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( Aratus)
Aratus (Greek Aratos) (ca. 315 BC/310 BC – 240 BC) was a Greek didactic poet, known for his technical poetry. He was born in Soli in Cilicia and was a contemporary of Callimachus and Theocritus. He is known to have studied with Menecrates in Ephesus and Philitas in Cos. As a disciple of the Peripatetic philosopher Praxiphanes, in Athens, he met the Stoic philosopher Zeno, as well as Callimachus of Cyrene and Menedemus, the founder of the Eretrian School. About 276 he was invited to the court of the Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas, whose victory over the Gauls in 277 BC Aratus set to verse. Here wrote his most famous poem, Phaenomena ("Appearances"). He then spent some time at the court of Antiochus I Soter of Syria, but subsequently returned to Pella in Macedon (now located in the periphery of Central Macedonia, Greece), where he died about 240 BCE. Aratus' major extant work is his hexameter poem Phaenomena ("Appearances"), the first half of which is a verse setting of a lost work of the same name by Eudoxus of Cnidus. It describes the constellations and other celestial phenomena. The second half of Phaenomena, "on weather signs", is chiefly about weather lore. Frequently referred to as the Diosemeia, and sometimes circulated separately under that title, it draws chiefly from a work on weather signs attributed to Theophrastus. The work as a whole has all the characteristics of the Alexandrian school of poetry. Although Aratus was ignorant of astronomy, his poem attracted the favorable notice of 18 distinguished specialists, such as Hipparchus, who wrote a commentary upon it.
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