Cicero’s Astronomy1
Cicero’s Astronomy1
复制标题
西塞罗的天文学1
作者：
E. Gee
Imagine that the only reliable way of telling the time of year was by the stars. The observer would have to know the positions of the constellations and their movements relative to one another, and to be aware of the meteorological phenomena accompanying them. This is the information Aratus’ Phaenomena gives us: the poet maps the position of the stars; he provides a celestial relative chronology; and he explains what sort of weather can be expected to accompany which movement of which constellation. The Julian calendar reform meant that observation of the stars became unnecessary. When the celestial and civil years are in harmony with one another, particular events in the human calendar reliably take place on a certain date in the cosmic year, and a mental database of constellations is no longer needed in order to know when to plant or harvest. In the Roman calendar after 46 B.C., the Parilia, Vinalia, and other agricultural festivals could be relied upon to fall at the correct season for their celebration. Nonetheless, the Romans retained the tradition of celestial relative chronology at least until the fourth century A.D. Roman interest in Aratean celestial chronology begins with Cicero’s Aratea, his translation of Aratus, in the first century B.C., and continues, via Virgil’s use of Aratus for his farmer’s calendar in Book 1 of the Georgics, and Germanicus’ Phaenomena (c. A.D. 17), to Avienus in the fourth century, and into the Middle Ages via the Aratus Latinus. Cicero himself provides clear evidence that Aratean celestial chronology straddled the period of calendar reform: he wrote the Aratea as a youth in c. 89 B.C., about eight years before his first legal case, the Pro Quinctio (81), but quoted it again as a mature philosopher, in the second book of the De Natura Deorum, written in 45 B.C. Balbus, the Stoic speaker in the D.N.D., having quoted a large chunk of the Aratea at 2.104–15 to illustrate the providential arrangement of the stars (see below), may refer shortly afterwards to the calendar reform (2.153):
