Of those interested in Ancient Greek literature, not all will have encountered the author Manetho, and still fewer will have read the astrological didactic poetry composed by a certain pseudo-Manetho. Coming in at around 1000 pages, Lightfoot’s commentary amply demonstrates what we have missed out on—and stands as a spectacular piece of scholarship.
Before we look to the skies, however, there is some ground work: all the terms in Lightfoot’s title require explanation. A single manuscript, Laur. Plut. 28.27 (L), preserves six books of astrological didactic poetry. That collection is headed by the designation ἀποτελέσματα (‘outcome’, ‘effects’), which refers to things which are brought about by certain combinations of stars at one’s birth. This kind of prediction is called natal astrology. It has long been known that Books 2, 3, and 6 of the collection form something of a cohesive unit and are much the earliest. That collection is also attributed in the manuscript to Manetho and given the rarity of the name it is very likely that the ascription has in mind the third-century BCE Ptolemaic Egyptian historian, Manetho of Sebennytus. However, since Book 6 concludes with the poet’s own horoscope and gives his birth year as 80 CE, the attribution is considered false, hence pseudo-Manetho (see Lightfoot’s comments on 6.745-50). So: the commentary deals with three books of didactic poetry written at the beginning of the second century CE that deal with natal astrology—and which were, at some point in antiquity, attributed to Manetho.
The book has a standard form. It begins with introductory material which comprises a good two-fifths of the book. It is further divided into four parts. Part One (Astrology) takes seriously the necessity to prepare and orientate the reader for their foray into what Lightfoot dubs the Manethoniana, providing not only an overview of the poems within the manuscript, but also a contextualization of them within the wider, sprawling and often patch-work tradition of astrological writing in the first several centuries CE. Part Two (Poetics) dissects the poems, addressing in brilliant detail their language, syntax, diction, style and metre, as well as the techniques of employing astrological vocabulary and presenting information cogently. Part Three (The World of Astrology) sets out to excavate the social history inscribed within the poems. This is followed by Part Four (Text) which discusses the manuscript, its Humanist copies and editions. This is then followed by a Greek text and a translation on opposing pages. The lemmatic commentary forms Part Five. The book ends with two appendices: the first on the technical vocabulary employed by all the poets in the collection and the second on the names of the planets and their epithets.
The first three sections of Part One address: astrology in literature; astrology as both a body of knowledge and a practice or skill claiming insights regarding the divine; and astrology as a practice steeped in Greek antiquity’s mythological, literary, and cultural heritage. They make, simply put, an excellent and accessible case for why the study of these texts matters. Section four and five dive into the Manethoniana as a collection and the three books treated in the commentary together with comparative material. In section four, Lightfoot defines the nature of the corpus and its content with clarity, but this does require the use of astrology’s technical language with its talk of ecliptics, apoklimata and epanaphorai, and of planets in positions of conjunction, opposition, quartile, and trine. In section five, the reader is provided with the relevant poetic and prose works which will aid in the exegesis of the poems, many of them even more obscure than the Apotelesmatica. This is tough stuff. The depth of detail is impressive though at some points exhausting, but—at least for this reader—the sections do repay close attention on repeated reading. (In this respect it might have been useful to have a glossary of astrological terms in English, which will not be familiar to all readers). Thus, while these sections do some real heavy-lifting and ask the reader to carry their weight too, they nonetheless provide the exercise needed to tackle the poems oneself, and with fortitude.
Part Two describes the poetics of the first three books of the Apotelesmatica, although there are regular forays into the later books to emphasize points of divergence or similarity both between the earlier and later books and the Manethoniana as a whole in relation to the wider poetic tradition. This replicates the procedure of Lightfoot’s previous commentaries, but here there is much greater depth.[1] This is in part because of the need to detail how the Apotelesmatica have developed their own style within existing traditions of hexameter poetry, a style able to convey the technical aspects of astrology (e.g. quartile and trine positions of heavenly bodies), but which also varies such language to obviate the monotonous presentation and listing of information. For me, though, the stand-out section of Part Two is the chapter on metre. As one would expect for a commentary, there is the typical tabulation of hexametrical forms and a calculation of their frequencies. While this in itself is a valuable enterprise, what makes it such an engaging chapter is the way Lightfoot—building on her earlier work—contextualizes the metrical habits of the Apotelesmatica within the wider poetic landscape; against the highly Callimachean Dionysius the Periegete on the one hand and the popular form of the Sibylline Oracles on the other.[2] The chapter translates dry metrical statistics into a clear and readily understandable—nay, even enjoyable—account about where Ps.-Manetho’s versification fits in the poetic world. Direct your students/colleagues/friends/lovers here, when they question what the value of scansion is!
