Aratus: Phaenomena

by Aratus, Douglas Kidd

Overview

Aratus of Soli was a highly original poet of the early third century BC, famous throughout antiquity for his poem on constellations and weather signs, and imitated by later Greek and Latin poets. 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 text is based on a new reading of the manuscripts, including one not used before. The work provides a valuable basis for further research on Aratus and on Hellenistic poetry in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521582308
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/14/1997
Series:	Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries , #34
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.82(h) x 1.89(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: 1. Life of Aratus; 2. The Phaenomena; 3. The astronomy and weather signs; 4. Language, style and the hexameter; 5. Contemporary and later poets; 6. Scholia and commentators; 7. Text and manuscripts; Text and Translation; Commentary; Indexes.

Editorial Reviews

"...Kidd has produced a fine work of scholarship...." Robert Renehan, Religious Studies Review

"Kidd's text will now be the standard. It is the product of a critical judgment that consistently makes the right choices in that most difficult of textual traditions....the commentary is so rich and detailed and illuminates so much....one can only be filled with admiration and graditude for the painstaking scholarship and devotion that went into the making of this book....Kidd's book is the true editio princeps of Aratus's Paenomena, five hundred years overdue, which at long las t give us our author pristino nitori restitutus." Mark Possanza, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"Kidd's edition, however, is obviously the result of a long labor, and it promises to have a long life as the definitive work on this important, but neglected, poem." —Phoenix, A.-M. Lewis, Dept. of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics York University

From the Publisher