HEAVENLY AND EARTHLY ELEMENTS IN MANILIUS'ASTRONOMICA

Abstract

Mud and stars make a strange mixture, yet here in brief is Manilius' universe, in which the rarefied heavens regulate the coarse earth. As shown by the recent spate of critical attention to theAstronomica, his various intellectual resources—astronomical calculation, mythology, astrological lore and Stoic physics—, while not forming a unified dogma, are less muddled than previously thought. He switches between these different discourses (or as it were, idioms) in pursuit of his own cherished goal: an optimistic eulogy to a fatalistic cosmos in which the study of the heavens holds supreme interest and value. Manilius' discipline is the most specialised and mathematical, as well as the most novel, of all Roman didactic poets. He therefore takes a decidedly concrete approach to the inevitable balancing act between technical content and poetic form, as is immediately obvious in his self-portrait as a priest-poetuatestending the twin altar-fires of poem and subject (carminis et rerum, 1.22). The proposal of this paper will be that the division between poetic and technical corresponds far more profoundly with Manilius' dualistic universe (mundus), in which the realm of the hierophantic astronomer and natural philosopher is the sky (caelum) and that of the mythological poet is the earth (terra). Likewise, the constellations are both cosmic stars (stellae) and mythic signs (signa). Because the cosmos is a dynamic system, terrestrial inconstancy—violence, mortality and mess of all kinds—interferes with the absolute constancy of the celestial clockwork. The paradigm for such interference is catasterism, the translation of something mortal into stars. It turns the constellations into duck-rabbits: from one perspective they are eternal parts in the machinery of fate; from the other, vestiges of mortal beings or objects, which are often of dubious and even monstrous provenance. In this article I propose that Manilius' fundamental view is that the stars represent order and the earth chaos, a conviction partly expressed through Stoic doctrine and partly through poetic tropes. He frequently uses the imagery of the four elements to divide the superior realm of air and fire from the inferior realm of water and earth. Significant themes contributing towards this include Gigantomachy, cosmic vapours, the planets, and the figure of the Whale (Cetus) in the Andromeda story near the close of the poem.