Vergil’s Erigone and Astronomical Allusion

John Henkel

University of North Carolina , Chapel Hill

By the time Vergil began composing the Georgics, Caesar’s calendar reform had obviated the need for farmers to rely on the stars for the timing of the planting seasons.[1]  Nevertheless, Vergil’s poem names as one of its principal concerns the astronomical timing of plowing and tending vines (quo sidere terram | vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vitis | conveniat, Geo. 1.1-3).  The popularity of astronomy as a feature in Roman poetry is due in part to its traditional use to keep track of the year, and in part to the fact that astronomical poetry was imminently suitable for political panegyric, since catasterism offered a physical analogue for apotheosis.[2]  By the 1^st century BC, however, the constellations had become poetically attractive in their own right, and catasterisms offered fertile ground for aetiological poetry in the Alexandrian style.[3]  The Roman taste for poetic catasterism, moreover, has much to do with the perennial esteem in which Greeks and Romans alike held Aratus’s Phaenomena.[4]  Cicero, Varro Atacinus, Ovid, and Germanicus Caesar all translated Aratus’s poem into Latin astronomical hexameters.  As Farrell and others have noted, Vergil treats Aratus more freely, using him as the primary source of the second half of Geo. 1, which deals with weather signs.[5]

According to Farrell’s reading of Geo. 1, Vergil uses Hesiod and Aratus as models to show his adherence to Callimachean aesthetic principles.[6]  While Vergil undoubtedly revered Aratus for the refinements that Callimachus lauds in Ep. 27, this formalist reading overlooks the fact that Vergil has conspicuously suppressed the episode for which Aratus is most famous, and which is most germane to Vergil’s thematic program in Geo. 1 and throughout the poem: the departure of Justice from the Earth after the end of the Golden Age (Arat. Phaen. 96-136) from the better known and more-frequently translated first half of Aratus’s Phaenomena.  Despite Vergil’s emphasis on the opposition of Golden and Iron Ages (Geo. 1.121-46), Vergil refers only obliquely to Aratus’s famous passage (2.473-74, 537).  In the Invocation of Octavian, however, Vergil locates the young Caesar’s future celestial sedes between Erigone and Chelae (qua locus Erigonen inter Chelasque sequentis | panditur, 1.33-34).  Erigone and Chelae are non-standard references to Virgo and Scorpio, the two zodiacal signs to which Aratus devotes his longest digressions (96-136, 634-68).  Vergil suppresses through antonomasia the more resonant name associated with Virgo by Aratus—Δίκη (Lat. Iustitia); the next two lines, however, activate this suppressed resonance in a parenthesis: ipse tibi iam bracchia contrahit ardens | Scorpius et caeli iusta plus parte reliquit (1.34-35).  Thomas claims that Erigone is the standard Greek designation for Virgo, but this is far from evident.  Rather, this obscure antonomasia draws attention to Vergil’s ambitious literary program in the Georgics as well as highlighting—through conspicuous suppression—the thematic importance of the Hesiodic/Aratean myth of metallic ages in his poem.