Marcus Manilius

The teaching

Taught from the five books of his Astronomica.

One reason in all things

Manilius sings that the world is one great body, alive in all its parts and governed by a divine reason that runs through the whole. Heaven, earth and sea, fire and air, are bound into one by this spirit, each part answering to the others, so that the stars act on the earth and the earth answers them. A single god dwells in the world and rules it from within, by a bond in which all its parts share.

The proof is the order of the heavens. In all the ages people have watched, the same stars have risen and set at their fixed times, nothing in so vast a work has strayed from its course, and the constellations have kept their shapes and places. Chance does not make such order; it is the work of a mind, and so the world itself is divine.

The mind kin to the stars

Who could know heaven, Manilius asks, except by the gift of heaven, or find god unless he were himself a part of the gods? The human being alone among the creatures stands upright and lifts his starry eyes towards the stars, because the god who rules the world dwells in him too. It is no wonder that people can know the world, when the world is within them and each is an image of god in small. The fourth book ends on that kinship: reason conquers all.

How the art was learned

The art came first as a gift: Mercury, the poet says, founded it, and the kings and priests of the East kept it. But it grew by watching. The first people gaped at the sky, grieved when the sun went down as if it were lost for ever, and wondered at the moon's changing face. Over long ages, by many trials, experience built the art, example showing the way: they marked which fortune went with which star and noted when the stars came back to the same places, until what had been seen many times was known as law.

The Fates rule the world

The fourth book opens on the poem's creed. Why do we spend our years in fear and longing, chasing what we cannot hold? The Fates rule the world, and all things stand fixed by a sure law; at birth we begin to die, and the end hangs from the beginning. Wealth and rank, the length of a life, its sorrows and its triumphs, are given with it, and no prayer or labour changes the sentence.

Yet fate does not excuse the wrongdoer or rob the good of praise. A crime remains a crime and is rightly punished, from whatever source it springs, and virtue is no less to be honoured for being a gift of the heavens. The teaching is meant to free the mind from anxiety, not from the law.

The signs and their guardians

The second book sorts the twelve signs by kind. They are male and female in turn, beginning with the Ram as male; some have human form and some are beasts; some are double in form and some single. Each has its guardian god: Pallas guards the Ram, Venus the Bull, Apollo the Twins, Mercury the Crab, Jupiter with the Mother of the gods the Lion, Ceres the Virgin with her ear of grain, Vulcan the Scales he forged, Mars the Scorpion, Diana the Archer, Vesta the narrow stars of the Goat, Juno the Water Bearer, and Neptune knows his own Fishes in the sea. How the signs rule the body, from the head to the feet, is taught on the page of the zodiac on the body, among the sky in the scriptures.

Signs are joined by their places on the circle. Those a third of the circle apart stand in the triangle and are friendly; those a quarter apart, in the square, are less kind; those opposite face each other across the sky. Manilius warns that the true aspect is counted in degrees and not by whole signs, for the last degree of one sign and the first of another do not make a trine because their signs do. He tells too of signs that see each other and signs that hear each other, and of signs that love and signs that are at war.

The circle of a life

Beside the zodiac, every birth sets out a second circle, fixed by its moment. Four points hold it: the rising, where the sky climbs from the east; the setting; the top of heaven; and the depth beneath the earth. Between them lie the temples, each with its share of a life's fortune. From the Lot of Fortune Manilius counts twelve lots more, for fortune, warfare, marriage, children, health and the rest of life's business, and his third book teaches how the rising sign is found and how the years allotted to a life are reckoned.

The stars that rise beside the signs

The fifth book turns to the constellations outside the zodiac that rise with each part of it, and to the characters they give. One born as the Lyre rises takes song and the strings from it; one born as the Dolphin rises swims and dives as if born to the sea. Andromeda, whose whole story he tells, the girl chained to the sea rock and Perseus coming through the air to free her, gives at her rising the jailer and the executioner, who keep watch over those in chains, for her chains are on those stars. The poem ends by ranking the stars by their brightness, like the orders of a great city, from its leading men to the common crowd.