Part Three deals with the world evoked by the Manethoniana. Lightfoot addresses in turn the self, class and status, social groups, the family, ethics, money, professions, and the body. The way these different aspects of human life are characterized is set out in detail and compared with related accounts in Firmicus Maternus, Vettius Valens, and a whole range of texts collated in the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (CCAG), as well as with Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica, the Sortes Astrampsychi and the New Testament. The incredible breadth of works consulted enables a refined picture of the social world that the Apotelesmatica depict. It is worth noting several interrelated emphases in the poems that Lightfoot has uncovered. The Manethoniana demonstrate a keen interest not only in social mobility—for good or for bad—but also in the place of craftsmen and professionals within society. In fact, in contrast to other astrological writings that envisage an upper, middle, and lower class, where the middle class are aspirational and the lower class are craftsmen, the Manethoniana place craftsmen and professionals into a large and amorphous middle group. And this social vision has reflexes in other areas. Their ethical outlook is all about getting ahead and money is a ubiquitous concern. The precarity of the individual in these poems, the potential for success alongside the many social and economic pitfalls as well, chimes with the reality of the astrologer’s clientele. This is not an elite view of the world, but a popular one.
Since the Manethoniana survive in a codex unicus, L, Part Four begins with a detailed account of the manuscript, its organization, glosses, and marginal signs. This is followed by a discussion of the later humanist copies. Lightfoot then sets out the principles of her edition. There subsequently follows the Greek text and translation. Two things are notable here. First, despite a whole page (393) justifying to the reader a verse translation of the poems, I found it eminently readable—once one gets into the iambic rhythm, un-English syntax becomes easy to handle. And there is a considerable advantage here in that each English line renders almost exactly what can be seen in the Greek verse. Second, as is to be expected from a work with a single witness, the apparatus is slender, registering mostly conjectures from earlier editors and places where the humanist copies differ from L. In the pragmatic terms of textual organization, this allows space for a lower register in which Lightfoot provides significant parallels from all manner of astronomical and astrological texts. This is an excellent tool for further study.
Part Five is the commentary. Since so much information has been provided in the preceding parts, the commentary itself is able to be concise in its discussion of interpretative issues, of poetic forms and their relation to the tradition and of significant parallels, but also in its explanation of the astrological meanings. That is, Lightfoot sets out clearly for the reader what particular celestial phenomenon or movement is being described. This still requires making reference to the technical aspects of astrology (such as those mentioned above) as well as to other equally obscure astrological texts, but it is done in a way that is not at all onerous on the reader. Thus one could, I think, consult the commentary without reading the introductory material and still find what one needs.
This is, without doubt, a big book; that is because it does so much. Lightfoot comments in the preface: ‘Never before have I had the feeling of being able, effectively, to create a new subject within an ancient one’ (x). Very few (living) scholars would dare make such a claim, and all those who work on ancient astrology will certainly raise a quizzical brow. Yet there is something particularly energizing about this book. It opens up several avenues for future textual and literary research: the question of the interrelation of prose and poetic works emerged as a pressing one for me, but it also seems clear that commentaries on other astrological didactic poets (Dorotheus, Anubion, Maximus, ‘Antiochus’) are now major desiderata. By the same token, Part Three takes great pains to demonstrate the importance of these poems for writing history: they offer a distinct ‘popular’ social perspective that is rarely discernible or accessible in the literature of Greece and Rome. Hopefully this foundation is built upon with alacrity.
But it is also a big book because of its subject. The Manethoniana compress into the hexameter complex astrological descriptions as well as characterizations of person’s place in the world and its intrinsic instability. Their catalogic form means that this information comes thick and fast. A poem which communicates so much information requires a book which tackles all that information and that must inevitably supply even more information. There are many lists and tables in the introductory chapters, and Lightfoot demands the reader’s absolute attention in order to understand the organization of material and its explanation. What makes this book nevertheless a pleasure to read is the (largely) accessible, humorous and warm manner in which it is written: there is, for example, a recurring joke about garum (226, 279) and a self-aware comment about Lightfoot’s famous (to some) haunt in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (371). So be under no illusion that diving into the world of the Apotelesmatica will be a disorientating experience for most students and scholars of the Greek and Roman world; but know also that you could have no more genial or supportive a guide.
Notes
[1] cf. Lightfoot, J.L. The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books(Oxford, 2007) Chapter 5: Language, Style, Poetics; Dionysius Periegetes: Description of the Known World (Oxford, 2014), Chapter III on language and parts of Chapter IV on the didactic tradition.
[2] Cf. Lightfoot (2007) 154-62, with further comments on composing Sibylline hexameters to 169, and (2014) 60-75.