ARATUS. - 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 the grammarians and the philosophers, and especially that of the Stoic Zeno. He was later at Pella with the king of Macedonia Antigonus Gonatas, as a physician, becoming almost his official poet; then he was in Syria with Antiochus I Soter. He wrote hymns, epicedia, elegies, epigrams, the collection of verses hudá leptón. His major poem, The Phaenomena, the only work of his that has come down to us entire, intends to glorify the universe and God; it puts into verse the prose work of the astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus; it had 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 it. There are also fragments of the Prognostica (422 verses).
St. Paul (Acts 17:28), in order to demonstrate in his speech at the Areopagus that man can easily reach God, cited A. verbatim: "For we are also his offspring" (Phaen., 5). This hemistich also occurs in Cleanthes of Assos (Hymn to Zeus, 5) and, in a slightly different form, in Pindar (Nemean Odes, 6).
Francesco Sole