ARATUS. – A Greek poet who lived between the end of the 4th century and the mid-3rd century BC, probably born in Tarsus in Cilicia but a citizen of Soli.
He studied at Athens in the schools of grammarians and philosophers, especially under the Stoic Zeno. He then went to Pella at the court of the Macedonian king Antigonus Gonatas, serving as a physician and becoming almost the king’s official poet; later he was in Syria at the court of Antiochus I Soter. He wrote hymns, dirges, elegies, epigrams, and the collection of verses *Kata lepton*. His major poem, *The Phenomena*, the only one of his works to survive intact, aims to glorify the universe and God; it versifies the prose work of the astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus. It exerted great influence and was the only work of Greek poetry to remain alive in the West during the Middle Ages; Latin translations, commentaries, and illustrations were made of II. Fragments also survive of the *Prognostics* (422 lines).
St. Paul (Acts 17:28), in his discourse to the Areopagus to show that man can easily attain to God, quoted Aratus verbatim: “For we are also His offspring” (*Phaenomena*, 5). This hemistich also appears in Cleanthes of Assos (*Hymn to Zeus*, 5) and, in a slightly different form, in Pindar (*Nemean Odes*, 6).