Some Roman cosmology…

I'm going to use a wonderful text, written in Rome at the end of the reign of Emperor Augustus by the poet Marcus Manilius, to summarise the thousand-year enigmas of the cosmos. The extracts are taken from his poem on astronomy. This is more than two thousand years old and lay forgotten until the tenth century. The first French translation by Pingré was published in Paris in 1786. I know all this not because I am a historian, but because I stumbled across the book by sheer chance on the stand of a bookseller by the Seine. With my love of astronomy, the Seine, and old books I just could not resist such a find. It was my first introduction to the works of Manilius.

Manilius himself was probably not an astronomer. Instead he drew his knowledge from a variety of Greek and Roman authors. The special fascination of his work is that he gives an extensive review of astronomy, and this summary was made at a pivotal moment during the evolution of western philosophy. Astronomy flourished in the millennium before Manilius: the diameter of the Earth had been determined, and the idea that the Earth was isolated in space was taken seriously.