Volk, K., 2009, Manilius and his Intellectual Background, 69-70.
The mention of both Mesopotamia and Egypt shows the poet’s awareness (which he shared with his contemporaries) that astrology had been imported to the Graeco-Roman world from the east (an understanding discernible already in Manilius’ identification of the originator of the art as the Egyptian Hermes); it also shows his tendency to keep his account general. Manilius’ scenario is imbued with high significance—there is the self-revelation of nature, the exalted position of the first recipients of heavenly knowledge, and he evocative locale of the oriental kingdoms—but devoid of historical detail. In particular, Manilius is keeping out of the controversy over whether it was in fact the Babylonians or the Egyptians who invented astrology, a controversy apparent in some of our other ancient sources and one that persists into the modern period, frequently bound up with ideological concerns about the relative merits of individual cultures and the origins of Western civilization.
After the imparting of astrology to the kings, Manilius appears to envisage a third, separate, stage in the development of the discipline (cf. tum, ‘then’, 1.46), one that crucially involves the activities of priests (1.46–8). That the poet would associate priests with the origins and practice of astrology is not surprising, since, as a type of divination, the interpretation of the stars was imagined as falling under the purview of religious practitioners (and in Mesopotamia and Egypt, it actually did); in particular, Manilius may be thinking of the famous Egyptian priest Petosiris, the above-mentioned nominal author of a number of pseudepigraphic works. The description of the priests’ activities takes up the longest section of Manilius’ history of astrology (1.46–65), and the poet finally gives credit not solely to an inspiring force but to human persistence and ingenuity as well. While it is true in the case of the astrologer-priests, too, that the god of the universe voluntarily lays himself open to his servants (48–50), they are also said actively to ‘bind’ him ‘with their dutifulness’ (officio uinxere deum, 48) and to employ ars (‘art, science’, 51) to understand the exact correlations between human fate and the movements of the heavenly bodies. For generations and generations, the priests observe the stars, noting how each and every position of the heavens relates to human life until they have finally amassed enough data to cover every possible constellation of heavenly bodies—and know what it portends. Manilius clearly envisages these observations as going on for the duration of what was known as a Great Year, the period of time it takes for all planets to return to the same relative position: the priests’ task is complete only postquam omnis caeli species, redeuntibus astris, / percepta (‘once they had observed every appearance of the sky, with the stars returning (to their starting points)’, 58–9). This is no mean feat, given that, as the Greeks and Romans were well aware, a Great Year takes thousands of years.
Volk, K., 2009, Manilius and his Intellectual Background, 69-70.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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