This second volume by J. L. Lightfoot completes her edition of all six books of astrological poetry attributed to Manetho. The first volume dealt with the Books 2, 3, and 6 (their number indicating the order in the MS) which are the product of a single author and the earliest books (datable to the beginning of the second century CE).[1] The present volume deals with Books 4, 1 and 5 (the remaining books, following the order of an earlier editor and reflecting a rough chronology) which are not by the same authors and are later than the author of Books 2, 3 and 6. Nevertheless, these later books also deal with natal astrology, that is the combination of stars at one’s birth and the outcome (ἀποτέλεσμα) this has for one’s life, and so they are likewise placed under the title of Apotelesmatica by Lightfoot (just as all the books are headed by the designation ἀποτελέσματα in the MS). Indeed, we now also meet the works whose proems (1.1-15; 5.1-11) seem to have been responsible for fashioning an authorial figure resembling Manetho, with their addresses to Ptolemy (1.1; 5.1 and 11) and claims to be bringing arcane Egyptian knowledge to light (1.14-15; 5.2-5).
The shape of the book follows a typical pattern. It deals with contextual and cultural-historical material in Part One, poetics, style and language in Part Two, textual-critical matters and the presentation of the text in Part Three, and the commentary in Part Four. There are some differences. There is no introduction to astrology in this volume, and Part One is instead a return to the ‘world of astrology’; Part Two handles the books as poetic artefacts, providing an overview of the later Manethoniana together as well as discussions of individual books; Part Three on the text contains an extended discussion of the principles underpinning the editing of the later books and especially of Books 1 and 5.
As with the first volume, the lemmatic commentary is stellar in its careful discussion of astrological interpretation (the position of heavenly bodies, parallels in related texts and the protasis and apodosis of each prediction; on which see i.48-53), literary forms (novel coinages, common places and tropes, and the use and adaptation of earlier poets and above all Homer) and a dizzying array of cultural-historical matters. I find two things especially helpful about Lightfoot’s commentary style. First, there is the foregrounded questioning. Lightfoot asks, e.g., ‘[W]hat is going on here?’ (ii.609, on 4.254-5), ‘[B]ecause their husbands divorce them, or they die?’ (ii.767, on 1.47) and ‘what is this additional circumstance?’ (ii.996, on 5.340), and adds many more queries of ‘could…?’ besides (cf. e.g. ii.737, on 4.600). When the material is so tralatician (her watchword), it pays to be open about what question one is asking of these texts and what precisely is difficult to understand in them, before reaching a conclusion, however provisional. This tone helps to impress the difficulty upon the reader while also guiding them through the brambles. Related to this, second, is Lightfoot’s knack for breaking problems down into their constituent parts, often but not always marked by Roman numerals. To take just one example: at ii.732, on 4.591 (μεμφόμενοι φύσεως ὀρθὴν ὁδόν, ‘Nature’s straight path disdaining’ [of the natives]), she differentiates between the question of whether the poet views all homosexual behavior as unnatural or only the passive role and the question of how exactly the path metaphor functions. This allows for an answer that can position the Apotelesmatica in relation to Stoic and Early Christian views on homosexuality with nuance, all the while accepting and probing the unparalleled use of the path of Nature metaphor applied to homosexuality. The divide-and-conquer approach leads to literary and cultural-historical advances in the understanding of the material, for sure; but I also found the clarity of presentation edifying as a reader of the commentary.
