SOURCE: Lombardo, Stanley. Introduction to Sky Signs: Aratus's Phaenomena, translated by Stanley Lombardo. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1983, np.

In the following excerpt from the introduction to his translation of the Phaenomena, Lombardo remarks on Aratus's poetic vision and provides a structural outline of the poem.

Aratus' Phaenomena is a semiological celebration of the sky in 1154 Greek hexameters. The sky has not changed much since the time of its publication (c. 270 b.c.) and it may be that the literary climate today is conducive to the revival of a work in which visual signs—celestial, meteorological and verbal—form the very stuff of poetry. The poem certainly did not lack appreciation in antiquity. Numerous ancient commentaries, laudatory epigrams, Latin verse translations (one by Cicero), adaptations, allusions and an exceptionally strong manuscript tradition all attest to the fact that the Phaenomena was one of the most successful poems in...