SOURCE: Sale, William. “The Popularity of Aratus.” Classical Journal 61, no. 4 (January 1966): 160-64.

In the following essay, Sale explores the reputation of Aratus's Phaenomena, discussing the work as a guide to the stars, an astrologer's handbook, and a poetic blend of science and Stoicism.

One of the tasks which any historian of Hellenistic literature must look upon as providing a definition of the term “thankless” is to explain why the Phaenomena of Aratus, which seems in most of its parts tedious, was so enormously popular from the third century b.c. until at least the fourth of our era. That it was popular cannot be gainsaid. The polymath Eratosthenes, given the sobriquet “Beta” by unkind contemporaries to underline his status in their eyes as someone second best at everything, included among his manifold activities the production of an ancilla to Aratus; the astronomer Hipparchus was so alarmed at the...