Francesca Schironi (University of Michigan)
In this talk I will present the digital outcome of the The Aratus Project, an NSF-supported project which has produced a complete translation of all the exegetical texts connected with Aratus: all the scholia, Hipparchus’ Commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus, the treatises of Achilles, Leontius, and other anonymous treatises as well as the Vitae of Aratus and Eratosthenes’ Catasterismi.
Many of these texts are virtually unknown to most classicists because they have never been translated and also deal with a technical topic (astronomy), which is not usually part of a curriculum in classics. Still, astronomy was very important in Greece and Rome, and Aratus’ Phaenomena became a bestseller because it was the foundation of ancient star lore. This is why so many exegetical texts were composed to accompany this poem. The Aratus Project aims at bringing the entire corpus of these nearly forgotten texts composed around Aratus’ Phaenomena back to life; it shows how only by reading them as a unit and in close connection with the authoritative text they discuss (Aratus’ Phaenomena) one can really appreciate their importance in antiquity.
The original Greek texts as well as translations are made available through an open-access online platform. In it, these texts are all interconnected, so that the user can easily navigate through all available exegetical material for any given passage of Aratus. Each text is accompanied by annotations, as well as parallel passages from other ancient authors (Aristotle, Geminus, Cleomedes, Ptolemy, etc.) in order to contextualize each specific point within the ancient philosophical and astronomical contexts. In addition, images and diagrams are added, so that user is able to visualize the astronomical content of Aratus’ poem and of its commentators—a key part for understanding a topic (ancient astronomy) which is eminently visual. This innovative project thus exploits the possibilities of digital humanities to showcase an entire body of interconnected texts and to visualize the science behind them. This online platform provides the first complete case-study of the ancient scholarly and scientific reception of an author, making it available to an audience beyond the experts in the field in a ‘multimodal’ translation (González 2014).
In the talk I will showcase the online platform with all its possibilities, including teaching (from graduate seminars on ancient scholarship to undergraduate classes on Greek astronomy in translation appealing to STEM students). In particular, I will give one example of what it means to study the ancient reception of Aratus by analyzing one specific issue as discussed by the different sources now connected and visualized in the platform. While discussing the result of this project, I hope to present it as a model for other projects that deal with exegetical material—an area in which comparison of similar texts commenting on the same authoritative text is often the only way to truly understand how the latter was received in antiquity.