The poet Aratus was born about 315 B.C. in Soli, a small city near Tarsus on the southeastern coast of Asia Minor in the district known as Cilicia. Because of his birth in Soli, Aratus is sometimes identified as Aratus Solensis or Soleus. When these modifiers are missing, he is occasionally confused with his contemporary, the anti-Macedonian statesman Aratus of Sicyon (271-213 B.C.), who brought his hometown Sicyon, in the northern Peloponnese, into the Achaean Confederacy and about whom Plutarch wrote. Unattributed references to Aratus over the years by various writers have perplexed readers in several fields, including, for example, modern scholars of Herman Melville, who wrote the name "Aratus" in the margin of his copy of the New Testament at Acts 17:28. Confusion has sometimes arisen, too, between Aratus's hometown of Soli in Cilicia and the seaport of the same name on the northern coast of Cyprus...