An Echo of Manilius’S Astronomica in Abraham Cowley’s Davideis

Abstract

In Book III of Abraham Cowley’s biblical epic Davideis, there is a previously unremarked echo of the Astronomica, a didactic epic by the ancient Roman Stoic poet Manilius. Cowley never finished writing Davideis, and the Preface to his 1656 Poems, where he first published it, states that he had ‘neither Leisure hitherto, nor … Appetite at present to finish the work, or so much as to revise that part which is done with that care which [he] resolved to bestow upon it, and which the Dignity of the Matter well deserves’.1 It has sometimes been suggested that his struggles to complete Davideis were related to his process of adding exhaustive endnotes to the poem.2 However, although Cowley’s own endnotes list many of his sources and models for Davideis, they do not draw readers’ attention to his echo of Manilius in Book III, which...