Callimachus was not only the most influential poet in the Greek world of the third century bc, he was one of the age’s most compelling intellects. His writings can be dated roughly from 285 to 245 bc, although these dates are only approximate and his literary career may well have begun earlier than this. What little we know, or think we know, of his life is derived primarily from inferences drawn from his poetry and the biography contained in the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda ( Test. 1 Pf.). Although his family originated in Cyrene, he spent much of his life in Egypt at Alexandria, where he worked in the great Museum and its Library. He never headed the Library, but he was intimately connected with it and was known at the court of the Ptolemies, where he may have served in his youth as a royal page (Cameron 1995: 1-11). Much of his most influential poetry celebrates members of the dynasty.
According to the Suda Callimachus authored more than 800 books (i. e., papyrus rolls) in poetry and prose, of which the following is a partial list (Test. 1 Pf.):
The Coming of lo; Semele; Founding of Argos; Arcadia; Glaukos; Hopes; satyric dramas; tragedies; comedies; lyric poems; Ibis...; Museum; Pinakes of the Illustrious in Every Branch of Literature and of What they Wrote, in 120 books; Pinax and Register of the Dramatic Poets Arranged Chronologically from the Beginning; Pinax of the Glosses and Compositions of Democrates; Names of Months According to Tribe and Cities; Foundations of Islands and Cities and their Changes of Name; On the Rivers of Europe; On Marvels and Curiosities in the Peloponnesos and Italy; On Changes of Names of Fish; On Winds; On Birds; On the Rivers of the Inhabited World; Collection of Wonders of the Entire World According to their Locations.
What emerges from the bare essentials of his biography is a portrait of a polymathic scholar with an extraordinary range of interests. These scholarly interests inform his poetry as much as - some would say more than - the divine inspiration of the Muse, and it is one of the features of his poetry that modern readers find most difficult to appreciate. As W. Clausen once observed (1982: 182), ‘‘it is impossible to read much of Callimachus... without being impressed, or depressed, by his multifarious learning.’’
Callimachus’ most famous work of poetry was the Aetia, which more than any of his other works, more so indeed than any other single work of Greek literature after Homer, impressed itself upon the minds of the Roman poets of the first century bc. The work no longer survives intact and until the twentieth century it had to be reconstructed from scattered quotations in other ancient authors. Papyrus finds in the last century have significantly increased our understanding of the poem’s composition, narrative content, and style. There is general agreement about the basic outlines of the Aetia, which was composed in two parts. At the beginning of the poem (fr. 2 Pf.), Callimachus imagined himself transported in a dream from Alexandria to Mount Helicon in Greece, the place where Hesiod famously encountered the Muses while herding his sheep ( Theog. 22-34). There Callimachus engages in a lively question-and-answer session with the Muses as he asks about the origins of rituals and numerous other topics. The answers that he receives from them form the etiology that gives the work its title. This structure was not carried over to Books 3 and 4, which were probably composed later and added to the original two-book version. In these last two books etiological stories are straightforwardly juxtaposed and we do not know how Callimachus endowed this part of his point with narrative unity, or if he did so at all.
Beyond this general outline, there is considerable controversy over many of the details of the Aetia, particularly concerning the Prologue to the work (fr. 1 Pf.), in which Callimachus addresses his critics, whom he refers to as ‘‘Telchines,’’ a mythical race of troglodytes dwelling on the island of Rhodes. This important programmatic statement is open to conflicting interpretations both because of the fragmentary state of the text and because of the cryptic terms in which Callimachus states the fundamental premises of his approach to poetry (fr. 1.1-6 Pf.):
[Often] the Telchines mutter at my song, ignorant as they are and no friends of the Muse, because I did not accomplish one continuous poem on [the deeds] of kings or heroes [of old] in many thousands of lines, but instead like a child [steer] my poetry into a small compass, though the decades of my years are not few.
This opposition between two types of poetry, the long and turgid versus the short and refined, is a consistent theme throughout the Prologue. The device of contrasting one with the other is reproduced with concrete examples in an important passage, where Callimachus refers to two predecessors in the genre of elegy, one the much earlier Mimnermus, the other his near-contemporary Philetas. Unfortunately, the papyrus that preserves this text is damaged at key points; addressing his critics, the Telchines, Callimachus asserts (fr. 1.9-12): ‘‘[...] of a few lines; but bountiful Demeter by far outweighs the big [lady?]. And [of his] two [works], not the big woman, but the small-scale [verses] teach us that Mimnermus is sweet.’’ The interpretation of these lines is much disputed and the brackets indicate how speculative is the reconstruction of text, but an ancient commentary on these lines that is also preserved on papyrus probably points in the right direction in explaining that a long poem by Philetas is being compared unfavorably with a shorter work known as the ‘‘Demeter.’’ Likewise, a longer poem by Mimnermus, identified as ‘‘the big woman,’’ is being unfavorably contrasted with his shorter poems (Cameron 1995: 307-9).
