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Steven J. Green. Disclosure and Discretion in Roman Astrology: Manilius and His Augustan Contemporaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 248 pp. Cloth, $78.00.
This book investigates the reception of astrology in late Republican to early Imperial Rome, with a particular focus on the Augustan-Tiberian period during which the poet Manilius, author of the Astronomica, likely lived. Green examines the degree to which astrology was acceptable in the elite Roman world of the early Empire, where the princeps, whether Augustus or Tiberius, could be both the beneficiary and patron and yet also the enemy and expeller of astrologers in Rome. He seeks to paint a picture of literary artists in Rome, who had to navigate with care a difficult course through the explication of astrology via more or less equivocation about this form of divination.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Manilius' Astronomica," comprises a single lengthy chapter examining Manilius' poem. Green presents a culturally nuanced reading, seeking to describe the negotiation of the tension between the poet's knowledge of the workings of astrology on the one hand, and his need to acknowledge the power and interests of the princeps on the other. The chapter analyses the deteriorating relationship between the poet-instructor and the assumed student (the "reader," as opposed to the external, contemporary reader [the "Reader"]), as the student grows increasingly frustrated at failing to learn the intricacies of how to cast a horoscope. Some of that frustration (perhaps more for the "Reader" than the "reader") stems from the lack of full disclosure by the instructor about the techniques of casting a horoscope, notably the absence of anything concrete concerning the planets, which are usually pivotal to horoscopal astrology (unless one accepts a non-planetary form, as has indeed been suggested to explain the lacuna in the poem). Green argues that the lesson that the instructor teaches is intended to fail, because of the nervousness about the practice of astrology in the early Empire, and since it was a technique intimately bound up in the fortunes of the first two emperors. So the Astronomica represents a process of disclosure combined with discretion by poets who sought to engage with a new and fundamentally foreign technique for foretelling the future, in a culture that...