Editing Cicero (and Translating Aratus) in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Jan Kochanowski (1579) and Hugo Grotius (1600)

In his 1579 edition of Cicero’s Aratea the Polish humanist Jan Kochanowski interpolates the missing sections of Cicero’s poem with his own Latin translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena. Some years later, the same solution will be adopted by Hugo Grotius in his Syntagma Arateorum (1600), were he edited Cicero’s poem along with Aratus and the Latin Aratea of Germanicus and Avienius. Through a contrastive study, it will be analysed how these humanistic translations try to emulate Cicero’s poetic style and to which extent they rely on later poetic tradition (especially Germanicus).