From its beginnings in the third century bc, Roman literature was, in the strictest sense of the term, derivative: the earliest poets writing in Latin took their bearings from the dramatic and narrative poetic traditions of Greece. Indeed, the most important of these poets, Livius Andronicus and Ennius, were themselves Greek, and the Latin literary culture that they initiated was, in many respects, an extension of the Greek (Mayer 1995). Roman writers in every genre, with the exception only of satire, saw themselves as carrying on a live tradition extending back to the authors of the Greek canon. The earliest works of Latin poetry were translations and adaptations of Greek masterpieces, like Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey and Plautus’ adaptations of Greek New Comedy. Indeed, Ennius portrayed himself, and in turn was viewed by later generations, as another Homer (Ann. 3-11 Sk. Skutsch 1985: 147-67). And Terence was seen by later critics as a ‘‘knock-off’’ (dimidiate, Caes. fr. 1 Blansdorf) of Menander. But the role of Callimachus in Latin poetry was somewhat different from these classic models, and it was Catullus who was largely responsible for his disproportionate influence on succeeding generations of Roman poets.
To be sure, Callimachus was not unknown in Rome before the 50s bc. Ennius certainly knew enough of his Aetia to allude to the famous dream at the beginning of his Annals (Skutsch 1985: 147-50), although the extent to which it influenced his approach to poetry is difficult to gauge because of its fragmentary state. We know even less about the composition of Ennius’ Saturae and so it is impossible to evaluate how much the origins of the quintessentially Roman genre of satire might owe to Callimachus’ reconfiguration of iambic poetry. The same observations apply to the Satires of Lucilius later in the second century bc (Puelma-Piwonka 1949). An adaptation of one of Callimachus’ epigrams (41 Pf.; Courtney 1993: 75-6) byLutatius Catulus (cos. 102 bc) is an indication of the reading interests of the cultured Roman elite of this period, rather than of a literary movement taking its inspiration from Callimachus. Catulus was a learned man, a respected orator, and the friend of Greek poets such as Archias and Antipater of Sidon. When the next generation adapted Callimachean poetics, there was now a readership capable of recognizing it. The intense engagement with Callimachus that begins in the generation of Catullus has often been attributed to an external stimulus associated with the contemporary Greek poet Parthenius of Nicaea. Parthe-nius was brought to Rome in the late 70s or early 60s bc, probably by the poet Cinna or a close relation (Lightfoot 1999: 9-16). Almost every aspect of Parthenius’ relations with Cinna, Catullus, Gallus, and the ‘‘neoterics’’ is disputed, but the cumulative weight of the abundant circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that, while he may not have played the dramatic role sometimes ascribed to him (Clausen 1964), Parthe-nius was clearly heavily implicated in the increasingly sophisticated engagement of Catullus and his contemporaries with the poetry of the Hellenistic world (Lightfoot 1999: 50-76). Callimachus was ‘‘the chief classic of an unclassical art,’’ as one of the greatest critics of Hellenistic poetry referred to him (Wilamowitz 1924: I.170),andit was inevitable that as the Romans came to know the works of Parthenius, now present in Rome, and the corpus of Hellenistic epigrams recently assembled by Meleager of Gadara (Gow and Page 1965), they would also want to know more about the inspirational source of this poetry in his works.
World History
