The Sky Is Our Song: The Phaenomena of Aratus

An ancient Greek guide to the heavens, translated in a new accessible modern English edition.

A poetic guide to the heavens, the Phaenomena of Aratus--dating from around 270 BCE--was widely known across the ancient world, second only in fame to the works of Homer. Beginning with an invocation to Zeus, the poem describes the constellations of the northern and southern skies, the celestial sphere, and weather signs. Aratus’s vivid work offered a complete handbook of astronomy, constellations, and weather, and this treatise on the night sky was later translated or adapted by luminaries including Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. The Phaenomena remained popular throughout the Renaissance and had more than sixty printed editions by the early seventeenth century, but its fame has faded in the modern world.

With this edition, renowned translator and amateur astronomer Stanley Lombardo renders Aratus’s poem in reader-friendly vernacular English verse. Complete with endnotes, an accessible introduction, and astronomically accurate illustrations, The Sky Is Our Song brings this master poet’s celebration of the sky to a twenty-first-century audience, inviting new readers to follow Aratus on a visual journey through star signs, moon phases, weather phenomena, and all wonders of the heavens.

Aratus (ca. 315-ca. 240 BCE) was a Greek didactic poet from Soloi. He composed the Phaenomena while he was a resident of the court of the Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas. Stanley Lombardo is a translator, former professor of classics at the University of Kansas, and amateur astronomer. He has published translations of works by Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Sappho, Plato, Hesiod, Statius, and Dante, among others.