies.

(Opening lines of Phaenomena)

To earn the First Class rank when I was in Boy Scouts you had to demonstrate some knowledge of the night sky by identifying a certain number of constellations. While I recall much that I learned, I now have an app on my phone that points out everything in the sky for me regardless of where I am.

Written in Greek around 270 BC, Aratus’ Phaenomena provided a guide to the constellations as well as weather signs that were popular for many centuries. While its use faded with the advent of the telescope and more accurate means of mapping the heavens, the last few decades has seen a rediscovery of Aratus’ work. Stanley Lombardo provided a full length verse translation in 1983 and this edition updates it, including helpful illustrations generated from the open-source planetarium software Stellarium and enhanced by Amy Albright.

While the Phaenomen provides a handbook or map of the heavenly skies it also demonstrates a very Stoic way of seeing the world, a philosophical framework of an ordered universe overseen by a providential deity revealed through natural signs. Aratus centers the poem on Zeus, as you can see from the opening lines, then points out the constellations in a very ordered method. There are occasional dips into the mythology behind the constellations, but that’s secondary and sometimes at variance with Homer or Hesiod. While Zeus is responsible for the stars and their ordering, humans are responsible for constructing the system Aratus details. When he reaches a part of the sky with no known constellations, he muses about how groupings came into being:

They [groups of stars] bear no resemblance to the limbs of a figure,
unlike the many starts that run their fixed courses
year in and out, stars that some primordial astronomer
observed, grouped into patterns, and named.
He could not devise a name for each star
of all that swirl throughout the night sky,
in prolific confusion of color and size,
and so he assembled the stars in formations
suggestive of images, and of a sudden
named constellations rose from the horizon
and stars were not wonders but signs,
resplendent and pure in their hard outlines.
(lines 349 – 360)

People have to make an effort to see and understand the phenomena provided in order to reveal their providential meaning, although the author also makes it clear that “Not yet do we mortals know all things from Zeus. / Much is still hidden, God’s gift for the future / as His will provides.” Aratus provides the means to locate a constellation and orient it with nearby ones, and often provides information for sailors if certain circumstances occur when a constellation can be seen. As Lombardo points out in the introduction, the author refuses to “exploit the mythological aspect of the constellations” in order for the reader to use the information provided, whether from Zeus or by Aratus.

There is only a brief account of the planets since their ordering ad paths seemed erratic (termed “wandering stars” and “celestial vagrants”) in comparison to the “fixed” constellations. More details are given on the lines of the Celestial Sphere (the equator and two tropic lines) and how they work with the zodiac constellations. He then sets the whole thing in motion, describing the rising and setting arcs noted throughout the night as well changes throughout the year and their meaning for humans in almanac-like fashion. The detailed weather signs Aratus lists have the same skills of observation and reflection in locating the constellations, presented with the same poetic skill. “The zodiacal signs announce the hours of night / and lie along heaven as expressions of Zeus / for the year in the large, the season to plow, / and the season to plant.” Animals are often used in identifying weather signs (especially in regard to potential storms), meaning that they also observe the signs we do as well as providing additional signs to humans.

Of special note is Lombardo’s notes on the opening of the poem. In other translations the first line is something like “We begin with Zeus” or “From Zeus let us begin.” I’ll let Lombardo speak for himself on why he chose the opening he did (references to line numbers are omitted).

“Let us begin from Zeus” has a double significance in an astronomical-meteorological poem charged with Stoicism (a significance that I have rendered in the translation as “The sky is our song / and we begin with Zeus.”) The dual meaning of Zeus as god and sky is maintained throughout the poem and contributes to the impression that the sky in its astral and meteorological manifestations is no less a revelatory self-expression on the part of the divine power. Similarly, whenever men speak, they are inevitably expressing aspects of Zeus: this is the true (Stoic) meaning of the manifold epithets of Zeus.

The astronomer Hipparchus wrote a correction to Aratus’ work about 120 years after Phaenomena was written, in part because the Precession of the Equinoxes (the earth’s ‘wobble’) had not previously been accounted for as well as Hipparchus ability to provide more accurate stellar coordinates. Even so, Aratus’ work remained popular until the Middle Ages and it’s good to see a beautiful modern edition of the work The skies haven’t changed too much in the 2,000+ years since Aratus wrote Phaenomena and human nature has probably changed less.

Related:

1. From Richard L. Hunter, “Written in the Stars: Poetry and Philosophy in Aratus’ Phaenomena ”, Arachnion 2 (1995) 1-34.

Aratus’ poem, unlike the work of Eudoxus [source material for Aratus] or Hipparchus, is not merely about the universe, but is also universal in the sense that it presents itself as available to all, farmers, sailors, literary scholars. The poem continues in a new mode the age-old position of the poet as communal repository of wisdom. Aratus’ project is to make us all see what we have always seen, to ‘teach’ us what we have always known. In the works of Eudoxus he found a systematisation of knowledge and experience, which was not only itself a sign of god’s benevolence, but matched the ordered nature all around him; the poetic mode in which to express this cannot have been a difficult choice.

2. I have not seen a copy of it, but John Hopkins University Press put out a translation by Aaron Poochigian in 2010 that translates the Greek into rhyming couplets. While I don’t know what liberties were taken in such a poetic translation, it would seem to be an effective technique for what was meant as a didactic poem.