672 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY
of the African bishop Fulgentius (late fifth century A.D.) summarized and ex-
plained the pagan myths. These works, whatever their literary worth, at least
helped keep the myths alive through the early Middle Ages.ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY
The names of mythology often survived through astronomy and astrology. We
have already mentioned the interest of the Alexandrians in astral legends. The
astronomical poem Phaenomena, by Aratus (a Greek from Asia Minor, ca. 275
B.c.), was one of the most popular of all Hellenistic works. It was translated into
Latin by several authors (including Cicero), and more than two dozen ancient
commentaries are known. Astrology, however, was more significant in the sur-
vival of the pagan gods. It had been important in the East since the time of the
Sumerians and became popular in the Greek world after the conquests of Alexan-
der. Before the Hellenistic Age the Greeks had been skeptical about astrology,
but after the fourth century B.c. the influence of the stars on human life was
widely studied and feared.
Astrology was not confined to the uneducated or the superstitious; it was
encouraged by the Stoic philosophers, and among the Romans even so rational
a man as Cicero admitted that there was "divinity in the stars." Astrologers be-
lieved in the sympathy of the heavenly bodies and human beings. Human life,
they said, was bound up with the movements of the heavenly bodies, so that
the stars came to have the power formerly held by the gods. It was an easy step
then to give them the names of gods and to link these names with existing leg-
ends. Moreover, as countless peoples and religions were included in the Roman
Empire, a host of foreign gods joined the classical pantheon, and they trans-
formed the images of the classical gods. This process is especially clear in the
influence of Egyptian religion and its mother-goddess, Isis, and in the repre-
sentations of gods in the religions of the Near East such as Mithraism.
One great Roman poem on astrology survives, the Astronomica of Manilius,
written early in the first century A.D. Manilius recognized the authority of Homer
and other Greek poets, but he found traditional mythology to be too restrictive.
In Book 2, he recalls the Iliad and the Odyssey (Astronomica 2. 1-7):The greatest of poets with his sacred mouth sang of the struggles of the Trojan
people, of the king and father of fifty princes [Priam], of Hector conquered by
Achilles and Troy conquered after Hector, and the wanderings of the leader
[Odysseus]... and his final battle in his own land and in a home taken captive
[i.e., by the suitors].Manilius goes on to praise Hesiod and other poets, showing that Greek
mythology still exerted a strong influence on even the most rational of poets. In
Book 3, however, he shows how he needed to go beyond the traditional themes
of mythology and epic (Astronomica 3. 1-13):