Forgotten Stars: Rediscovering Manilius’ <i>Astronomica</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite his participation in the Golden Age of Latin literature under Augustus, and despite many passages of surpassing artistry, Manilius and his Astronomica, a 4200-line poem describing the heavens and the astrological methods of forecasting, have until recently received little attention in the English-speaking world.Modern scholarly work has generally appeared in German, French, or Italian, and has been crowned by an excellent twovolume Italian edition with translation and extensive commentary on the literary and astrological matters relevant to the text [Feraboli, Flores, and Scarcia 1996-2001].Unfortunately this edition is somewhat difficult of access in the United States.The Anglosphere's access to Manilius is through G. P. Goold's indispensable Loeb edition [1977], which provides a thoroughly edited text, a fine translation, and a 120-page introduction with a detailed explanation of Manilius' astrology.Now Katharina Volk, the author of two previous books on Manilius, and Steven Green, who has written on Manilius' contemporary Ovid, have edited an outstanding collection of essays on the Astronomica, presenting in English the results of recent German (Hübner, Heilen), French (Abry), and Italian (Flores) work, along with essays by English and American scholars.The editors hope-reasonably-that this collection will restore Manilius to his proper place in scholarship, if not in popular appeal.The book is edited with an eye to the reader's convenience: Manilius' Latin text is quoted extensively but always with an English translation, usually Goold's; footnotes are at the bottom of the page; background information and important comments are in the text where they belong, not relegated to the footnotes.The book's binding and printing are first rate; any typographical errors escaped my notice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".