Housman's edition did not win new readers for Manilius' poem, to say the least. Manilius' Astronomica is the text that Housman edited over a period of many years and dedicated to Moses Jackson, a friend from school that Housman never got over. Unknown as Manilius is, I suspect that many of you have heard his name recently, in the Tom Stoppard play The Invention of Love, about the life of A. There has been some good European scholarship on Manilius in recent years, especially by Italian scholars, but in English there is still no book-length study. There are several reasons for this, but certainly one reason lies in the nineteenth and twentieth century view of astrology as "pseudo-science" and an embarrassing blemish on the faces of our classical forebears, whose images were to be kept as shiny and clean as possible. Greatly admired by such modern figures as Goethe and Leibniz, the Astronomica is a poem that literally almost no one reads today, not even specialists in Latin literature. Its title is Astronomica, and it was written in the first and second decades of the first century of our era by a poet named Marcus Manilius, of whose life we know nothing whatsoever. The poem is a didactic (instructional) work on astrology. Y main focus will be on an ancient Roman long poem and a set of questions surrounding it. Astrology in Ancient Rome: Poetry, Prophecy and Power by David Wray
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