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Manilius and his Intellectual Background

Online ISBN:
9780191708800
Print ISBN:
9780199265220
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Manilius and his Intellectual Background

Katharina Volk
Katharina Volk
Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Columbia University
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Published online:
1 May 2009
Published in print:
12 February 2009
Online ISBN:
9780191708800
Print ISBN:
9780199265220
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book describes the Latin astrological poet Marcus Manilius. Manilius, about whose life nothing is known, composed his didactic poem Astronomica in the second decade of the 1st century AD. The work is our earliest extant comprehensive treatment of astrology, a discipline developed in Hellenistic Greece under the influence of Near Eastern practices that had become highly fashionable in Rome during the final years of the Republic. Apparently without much impact in his own lifetime and the rest of antiquity, Manilius was rediscovered in the Renaissance and has received numerous editions over the centuries, including by such influential critics as Joseph Scaliger, Richard Bentley, and A. E. Housman. In recent times, however, his work has been largely neglected by classical scholarship. This book explores the manifold intellectual traditions that have gone into shaping the Astronomica: ancient astronomy and cosmology, the history and practice of astrology, the historical and political situation at the poem's composition, the poetic and generic conventions that inform it, and the philosophical underpinnings of Manilius' world-view. What emerges is a panoroma of the cultural imagination of the Early Empire, a fascinating picture of the ways in which educated Greeks and Romans were accustomed to think and speak about the cosmos and man's place in it.

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