Arato de Solos . He was born in 310 and died in 240 BC. Born in Soli, ( Cilicia ), Greek writer , poet . He was a disciple of the Stoics and wrote the didactic poem Los phenomennos , a compendium of the cosmological knowledge of his time that Cicero translated into Latin verses .
Summary
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- 1 Biography
- 2 Artwork
- 1 Comment on: The Aratus phenomena
- 3 Sources
Biography
He wrote a poem, which makes him famous, Phenomena , in the Macedonian court of Antígono II Gónatas and concluded it around 275 BC. C. He wrote other erudite poems, some on a medical subject, now lost. He enjoyed a great reputation among the Alexandrians first and among the Romans later. Callimachus himself celebrated him in a beautiful epigram, and many others mentioned him highly, as a master of that astronomical poetry, stellar in its themes and luminous in its verses. The Phenomena are the most effulgent and renowned Hellenistic product of didactic-astronomical poetry. That is, it belongs to a genre of poetry that he already finds in Hesiod.his oldest teacher, and who had notable practitioners in the ancient world. As in Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Aratus’s scholarly poem about the sky beats a religious emotion and a Stoic philosophical worldview, while a polychrome and refined mythology flashes in his images. It is a magnificent and picturesque sample of that Alexandrian poetry loaded with erudition and, on the other hand, supported by a solid astronomical knowledge, in vogue in its time. It is a poetry with an archaic and Homeric poetic vocabulary, but, at the same time, innovative within that epic language of such a long tradition, by introducing expressions very of its time and its cosmic vision. It has elicited numerous comments throughout history. It was translated into Latin repeatedly and by illustrious authors (Marco Tulio Cicerón, Varrón, Atacino, Ovidio, and Avieno). Its prestige survived in the High Middle Ages in the very curious Aratus Latinus from the Merovingian period. It was a widely read text in the Renaissance.
Work
Comment on: The phenomena of Aratus
phenomena
The classical constellations are described in detail for the first time in Western culture in the work Phenomena (Φαινόμενα) by Arato de Soloi (also Solos: city of Cilicia, on the southern coast of Anatolia). Aratus, or Aratos in Greek, lived from 310 BC to 240 BC, approximately. He studied in Athens under the tutelage of Zeno de Citieus, the founder of the Stoic school. He was a deep connoisseur of the work of Hesiod and Homer, and wrote a version of the Iliad and another of the Odyssey. Apparently it was at the court of the Macedonian king Antígono II Gonatas (276-239 BC) where he composed this work commissioned by the monarch between 274-276 BC It is an astronomical poem with 1154 hexameters in the Latin version of Germanicus.
The Phenomena is a very descriptive work, where apart from citing the constellations, Aratus describes various meteorological phenomena and the divisions of the celestial sphere. It is assumed that Aratus was based on (perhaps simply copied) on similar earlier works, specifically the Mirror (Kátoptron) by Eudoxus of Cnidos (city of Caria, also on the southern coast of Anatolia), written around 370 BC. Unfortunately, the work of Eudoxus has not reached us directly, with which it is impossible to know which parts of Phenomena are due to Aratus, and which to Eudoxus (or other previous authors). From the criticisms that Aratus received from other classical authors (Hipparchus) who knew the work of Eudoxus it is inferred that most of his work was original. Anyway, from a practical point of view, and although it is a bit unfair to the figure of Eudoxus, we must consider the Phenomena as the first classic work to describe the western constellations. However, a careful analysis of this work reveals that Aratus did not describe several constellations that were visible in his time, as is the case of the star Canopus, the second brightest in the sky, but he did include stars and constellations that were difficult to see from its latitude.
This discrepancy can be explained if we take into account the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes, the spinning movement of the earth’s axis, and we assume that the constellations of Aratus were previously described. To pinpoint the date and place, several studies have been made, the most famous of which is that of Michael Ovenden (see). Studying the shape of the constellations described by Aratus, we can see that there is a ” since the constellations of the Phenomena may have been created in different periods of time and in different places. In any case, and although the exact date of creation of these constellations is still being debated today, it is clear that the work points to an earlier origin.
The Phenomena was one of the most popular works of antiquity, translated into Latin by various authors, among which Germánico (nephew of the Emperor Tiberius), Varro (also author of Disciplinarum libri, where he addresses astronomical issues), Avieno, Cicero, stands out. the Emperor Gordian I or the poet Ovid, who would say “Arato will always live with the Sun and the Moon” (Amores I: 15,16). Another author influenced by Aratus was Geminus (1st century BC), of whom it is unknown whether he was Greek or Roman, who wrote Introduction to the Phenomena. This tremendous popularity in classical and medieval times contrasts with how little known his figure is today, perhaps because both astronomers and astrologers prefer to refer to the works of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus or Ptolemy, lacking these divergences with the current constellations it contains. the work of Arato. It is precisely this popularity and the enormous number of versions of this work, many of different origins, that allow us to be sure of the authenticity of this work.
