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"The Phaenomena is a didactic epic poem modelled on Hesiod's Works and Days and cleverly updated to appeal to contemporary readers interested in new trends in Greek poetry, philosophy and science. Aratus invokes a beneficent Stoic Zeus who has created the constellations and their movements to help men follow the progress of the solar year, and also provides a great variety of signs in sky, air, earth and sea as warnings of weather changes." "This volume presents for the first time in English an edition of the poem with a full introduction, a facing translation and a line by line commentary. The introduction explains the literary and scientific background, the characteristic features of Aratus' language, style and metre, and the transmission of the text to the end of the Middle Ages. The commentary gives help with the content of the poem and aims to discuss and resolve the many problems of text and interpretation caused by Aratus' innovative use of language. The text is based on a new reading of the MSS, including one not used before."--BOOK JACKET.
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'Athena seized the writhing serpent and hurled it into the sky, and fixed it to the very pole of the heavens.' The constellations we recognize today were first mapped by the ancient Greeks, who arranged the stars into patterns for that purpose. In the third century BC Eratosthenes compiled a handbook of astral mythology in which the constellations were associated with figures from legend, and myths were provided to explain how each person, creature, or object came to be placed in the sky. Thus we can see Heracles killing the Dragon, and Perseus slaying the sea-monster to save Andromeda; Orion chases the seven maidens transformed by Zeus into the Pleiades, and Aries, the golden ram, is identi...
The astronomical material in Ovid's Fasti has been overlooked. It is this material which is the subject of this book.
Germanicus Caesar's translation of Aratus's celebrated astronomical poem, Phaenomena, is crucial for the study of the poetics of Latin translation. Building on the foundation of translation studies, Translating the Heavens investigates how Germanicus rewrote the Phaenomena as an Augustan aetiological poem that subverts the religious and philosophical themes of the original. In Germanicus's version the map of heaven becomes an Ovidian firmament of love and transformation. Translating the Heavens shows that the poetics of Latin translation far surpasses in complexity and sophistication the conventional notion of the translator as an interlingual scribe who mechanically substitutes the words of one language for the words of another.