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ART. III.-The Phenomena and Diosemeia of Aratus, translated into English Verse; with Notes. By JOHN LAMB, D.D., Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Dean of Bristol. London: John W. Parker, West Strand.

1848.

THE poets tell us that the setting sun, before his total disappearance in the western waters, casts one bright glance expressive of his regret at leaving a world so beautiful as our own. This poetical description of the sunset is applicable to the literature of ancient Greece in its decline and decay.

The literary glory of Athens was fast disappearing. The voice of the orators who had once 'wielded at will the fierce democratie,' was no longer heard fulminating in the Pnyx. The soccus of Aristophanes, and the Sophoclean cothurnus, but ill became their degenerate successors. The olive groves of Academus, once the retirement of the almost inspired Plato, resounded only to the lectures of a Polemo and a Crantor; while of all the pupils of the Stagyrite, Theophrastus alone had succeeded to some portion of his master's genius.

In a period so devoid of literary talent, it was the good fortune of one of Alexander's ablest generals to become possessed of a kingdom beyond all others adapted for the arts of peace. Bounded by the Mediterranean on the north, and communicating with the Asiatic continent by a narrow isthmus only, Egypt, secure in its position, had little to fear from the only nations which were likely to disturb its repose; and the Ptolemean or Lagian dynasty was thus enabled in a great measure to keep clear of the jealousies and quarrels which distracted the other provinces of the disjointed Macedonian empire. The fertile soil and mild climate of Egypt also produced the necessaries and comforts of life in such profusion, as rendered its inhabitants entirely independent of other nations; while advantages rarely to be met with were presented to those, especially to the Greeks, who were desirous to settle on its shores. In a position so favoured, the first Ptolemy, when secured in the undisturbed possession of his throne, devoted all his energies to the development of the resources and promotion of the prosperity of his kingdom. Under his wise government, Alexandria became, as the conqueror from whom it derived its name anticipated, the first commercial city in the world. Ptolemy Soter was also a great patron of learning; he invited Theophrastus and Demetrius Phalereus to his court, and collected materials for the great library which was established by his son.

But it was reserved for Ptolemy Philadelphus to make Alexandria the great seat of learning, as his predecessor had made it the chief emporium, of the civilized world. He was the first monarch in history who took the muses under his especial patronage, or thought that the encouragement of learning was likely to procure him as lasting a fame as the pursuit of arms or the promulgation of laws. He offered such inducements to men of learning, of whatever nation, to settle at Alexandria, that his capital soon became the great focus of literature, rivalling in some degree the ancient glory of Athens itself.

It was under his auspices that the first translation of the Hebrew Bible was made. At his court did Manetho, the priest of Sebennytus, record his country's history in the language he had himself adopted. Here, too, did Theocritus, with a truthfulness of feeling never surpassed, sing of his shepherds and their loves, while Callimachus chanted his hymns in honour of the gods, in Homeric strain. Here, too, Lycophron enveloped in darkness the prophecy of his Cassandra, making that inspired maiden the vehicle for the display of his own erudition. Rather later than these lived Apollonius Rhodius, the only extant Greek epic poet except Homer, and the pedantic Colophonian, Nicander, whose works, on poisons and their cure, present no attractions except to those who pursue the study of zoological or medicinal antiquities.

Such were the greater stars, amidst a host of lesser fires, at the revival of learning under the Ptolemies. It was, however, but a struggle of light with darkness-a transition state between day and night. With the splendid exception of Theocritus, originality of genius they had none; they followed in the wake (sed longo intervallo) of the earlier poets, and endeavoured to reflect their borrowed light, expanding their ideas, but at the same time weakening their force; adopting their language as far as they understood it, and imitating, without attaining to, their flow and cadence. Compared with their predecessors, they show in somewhat of the same light (humanly speaking) that the Apocryphal authors of Judith' and 'Bel and the Dragon' do, when contrasted with the inspired authors of Ruth, and Esther, and the prophet Daniel; and their works are as inferior to those of the earlier poets as the Wisdom of Solomon' is to the Proverbs of the veritable king of Israel. It is to the poets of this era that Aratus belongs; and we shall find that his merits and defects are very much of the same stamp as the writers we have alluded to.

Aratus was born at Soli, a city of Cilicia, and flourished about 270 B.C. It was in all probability the neighbourhood of their respective birth-places, Soli and Tarsus, that made St.

Paul so familiar with Aratus. Our poet completed his education under Perseus the Stoic, at Athens. At the invitation of Antigonus Gonatas, he accompanied his tutor to the Macedonian Court, where he seems to have been taken into favour, and to have filled an office somewhat resembling that of our poet laureate, until his death. It seems that Eudoxus, the astronomer, had about a century before published in prose, a work he called 'Phenomena;' and that Aratus, in accordance with the request of his royal patron, engaged to clothe this work in a political garb. Such is the generation of the greater poem at Aratus, to which he appended a smaller one of 422 verses, termed the Diosemeia, or Prognostica,' which is said to have been derived almost entirely from lost works of Aristotle and Theophrastus.

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In respect to the subject of his greater poem, the most ardent admirers of Aratus can challenge no more originality for it than we could for a metrical version of Newton's Principia,' or a poetical Euclid. He was set, we know not for what crime or misdemeanour, as an exercise, by his patron Antigonus, to turn a given subject into Homeric verse; and a most difficult and disagreeable task it must have proved.

We all know that, from the time of the patriarch Job and the poet Homer, the stars visible to the naked eye have been grouped into constellations; that is to say, tortured into various forms, figures of men and figures of animals, things animate and inanimate, things possible and impossible. The sprightly imagination of the Greeks was not long before it had adapted to each constellation a myth or story, and in some cases more than one, which poetically explained the cause of its mysterious exaltation.

