Recently in the pages of The Classical Quarterly Mathias Hanses convincingly demonstrated the existence of a fourth occurrence of the programmatic adjective λεπτός in Aratus, Phaen. 783–7. This new example occurs in the form of a diagonal acrostic alongside the known ‘gamma-acrostic’ and the occurrence of the same form of the adjective in line 784. Jerzy Danielewicz has now proposed yet a fifth instance of λεπτή in the form of an acronym spread over two lines and meant to be read (...) anticlockwise. (shrink)

Aratus has been notorious for his wordplay since the first decades of his reception. Hellenistic readers such as Callimachus, Leonidas, or ‘King Ptolemy’ seem to have picked up on the pun on the author's own name atPhaenomena2, as well as on the famous λεπτή acrostic atPhaen.783–6 that will be revisited here. Three carefully placed occurrences of the adjective have so far been uncovered in the passage, but for a full appreciation of its elegance we must note that Aratus has set (...) his readers up to notice a fourth. (shrink)

The dating of Manilius' Astronomica and of the Aratea attributed to Germanicus are both long-standing problems of Latin scholarship. The large number of significant correspondences between the two poems suggests a considerable degree of imitation and allusion one way or the other, but it is widely agreed that the internal evidence of the poems can shed no light on the direction of the influence. I would like to present a new observation, however, suggesting that the Aratea was already available to (...) Manilius in some form by the time he came to compose his first book. (shrink)