Now to notable aspects of the second volume as a whole. The first is important for the history of Greek poetry in the Imperial Period. While there are three books covered in this volume, Lightfoot’s analysis enables Book Four to emerge as a remarkable composition and individuates the poet’s idiosyncratic style. 91 pages are dedicated to the poetics of Book Four alone, in contrast to 94 for both Books One and Five (although granted the former extends to 626 verses whereas the latter comprise 361 and 340 respectively). The book has a distinct way of presenting material. For example, it focuses on temporal clauses over conditional clauses, on the actions of the native (i.e. the person whose birth is being considered) over the actions of the stars and it prefers predictions in the future tense over the present tense (see across ii.166-68). Thus, it takes particular interest in the stars’ future impact on individuals’ livelihoods and doings. In that respect, this study will enable future work to place Book Four in dialogue with other forms of prediction in the ancient world, whether it be oracular or oneiromantic. Book Four is also the most mannered of the books, containing many more neologisms and hapax legomena (188-97), making much greater use of tragic idiom (216), but also – argues Lightfoot – invoking at a certain remove the cosmology of the Timaeus (180-82). Once again, such a sophisticated depiction of celestial workings needs now to be set beside other depictions of the cosmos in imperial verse, such as those found in Dionysius Periegetes, the Sibylline Oracles, the Chaldean Oracles and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. Lightfoot frequently invokes the term ‘miserabilist’ in encapsulating the tone of these poems and Book Four manages it in a cosmic and tragic key all at once. In Lightfoot’s summary, it is ‘a poor man’s encomium’ (174): ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now…’
Second, if Book Four offers the commentator the opportunity to paint an exacting portrait of an imperial writer with real poetic individuality, then Books One and Five demands a reflection on the task of the editor and the nature of the textual material at hand. The evidence of papyri (P.Oxy. 2546 and the soon to be published P.Oxy. 5588), and the fact that verses have been taken over into Book One from Book Four, leads Lightfoot to a view of the later Manethoniana as offering a snapshot of astrological poetry as Fachliteratur (i.e., technical literature), a characterization that applies to much astrological material in antiquity. These knowledge texts are in constant reuse, being adapted and tweaked for new contexts or clients. Thus, all versions are apportioned equal valence. These textual changes are understood as an active re-purposing of the material rather than the accident of transmission and such an approach impacts the task of the editor. Such repurposing results in divergences between the MS and papyrus which are not to be uniformly resolved by privileging one source. Lightfoot takes full account of this in Part Three, laying out how the state of affairs guides her editorial choices. I found this helpful, and it makes for a lighter commentary: in the discussion of Book 4.409-11, for example, the different readings (from Book 4, their borrowing in Book 1 and the papyrus) are weighed up deftly and concisely, without having to rehash the methodology.
The pentameters to be found in Book One raise equally thorny questions about the reuse of existing poetic material and the blurry line between poet and editor. Are some pentameters borrowed from Anubion, the only other named author of astrological elegiacs? Yes, but not undigested. Some other elegiac underlay? Possibly yes, too. Some new compositions of pentameters? Likely also. In dealing with all this, Lightfoot proposes we think in terms of ‘ownership’ or ‘curatorship’, where material is taken over from (prose and) verse sources and a particular poetic idiom is stamped upon it to produce the diverse forms of astrological poetry that we encounter across the Manethoniana. It is a robust and clearly explained way of proceeding, although each case must be addressed on its own merits and again it is in the commentary that the fruits of this careful approach can be best observed (see, for example, the discussion regarding the likelihood of Anubionic influence on 1.121-8, ii.791).
When it comes to the presentation of her edition of the Greek of the whole Manethoniana, moreover, Lightfoot’s lower register provides bald comparanda at some length. It is worth emphasizing that, although some academics may dislike it (and I have heard the grumbles), it has an important purpose. As outlined in Lightfoot’s expounding of her editorial choices especially vis-à-vis De Stefani’s edition (i.388 and ii.388), her decisions are guided by the content of several related astrological texts (set out at i.64-76) which allow for a better-informed adjudication of plausible conjectures made by the copyist or previous editors. Any future discussion of the constitution of these texts has been made much more efficient by this editorial choice.
Third, there is the material with which this volume opens. It is billed as a return to the world of astrology. As with her Part Three in the first volume (i.279-369), Part One in this volume is directed at unearthing the social imaginary of astrology and especially representations of the elite and the mass, work and labour, the poor, the enslaved, and the cultured. While this is a fairly focused series of topics for analysis, they are covered across a large range of astrological texts in both Greek and Latin and the information is presented in Appendix II (ii.1025-58). Inscriptions offer very helpful comparanda across this discussion, and Lightfoot’s drawing together of these two corpora, even in comparison to the first volume, is in itself a great service to scholarship.
