The poem, while metrically correct, has been noted for its technical language and unusual word choices. The classicist Arthur Woollgar Verrall argues that while "at his best, Manilius may remind us of Lucretius", the "metre [that he uses] has the regular and monotonous flow of the age". Jacobs, Monceaux, and others have attributed the "Astronomica" idiosyncrasies to Manilius's reported African origin; they argue he wrote and spoke a form of "Africitas"—a putative African dialect of Latin "with strongly marked peculiarities of vocabulary, syntax, sentence-structure, and style"—thus explaining the poem's quirks. Aside from the dubiously hypothesized presence of "Africitas" in the poem, however, M. Dorothy Brock argues there is very little evidence that Manilius was from Africa. In addition to its stylistic oddities, the "Astronomica" includes some internal inconsistencies. According to Green, the poem is "riddled with confusion and contradiction"; he cites its "presentation of incompatible systems of astrological calculation, information overload, deferral of meaning and contradictory instruction". At the same time, Green notes that similar issues exist in other first-to-third-century astrological works. According to Caroline Stark, Manilius paradoxically claims astrological knowledge may be acquired by individuals and that it is only granted by divine favor. Barton says Manilius may have included these contradictions and complexities so he would be regarded as "a figure of unreachable knowledge for the novice student-reader". Green, while not ruling out this hypothesis, says Manilius was probably not motivated by a "desire to carve out for himself a position of power in the new imperial world of experts" as Barton says. Rather, Green says Manilius—due to his "pride in poetic innovation" and his "deference ... to the Emperor"—sought to present "himself as a compliant imperial agent, intent on producing a creative poetic enterprise that plots its own way through the levels of acceptable stellar discourse in the early empire". David Pingree concludes that the poem's "principal purpose seems to have been to delight its audience with poetry and to arouse admiration for the poet by its cleverness". It is unknown whether the "Astronomica" is a finished work; a large lacuna (i.e. a gap) between lines 5.709 and 5.710 presents a problem with this discussion.