Manilius

Marcus Manilius was a Roman poet, the author of Astronomica, a didactic poem in hexameters on the subject of astrology. Nothing is known of Manilius except that he lived in Rome during the reigns of the emperors Augustus (reigned 27 BCE – 14 CE) and Tiberius (reigned 14 – 37 CE).

The five extant books of Astronomica fail to deal with a number of topics which any treatise on astrology would be expected to cover, and it is generally assumed either that Manilius did not complete the poem or that parts of the work have been lost.

It is perhaps curious that although Manilius has never been considered to be among the greatest of the Roman poets, editions of Astronomica have been produced by three of the finest Latin scholars of recent centuries: namely, the French scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609); Richard Bentley (1662-1742), the English classicist and theologian, and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge 1700-1742; and the Latinist A.E. Housman (1859-1936), better known for his poetry and, in particular, for his collection A Shropshire Lad (1896).