Re: Appreciation of a different era: Poetry and Philosophy in the Phaenomena of Aratus


oriel36 wrote:

> Nobody would believe that clockmakers don't know the time it takes the
> Earth to turn on its axis and are out by 3 minutes 56 seconds per day
> when they do give it.How embarrassing for our race !!. Do you get some
> perverse satisfaction from be silly ?.

Please go back to school:

For the Stoics, the universe (kósmos) is order (kósmos). The word
re-echoes through Cleanthes' hymn[23]. The earliest poets too were
believed to have written about the development of the universe, and
'cosmogony' was generally held to be the first subject of poetry[24].
It is, for example, the subject of the first song of Orpheus,
traditionally the first poet[25], in the Argonautica of Apollonius, an
epic poem probably composed not long after the Phainomena. Aratus' poem
is not cosmogonical in the true sense, but it is certainly
cosmological, and to this extent Aratus evokes the originary voice of
the archaic theológos, 'speaker about the gods', while writing in a
very new mode. Similar literary combinations abound in the poetry of
the third century. Moreover, from a very early date, notions of kósmos
were closely bound up with the idea of poetry and, particularly, truth
in poetry.

In a famous passage of Odyssey 8, Odysseus praises the Phaeacian bard
Demodocus:

'Demodocus, I admire you beyond any man; either it was the Muse who
taught you, daughter of Zeus himself, or else it was Apollo. With what
utter rightness (katà kósmon) you sing of the fortunes of the
Achaeans ? all they achieved and suffered and toiled over ? as
though you yourself were there or had talked with one who was! Come,
change now to a later theme ? the wooden horse and its fashioning
(kósmon)... If you recount all this for me in the fashion it deserves
(katà moîran), then I will tell the world forthwith how the god has
blessed you ungrudgingly with the gift of inspired song'. (Od. 8.
487-98, trans. W. Shewring)

The notion of kósmos in this passage has been much discussed[26], but
'proper order' and 'sequence' are certainly of primary importance, as
they are also in the phrase katà moîran, literally 'part for part'.
This is even clearer in the following passage from the Homeric Hymn to
Hermes in which the young god first sings for Apollo:

'He sang of the immortal gods and the dark earth, how they came to
be in the first place and how each one was allotted his portion
(moîra). First of the gods he honoured Mnemosyne in his song, the
mother of the Muses, for she had received the son of Maia in her share.
Then the glorious son of Zeus hymned the immortal gods according to
their age and he told how each was born; he told everything in due
order (katà kósmon) as he played the lyre in his arm'. (vv. 427-33)

Here, again in an originating cosmogony, the young god sings first of
the division (moîra) of powers, and then of each god in turn, katà
kósmon. Notions of partition and of sequential order are of course
very closely related, and as the passage from Odyssey 8 suggests, it is
in that proper sequential order that the guarantee of truth lies[27].
These guarantees are a result of the sense that the kósmos of the song
reflects the kósmos of the 'real world'. This has been well described
by George Walsh: 'kósmos ... an order of the world to which song must
correspond as representation ... kósmos in the song and kósmos of the
world should not differ. The song viewed as an articulation of parts
stands for one viewed as a representation of serially ordered facts,
for the true song must reflect the world's articulation with its
own'[28]. In singing of the stars and of nature ? for the Stoic a
perfectly ordered kósmos ? Aratus' poem is its own guarantee of
truth. A poem 'about the kósmos' must be a poem katà kósmon.
Moreover, in the Works and Days Aratus had an authorising model which
also foregrounded order and sequence, as Hesiod sets out for us the
passage of the year.

The centrality of kósmos in its manifold senses sheds particular light
on two important passages of the Phainomena. The first is the acrostic
passage discovered by J.-M. Jacques (Phain. 783-7)[29]:

If the moon is thin and her light pure on the third day, there will
be fine weather; if thin and her light very red, there will be wind;
if, however, she is on the large side and her horns are dull and her
light weak on the third and fourth nights, she is being dulled by the
approach of the South Wind or of rain.

Some years after Jacques' article, W. Levitan [30] identified a further
acrostic in the same area of the poem (vv. 803-6 pâsa) and, more
tentatively, a third (partial) acrostic immediately afterwards (vv.
808-12 semee, suggesting sêma and cognate verbs); recently, Michael
Haslam has refined Levitan's insight by noting mése, 'mid-way', split
between the openings of vv. 807-8[31]. Whereas Jacques and others [32]
connected the lepté acrostic solely with the famous leptótes of
'Callimachean' poetry, i.e. had seen it as imitation of Homer (cf.
Iliad 24.1-5) and a programmatic marker of style and nothing more,
Levitan rightly sought to make sense of it in terms of the central
concerns of the poem. He noted that it followed very closely upon a
passage which seems to invite us to look for such things (Phain.
768-72)[33] :

For not yet does Zeus allow us to know all things, but much remains
hidden; if he wishes, Zeus will grant us this too presently, for he
openly brings aid to the race of mortals, appearing on every side, and
everywhere revealing his signs.

