ARATO. - Greek poet, who lived between the end of the 4th century and the middle of the 3rd century B.C., born probably at Tarsus in Cilicia, but a citizen of Soli.
He attended in Athens the schools of grammarians and philosophers, especially that of the Stoic Zeno. He was later at Pella with Antigonus Gonatas, king of Macedonia, as a physician, becoming almost his official poet; he was then in Syria with Antiochus I Soter. He wrote hymns, dirges, elegies, epigrams, and the collection of verses hudá leptón. His greatest poem, The Phenomena, the only one of his works to have survived complete, seeks to glorify the universe and God; it renders in verse the prose work of the astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus; it exercised great influence and was the only work of Greek poetry that remained alive in the West during the Middle Ages; Latin versions, commentaries, and illustrations were made of II. There are also fragments of the Prognostics (422 verses).
St. Paul (Act. 17, 28), in order to demonstrate in his discourse at the Areopagus that man can easily attain to God, quoted A. verbatim: “For we too are of His offspring” (Phen., 5). This hemistich also occurs in Cleanthes of Assos (Hymn to Zeus, 5) and, in a somewhat different form, in Pindar (Nemeans, 6). Francesco Sole