Manilius: Poetry & Science after Vergil
by Mary Pendergraft, Wake Forest University
Original text © 2001 Mary Pendergraft
My earliest acquaintance with Manilius came through a text only vaguely classical: E.C. Bentley's parody of Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night. In this short story Lord Peter Wimsey visits Oxford to investigate a murder; strolling by night through the quad he encounters a young man sitting on "an obese volume on the gravel." With alacrity and courtesy the student offers the detective his seat: "Won't you sit down, sir? Not enough room for two, I'm afraid, even on Liddell and Scott." He explains that after the general rowdiness following the Aquinas dinner, he had been…
"just sitting here for rest and meditation. D'you ever meditate?"
"Oh, often," said Wimsey--the passage continues -- "What were you thinking of mediating upon this time?"
"Housman's edition of Manilius," the young man answered, abstractedly removing his collar and tie. "Wonderful chap--Housman, I mean; Manilius was rather a blister. The way Housman pastes the other commentators in the slats does your heart good. I was just concentrating on the way he kicks the stuffing out of Elias Stöber--lovely!" [E. C. Bentley, “Greedy Night,” reprinted from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in Dorothy L. Sayers: Lord Peter, ed. James Sandoe (NY 1972).]
When I came to read parts of the Astronomica and Housman’s prefaces, I shared the sentiments of this fictional Oxford student, finding the wit and point of A.E.'s malicious judgments on other textual critics, if not lovely, then at least worth remembering and repeating. Manilius, on the other hand, often does seem "rather a blister." I never imagined that I would do what I'm prepared to do today, to urge that Manilius' Astronomica can be a useful, interesting, and even pleasurable supplement to many a class of Roman poetry—say, for a Vergil class in the weeks remaining after the AP exam. For example, this poems offers a reason to discuss the role of astrology in the Roman world and its importance in the Stoic philosophical system. It offers as well an opportunity to consider the continuing vitality of the poetic tradition, for Manilius uses his didactic verse to engage in polemic with the atomistic doctrines of Lucretius, and extends his evocation of Vergil to express of his own convictions. Perhaps this is the most valuable thing such an exercise can offer, for the comparison Manilius invites his reader to make between his poem and its Vergilian models brings into relief particularly Vergilian characteristics. Clearly I can’t say all that I’d like to in 20 minutes, so I’ve included a rudimentary bibliography in case you want to pursue any of these ideas.
About Marcus Manilius, the man so far known only as a blister, we know nothing beyond his authorship of a single poem, the Astronomica, and a few fragments. About the poem's date and composition we have no external information, beyond echoes in later literature, including one pair of lines that appears as an epitaph. Internal cues for dating are few: a reference to the disastrous defeat of Varus at the Teutoberg Forest puts Book I after AD 9; its dedication to Augustus suggests a date in the emperor's lifetime. But references in book 4 point to Tiberius' reign--thus no earlier than 14 AD.
The hexameter poem fills five books, ranging in length from 650 to nearly 1000 lines, for a total of about 4500 lines. Its style is highly rhetorical, strongly influenced by Ovid; Manilius clearly delights in the challenges his subject presents, topics like a description of the stars in the night sky, the planets and their paths, the circles of the celestial sphere, and particularly the zodiac and its constellations, the twelve signs.
Manilian studies have burgeoned in the last twenty-five years; while we may find the poet's "versified sums" (a Housmanian phrases) tedious, we can no longer, like Bentley's student, dismiss him in a single word. The appearance of George P. Goold's Loeb edition in 1977, with its helpful introductions, charts, and English translation, made the Astronomica accessible to a wider audience; this volume has been followed by a second edition and by a Teubner text also edited by Goold. Renewed attention to the poem began to bear fruit in the early ‘80’s when the bibliography started to expand dramatically—some representative items are included in the bibliography; the number of English-language works is small. Specific studies have addressed Manilius' allusions to and borrowings from earlier poets, his influence in the Middle Ages, the evidence for his ideological leanings, and (brand new) his use of similes. As we gain access to more examples of astrological texts for comparison, we find that Manilius' science has close parallels in other sources.
And we must overcome our reluctance to consider his astrology as science, at least in the context of the ancient world and its understanding of a spherical, earth-centered universe. Ancient astrology relied heavily on mathematical models and it reflected the most up-to-date astronomical theory, which in turn depended on a fund of observational data. Claudius Ptolemy himself, after all, wrote not only Almagest--the great treatise on astronomy whose view of the universe was dominant until the Renaissance--but also Tetrabiblos, four books on astrological methods and their philosophical basis.
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