Moreover, the successful searching out of acrostic patterns recreates
the activity of the anonymous 'discoverer' of the constellations who
perceived the usefulness of joining together those stars which would
make meaningful figures (vv. 373-82)[34]. Just as this 'discoverer'
revealed patterns which had always been there, and were 'put there by
god', so a reader discovers meaningful 'signs' in the apparent
randomness of the first letters of a succession of hexameters. The
notion of kósmos now allows us to carry Levitan's important insight
further. The words which are used to describe the heavenly bodies ?
leptós 'fine', katharós 'pure' (e.g. 383, 783) pach?ys 'fat' ?
seem to have been used as descriptions of poetic style in contemporary
literary debate; this is most famously attested in the literary
polemics of Callimachus[35]. By this device, poetry and its subject are
seen to be symmetrical, illustrating the reciprocal kósmos which I
have already discussed. Even if we wish to deny that Aratus' choice of
language carries a programmatic charge in the context of contemporary
poetry, ? and both chronology and a dearth of other comparative
evidence make the matter at best uncertain[36] ?, the acrostic shows
us how the pattern of the universe is reflected in the pattern of the
poem. The stars are literally in the poem, and vice versa. Manilius too
employs a related strategy in his Astronomica, a massive Stoic poem in
which the regularity of heavenly movements is a central theme and in
which there is an important, if shifting, relationship between the ordo
visible in the skies and the ordo inscribed by the poet in his poem.

The second passage which I wish to discuss under this head is Aratus'
explicit refusal to give an account of the planets. The passage forms a
transition between the description of the individual fixed stars and
that of the four celestial circles (Phain. 454-61):

Mixed with them are five other stars, in no way like them as they
whirl all through the twelve figures [of the Zodiac]. Not by looking at
other stars could you mark the paths of these, since all move about.
Long are the periods of their revolutions, and very far apart the signs
of their conjunctions[37]. Of them I have no longer confidence: may I
be competent to tell of the circles of the fixed stars and the signs in
heaven.

In this praeteritio Aratus alludes to a notoriously difficult
astronomical problem[38], the discussion of which would certainly not
be in keeping with the style and level of the rest of the poem. There
is, of course, no reason to see here a serious and rather embarrassing
admission of astronomical incompetence[39]: the planets (excluding the
sun and the moon) are not in fact relevant to an account of star- and
weather- signs intended (at least notionally) to be of use to farmers
and sailors[40]. This, however, does not explain why Aratus chose to
call attention to his 'omission' in such a prominent and striking way.
Part at least of the explanation, I suggest, lies in the notion of
kósmos. Although the planets are, of course, as much a part of the
universe as are the fixed stars ? indeed they are much more
influential 'signs' according to certain ancient views ? Aratus
stresses their 'uncertainty' in order to emphasise the fixed certainty
of what he actually does describe. Put very loosely, the planets lack
kósmos.

The passage on the planets is introduced by verses which stress eternal
and regular recurrence in the face of moving time (Phain. 451-3):

These stars you can see returning in orderly succession as the
years pass, for all these images are very firmly fixed in the heaven
through the moving night.

You cannot, however, use the other stars to find the planets because
the latter are all metanástai, 'vagrants'. Not only can the poet and
his readers not be 'confident' (v. 460) where to look to see the
planets, but the same verse also suggests that they are not the kind of
signs which inspire confidence that we can read them[41]. We may
compare vv. 1142-4 where we are told that the congruence of two
weather-signs brings 'hope' (elporé) and of three 'confidence'
(thársos). It is, after all, god's benevolence that both gives us
signs and allows us to read them and to act upon our reading.
Confidence comes from the repeated pattern (kósmos) of successful
'sign-reading'; in this, the argument runs, the planets fail us. Such
an interpretation anchors the passage firmly within the limited bounds
of Aratus' 'didactic program'; poets, after all, only use an explicit
praeteritio for subjects they do not wish to pass by. It is striking
that in his 'Hymn to Zeus' Cleanthes too contrasts the fixed kósmos of
nature with the mad changeablilty and rush of the kakoí, the 'bad
men':

' [Reason, logos] is shunned and neglected by the bad among mortal
men, the wretched, who ever yearn for the possession of goods yet
neither see nor hear god's universal law, by obeying which they could
lead a good life in partnership with intelligence. Instead, devoid of
intelligence, they rush into this evil or that, some in their
belligerent quest for fame, others with an unbridled bent for
acquisition, others for leisure and the pleasurable acts of the body
.... <But all that they achieve is evils,> despite travelling hither and
thither in burning quest of the opposite. (Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus
22-31, trans. Long & Sedley)

The kakoí are, of course, very different from Aratus' planets, but the
two play structurally related roles in their respective poems; both
carry the rejected weight of change and disorder. For an astronomer,
the difficulty of explaining the movement of the planets was not a
serious threat to the idea of an ordered universe, but within the
rhetoric of his poem Aratus gives their 'quirkiness' a particular
importance.

Finally, the passage on the planets also finds an instructive parallel
in the archaic poem which we have seen to be central for the
Phainomena, namely Hesiod's Works and Days. The catalogue of 'days'
concludes with a brief glance at the days which have not been mentioned
(WD 822-5, trans. M.L. West):

These are the days that are of great benefit for men on earth. The
rest are days of changeable omen, doomless, with nothing to offer.
Different people commend different sorts of day, but few know that
among those ones 'sometimes a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother'
..

Interpretation of these verses is disputed, but there seems to be a
central contrast between days about which something certain can be
said, i.e. the days of Hesiod's catalogue (vv. 768-81), and days which
'give an uncertain sound', which may turn out good or bad, and are
therefore not suitable material for 'didactic poetry'. Hesiod's poem
ends (WD 826-8) with an affirmation of the power of knowledge to
overcome uncertainty, an uncertainty that is a central principle of
men's lives (WD 483-4). That knowledge, and the power to offer it to
others, is precisely what the poet claims for himself[42]. Aratus' poem
carries this claim further by eliminating uncertainty not only from the
poem, but also from the world itself.

quoted from Written in the Stars: Poetry and Philosophy in the
Phaenomena of Aratus

http://www.cisi.unito.it/arachne/num2/hunter.html#par2

.

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