Cosmologia e astrologia na obra Astronomica de Marcus Manilius

Abstract

In the first century a.D., the astrological understanding of the world offered an ontological basis from which the natural and social phenomena were understood. Regarded as truth in Rome and the hellenistic world, astrology acquired a scientific status, mainly due to its association with the Roman empire and to its use by the emperors, as a way of validating their own political position. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the cosmology and the astrological understanding of the universe present in the treatise Astronomica, by Marcus Manilius, a roman astrological poem written in the first century of a.D., a time when the roman Empire had already been consolidated and astrology was gaining more and more power as a form of knowledge. The emperors had chosen astrology to validate their political positions, due to the previous introduction of astrology in the roman culture. So, at first, this dissertation discusses how the astrological knowledge was incorporated by the roman culture and which elements contributed to establish its role in the establishment of the Empire constitution, considering the Stoic philosophy and the Greek literary model as the main elements. At a second moment, this dissertation analyzes the comprehension of the world presented in Astronomica, by identifying characteristics of stoic thinking related to it. Finally, this research discusses the relation between the astrological poem and elements of the context in which it was written