Daphne’s Aratea: Astronomical Hunting and the Dog Star in Ovid, Cicero, Vergil, and Lucretius

Abstract

This article explores evidence that Ovid’s famous simile comparing Apollo to a dog and Daphne to a hare (Met. 1.533–39) is based on an astronomical model: the Canis Major section of Cicero’s Aratea, in which Sirius perpetually hunts the Hare (Arat. 120–25). It argues that this section of the Aratea was particularly influential, and that Ovid engages with it in his Apollo and Daphne episode via astronomically inflected passages in Aeneid 10 and De rerum natura 3, examining Aratus’ star-map as a vehicle for intertextual engagement. It thus testifies to the importance of the Aratean tradition in late Republican and Augustan poetry.