SOURCE: Bulloch, A. W. “Hellenistic Poetry: Minor Figures.” In The Cambridge History of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature, edited by P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox, pp. 598-621. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Bulloch recounts what is known of Aratus's life and writings.

Apollonius' Argonautica is the only narrative epic to have survived intact from the Hellenistic period, and the only other major examples of epic hexameter writing are poems in the didactic tradition by Aratus and Nicander. The biographies of both authors are uncertain, but about Aratus we can make some reasonable inferences. He seems to have been a near contemporary of Callimachus, probably (at any rate according to most of our sources) rather older; he came from Soli in Cilicia and went, apparently after a period in Athens, to live and work in Pella, Macedonia, at the court of Antigonus Gonatas...