And this system carries with it certainly this advantage, at least in modern times, that it renders the study of sidereal astronomy, i. e. the study of the celestial globe, peculiarly attractive to boys at the first school,' and ladies of tender years. The artistic representations of lions and dragons, and flying horses, and bears (especially those with dogs' tails), excite the curiosity and please the fancy; and we ourselves well remember the delight we felt when examining Taurus to find the right ascension of Aldebaran, and the admiration with which we gazed on the supernatural outlines of Capricorn and Cetus. It, however, unfortunately happens that the system, however alluring to the sucking astronomer, labours under considerable disadvantages. Men of science have been long agreed that scarcely could a worse method have been devised for the purposes of modern astronomy. The boundaries of constellations are illdefined, the descriptions of catalogues clash together; some constellations have made raids upon portions of others, just as in counties there are isolated portions which are component parts of other counties with which they are apparently disconnected. Some

catalogue stars never existed, or owe their creation to a wrong entry, or a mistake in reading an instrument. All this is so manifestly wrong, as well as inconvenient, that Sir J. Herschel has proposed a plan for the reconstruction of the southern hemisphere, and recommended that the same course be pursued with the northern.

But our poor bard is certainly not responsible for the inconveniences the ancient classification of the stars presents to modern astronomers; enough for him are his own unavoidable misfortunes-that the ruthless tyrant should have forced him to describe these constellations in verse. We must take care to entertain a proper idea of the undertaking. The Cilician poet had not to describe the appearance of the heaven by night, its magnificent arch, its starry mosaic, or all its other inimitable paraphernalia; nor had he, like Ovid in his Fasti, the privilege of narrating the origin of each constellation, to move our tears by his description of the forsaken Ariadne, or excite our sympathy for the unhappy minstrel Arion. A far more unpoetical province fell to Aratus' lot. The heavens had been mapped, and arbitrarily arranged into such and such forms; Aratus had to take these figures for granted, however incongruous or startling they might appear, and enumerate the stars which made up the imaginary outlines; to trace out the family group of the starred Ethiop queen,' which affectionately included her husband, her daughter, her son-in-law and his steed; to record the stars which formed the belt of Orion, the paw of the Lion, and the muzzle of the Bear.

The plan of the Phenomena is exceedingly simple. The poet, like Hesiod in his Works and Days,' and in conformity to the laudable practice of the Homeric Rhapsodists,' commences with the praises of Zeus-the source of all power, the cause of all good, the only omniscient and omnipresent deity, from whom all are descended-who has most especially shown his beneficence to mankind by appointing the stars to advertise them of seed-time and harvest, and to guide them in all their agricultural labours. Then, after a parenthetical, and, we must say, rather peremptory summons to the Muse-without whose aid what poet from Homer to Byron durst adventure upon his task ?-— he commences his work in sober earnest. He describes the heavens as revolving on a fixed axis-of which one extremity (the North Pole) is visible, and the other (the South Pole) is invisible-around the earth poised in the centre. He then, with great skill as well as patience, gives us representations of the Bears, the Dragon, the Virgin, and other constellations of the northern hemisphere, describing their positions with respect to

1 Cf. Pind. Nem. ii. initio.

the principal groups. His landmarks in the southern hemisphere are the Argo and Orion. Sometimes the mythical account of the origin of the constellation is given, at other times omitted. Descriptions of tempests and other effects, supposed to arise from certain phases of celestial phenomena of a highly poetical character, are interwoven with the narrative.

Having exhausted this apparently inexhaustible subject, he laments the non-classification of certain stars in the south hemisphere between Argo and Cetus; in which lament his readers will probably not sympathise. He then proceeds to speak of the five other wandering fires' (as Herschel and Adams had not then added two to their numbers), but with great circumspection, for he says, but of these I am not confident.' He intimates that they have a motion of their own, and that the period of their conjunction (according to Plato, the consummation of all things, and the end of time,) is very remote.

He then describes what he conceives to be the most important circles of the heavens: the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the Equator and Ecliptic-all, as he says, invisible: and, lastly, the circle of the Galaxy, or Milky Way, the only one which is visible ! The Phenomena, from v. 560 to the end, treats of the rising and setting of the signs of the Zodiac, in order that mariners, in their nocturnal voyages, might judge of the approach of day; in the absence of chronometers, no doubt a useful piece of information. And the plan is this-Given the knowledge of the sign in which the sun is, and an acquaintance with all the constellations; to determine, from the poet's description of the contemporaneous movements of the heavenly bodies, the nearness or distance of the sun's approach; a problem, to our mind, entirely unnecessary, if the sailors, in the first instance, knew the relative situation of the constellations.

Of the Diosemeia or Prognostics it is unnecessary to say much. Let it suffice that it treats of the advent of fine weather, rain, wind, and storm, from external phenomena; in fact, that it is an unmercurial barometer.

And, first, the moon is pressed into the poet's service. From her colour, and clearness, and dulness, at different periods of her age from the position of her horns with respect to the earth-from the absence or presence of halos, one or more, faint or vivid, unbroken or dissolving, the weather is supposed to be greatly influenced.

But the sun is the great weather almanac. If he be pleased to rise with a clear and broad disc, if he be cloudless when he sets, or sets palely after rain, or encircled with crimson cloudsfine weather is certain. If, when the sun rises, his rays dart north or south, if he be very red at rising, or with a mixture of black and red tints-wind is the inevitable consequence. If his