Excerpt from Manili Astronomicon Liber II

The present Text, Commentary, and Translation, together with the Introductions prefixed to them, are designed to carry the casual student over Book II into clearer regions (though Book III might be clearer than it is) with less cost to his time and patience than he must ordinarily incur. The Translation attempts to give an accurate rendering of the Latin, and makes little pretension to literary quality. Indeed, the character of Manilius' Latin is such that the helpfulness of a translation is not unlikely to be in inverse proportion to its readableness. The temptation to para phrase is very strong. Yet any one who has constantly used Pingre will be aware of the disadvantages of this kind of rendering, and will perhaps be tolerant of a version in which literary form is deliberately subordinated to utility. Even when Manilius is not employing technical language his sentences are-often strangely intractable. Any one who will trouble to make for himself a rendering of the first nine lines of this book will know at once what I mean. His technicalities, moreover, are perhaps more embarrassing than those of any other author who has tried to versify a scientific terminology. What skill and sympathy can achieve in the translation of Lucretius Mr. Cyril Bailey has recently taught us. But we have yet to learn how to deal with a poet who versifies the multiplication-table and sets to the measure of Vergil the reasonings of Euclid. One particular difficulty I may be allowed here to mention, towards which I have not attempted to take up a consistent attitude. Quartet sigma In Manilius are, in accordance with an inclusive method of reckoning common in Roman writers, signs separated from one another by two inter vening signs. The clear sense of such a phrase can only be hit by a rigmarole. But I have found it in practice not possible to maintain throughout a single rigmarole for each such phrase as it'recurs in a variety of contexts.

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