Astronomicon 5 Volume Set

A. E. Housman's immensely erudite edition of Manilius' five-volume Latin poem on the stars and the zodiac was published between 1903 and 1930, and remains the authoritative study. The text, rediscovered in the fifteenth century, probably dates from the first century CE, and is a landmark in the history of astrology.

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Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and a version was published by the astronomer Regiomontanus in 1473. Editions were later produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–30 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman (1859–1936) is regarded as authoritative.