Real gems emerge from the analysis and tabulation. For example, specialist craftsmen serving elites are overrepresented in astrological texts in contrast to those manufacturing mass-produced goods (ii.50). Further particularity can be gleaned by noting that the interest of the Manethoniana lies in the petty and disreputable traders rather than in the merchants of boutique wares (ii.54). Add to this their specificity on the funeral industry (ii.54) and the grimy social-economic world-view begins to align with their grim poetics. Another fascinating case is the detail with which astrological texts account for mime entertainment (ii.69-70, 110-116). Lightfoot’s suggestion for this is that such imitative forms of entertainment mount a challenge to a middling-class’s sense of honour and decorum which just does not arise when one discusses non-imitative performance, for example a tight-rope walker (ii.115-16). Lightfoot admits once again that her analysis only makes a start on what might be said about reconstructing social imaginaries in Graeco-Roman antiquity when astrological texts are brought into sharper relief. Still, these pages and footnotes brim with questions that could serve as the starting point for future (postgraduate?) research. Ultimately, I think that Lightfoot has succeeded in bringing to light how this material evidences a more popular view of ancient life. ‘Suppose’, she submits, ‘…we suggest that this is what the Second Sophistic looks like in the hand of the hoi polloi’ (ii.xii). Book Four may be a poor man’s encomium, but Lightfoot’s Part One is its own encomium to the common folk and their world.[2]
Equally, it might be thought that the world generated from the detailed synthesis in Part One is a rather strange opening to a commentary on a collection of poetic texts. Pages 1-124 deal with astrological texts in great depth and tease out their social imaginary. At page 129 we are then told that ‘from now onwards attention turns to the Manethoniana themselves’. This arrangement is because Lightfoot wants to make the study of astrological texts maximally impactful and so she leads with the biggest stakes. Yet it produces a somewhat self-contained study which is not introductory in the same way as the first volume’s Part One. The detail here felt less about orienting the reader of a commentary and more about the presentation of novel research into the wider world of astrology. At points, one even loses sight of the Manethoniana; rather they become one text-collection among many. But where should the study go? A separate book? That would dilute the force of the research and separate it from some of the original texts presented in Parts Three and Four. Disperse it throughout the commentary? That would entirely dissolve the research’s impact. Place it at the back of the volume? This would at least unite it with its Appendix and save one flipping over the entire tome to check the tabulations, but might appear to relegate the discussion to something of a postscript – this is not where big claims should go. Nor, of course, do commentaries need to be read linearly like this. You can skip over this section and head straight to the commentary if you have specific literary or astrological questions in mind.
Lightfoot is aware of the problem/challenge of detail in commentary-writing – ‘Are we so mesmerised by the ancient world that it is a sacred duty to explore even the most sapping banality?’ (ii.x; cf. ii.505) – and the preface sets out her reflections on the philosophy of commentary. Her approach is to detail comparative literary and astrological commonplaces as a route to reaching the common ‘man’s’ experiences as figured in the verses (ii.xi). The synoptic view of the astrological social imaginary in Part One goes with the traditional commentary form of Part Four, I think, because it is intended to give greater meaning to the heaped-up details in the commentary. If the presence of Part One is felt to be awkward, then perhaps it is the form of the commentary book that needs reassessing. After all, what Lightfoot’s commentaries have offered time and again is in reality three studies crammed together under a single aegis: (1) the monographic cultural study of a topic, (2) the production of a critical edition and (3) the philological illumination of the text through lemmatic discussion. At over 1100 pages, I certainly felt this on reading the second volume, but with such richness of discussion at both the microcosmic and macrocosmic (and cosmic!) level, I would not want it any other way.
Notes
[1] See BMCR 2022.03.50 for my review of that volume. I take this opportunity to correct my comment there that a glossary would have been useful in the volume. There is in fact a glossary at i.xxviii-xxvix and see now also ii.xxvii-xxviii. All references to the two volumes are given in this form.
[2] A through-line of her scholarship elsewhere, e.g. The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (Oxford, 2007) 192-202 and in a public-facing piece (an encomium of sorts) which speaks to the same care to account for the ‘common’ or ‘popular’ on its own terms, ‘Snooker & Darts: Kiss Kiss, Thunk’, Areté: the arts tri-quarterly 35 (Autumn, 2011), 47–51.