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Abstract. Aratus' Phaenomena describes the constellations as a sign system devised by Zeus for the benefit of human beings. This article argues that Aratus figuratively depicts these signs as though they were "letters in the sky," a veritable text inscribed in nature. Through a cumulative argument that considers, among other things, the hermeneutics of Aratean sign-reading, the myth of Dike, Aratus' acrostic and other forms of letter play, and the reception of the Phaenomena, the article arrives at the conclusion that the writing metaphor is indeed pervasive in Aratus' poem. The Phaenomena thus presents an important early instance of a pervasive trope in the history of ideas, the concept of the "readability" of the world.
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Indessen müssen wir,
Zu unsers Schöpfers Ruhm, so lange wir noch hier,
Das Wunder-ABC der Sternen
In Ehrfurcht buchstabiren lernen.
-Barthold Heinrich Brockes, Die himmlische Schrift(1738)1
1. LETTERS IN THE SKY?
Aratus' Phaenomena is a poem about signs.2 As the poet states in the proem, Zeus, out of benevolence toward human beings (5), devised the constellations (the topic of the first and longer part of the Phaenomena, 1-757) as a heavenly sign system (10-13):
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For he [Zeus] himself fastened the signs to the sky, distinguishing the constellations, and organized stars over the course of the year that might give to men most clearly established signs of the seasons, so that everything might grow without fail.3
Similarly, the weather signs enumerated in the poem's second part (758-1154), whether astronomical, meteorological, or biological, are all discussed for their very ability to signify weather conditions to the informed human observer.
If Aratus' poem thus describes the physical world as a kind of code that calls for interpretation, his own text, as has often been seen, functions as a mirror image of its subject matter. Just as Zeus has designed the signifying cosmos, Aratus has fashioned a signifying verbal artifact; in each case, the human audience needs to make a mental effort to correctly match the provided signs to their intended meaning in order to make sense of the world and the poem, respectively. This parallelism between "verse and universe"4 is, as we shall see, alluded to in a number of ways in the Phaenomena, but...