Marcus, a Latin poet, who flourished towards the end of the reign of Augustus, but respecting whose private history we are entirely ignorant. Even the place of his birth is unknown. Vossius imagines that he is the same as Manilius Antiochus, who was brought as a slave to Rome along with his cousin Publius Syrus (See PUBLIUS SYRUS). Others have supposed him to be the same as Manlius the mathematician, who erected at Rome, in the Campus Martius, a gnomon of seventy feet in height, by order of Augustus. (Montucla, Hist. des Mathematiques, i. p. 485.) He is the author of a poem entitled Astronomicon, in five books, the last of which seems to be imperfect, as we nowhere find the observations which the author had promised to make on the setting of stars. He was of the sect of the Stoics, as we gather from the introduction to the sixth book, as well as from several other passages. The poem of Manilius professes to be on astronomy, but it is rather a treatise on astrology, a subject which was beginning to be much studied at this time in Rome. The style is full of energy, and worthy of the age of Augustus. Editio Princeps, Nuremberg, 1473, per Regiomontanum; Venetiae, apud Aldum, 1499; cum notis Bentleyi, Londini, 1739; C. interpr. Gall. et not. ed. Pingré, Paris, 1786.