Manethoniana

Definition

The Manethoniana (also Pseudo-Manéthō or the Apotelesmatika) is a six-book corpus of Greek astrological poetry in hexameter verse, handed down under the name of Manetho, the 3rd-century-BCE Egyptian priest-historian — though he did not write it. It runs to roughly 3,000 hexameter lines, with brief pentameters in Book 1, and survives in one ninth-century manuscript, Laur. Plut. 28.27. Scholars label its poets with letters: Ma for Books 2, 3, and 6 (dated by a horoscope to AD 80), Mb for Book 4, with further hands in Books 1 and 5.

In Tradition

In classical scholarship, the Manethoniana is the main surviving body of astrology written as verse, alongside Manilius's Latin Astronomica. Lightfoot's 2019 edition treats it as the work of several authors, with Books 2, 3, and 6 — the work of the poet 'Ma,' AD 80 — as one coherent block of doctrine. The attribution to Manetho is a Hellenistic-era convention that borrowed an Egyptian priest's prestige; it does not mean the poems were composed in Egyptian.

In Practice

For a historian, or anyone tracing the Hellenistic tradition, the Manethoniana is a primary witness to early-Imperial Greek technical astrology cast in verse. Books 2, 3, and 6 — the Ma group — preserve teaching on the effects of planets by sign, house, and aspect, on right-side and left-side aspect distinctions, on the Lots, and on cookbook-style natal outcomes, all squeezed into the demanding hexameter form. Lightfoot's 2019 critical edition of those three books supplies the Greek text, an English translation, and line-by-line commentary on the poems' debts to their sources (Dorotheus, Ptolemy, Anubio, the Egyptian decan-tradition) and on the early-Byzantine compilers who later quoted them. Modern astrologers turn to the Manethoniana for early-Imperial verse delineations and for the recovery of Hellenistic doctrine in a body of work distinct from the prose of Vettius Valens, Firmicus Maternus, and Paulus Alexandrinus.

Historical Origin

The poems are Greek-language hexameter astrology of the 1st-3rd c. CE; the Ma group, Books 2, 3, and 6, is dated from an internal horoscope to AD 80. The sole manuscript is Laur. Plut. 28.27, of the 9th century. Editions run from Koechly (1858) through Axtius-Rigler, De Stefani, and Zito to J. L. Lightfoot, The Astrology of Pseudo-Manetho: Books 2, 3, and 6 (Cambridge UP 2019). Lightfoot's edition supplies the Greek-English text of those three books and a line-by-line commentary on the poet Ma.

Further Reading

• J. L. Lightfoot, The Astrology of Pseudo-Manetho (Books 2, 3, and 6)
• Manilius, Astronomica