Sixty-three epigrams attributed to Callimachus are preserved in the Palatine Anthology, and surviving fragments (frr. 393-402 Pf.) suggest that he wrote many more. The selection preserved in the Anthology covers a wide range of topics, including erotic, sympotic, funerary, and dedicatory. In many epigrams literary themes are intertwined with the personal, most notably in a poem that makes a connection between the poet’s erotic interest in a handsome youth and his tastes in literature (Epigr. 28 Pf.):
I loathe the Cyclic poem, nor do I like the road that carries many to and fro;
I also hate a gadabout lover, nor do I drink from the fountain: I detest all common things.
Lysanias, you are so, so handsome - but before I get the words out clearly, Echo says ‘‘he’s another’s.’’
The first four lines of the poem have often been read as a separate statement of Callimachus’ poetic creed, but it is important to consider his programmatic pronouncements in their entire context: that is how Catullus and the Roman poets read them, however they may have adapted their readings to their own purposes. This is an erotic poem, in which Callimachus first lists four things he does not like, while in the last couplet he describes what he does like, the boy Lysanias. The final twist comes in the last line when it turns out that he cannot have what he likes after all (Cameron 1995: 387-402). The Cyclic poems that he does not like and the imagery of the crowded road echo themes raised in the Aetia Prologue, but they are adapted here to the amatory purposes of the epigram. For his association of his personal affairs and Lesbia with literary values, Catullus found an influential precedent in Callimachus.
Callimachus’ antipathy to long poetry on heroic themes has sometimes been considered at odds with his other major narrative work, a hexameter poem of more than a thousand lines known as the Hecale. It is usually classed by scholars as an ‘‘epyllion,’’ a modern critical term used to describe a wide range of poems from the Hellenistic period to Roman times containing narrative of less than epic proportions. Although the term is not ancient (W. Allen 1940), it serves a practical utility in discussing the common characteristics of a number of Hellenistic works, some largely lost, such as Callimachus’ Hecale or the Hermes of Eratosthenes, others such as Theocritus’ Idylls 13 (‘‘Hylas’’) or 24 (‘‘Heracliscus’’) surviving but differing considerably in scale (Hollis 1990: 23-6). Although the Hecale survived the wreck of ancient literature only in papyrus scraps and later quotations, from the reputation it enjoyed in antiquity it is clear that, for most later Greek and Roman writers, this poem provided the prototype for the short narrative poem. It recounts the story of Theseus’ defeat of the great bull that was ravaging the countryside around Marathon. But the most prominent feature of Callimachus’ narrative was not the actual heroic feat: most of the poem told of his visit with an old peasant woman from whom the poem takes its title. Theseus rests overnight in her hut when he seeks shelter from a sudden rainstorm. Much of the poem seems to have been taken up with their conversation and her hospitality to the hero, and although most of this part of the Hecale has been lost, some appreciation of its characteristics may be gleaned from Ovid’s imitation in his description of the visit by Jupiter and Mercury to the peasant home of Baucis and Philemon (Met. 8.624-724). A key trait that this poem shares with Catullus, as we shall see, is a narrative focus that deviates from the ostensible theme of the poem.
Papyrus discoveries have also restored some portions of a collection of 13 poems in iambic meters apparently designed as a coherent collection (Kerkhecker 1999: 27195). The first of the Iambi represents the figure of Hipponax, the sixth-century poet who, together with Archilochus, was most closely identified with the origins of the genre. Hipponax returns from the dead to lecture the philologists of the Museum in Alexandria, warning them against envy. The collection is a miscellany, with invective playing a reduced role and including poems on a variety of topics, among them fable, epinician, and ecphrasis. In the framing poem (13), Callimachus again invokes Hipponax in defending himself against criticisms for writing in a variety of forms (polyeideia). In a central passage, he denies that there is a ‘‘one poet, one genre rule’’ (fr. 203.30-4 Pf.): ‘‘who said... you compose pentameters, you the heroic, it is your lot from the gods to compose tragedy? In my opinion, no one.... ’’ Callimachus has softened the invective tone of iambic poetry to include a wider range of admonitory discourse, and adapted it to literary programmatic purposes in defense of a more sophisticated approach to literary genre (Acosta-Hughes 2002: 82-9).
Six hymns survive in a medieval manuscript tradition, reviving the traditional form of the Homeric hymns. It is a matter of dispute whether these hymns actually formed part of a ritual performance (Cameron 1995: 63-7) or, as most critics believe, were entirely literary creations designed to create the illusion of a performance. The Hymn to Apollo (2) concludes with another important programmatic statement that strikes many of the same notes already heard in the Aetia, the Epigrams, and the Iambi (105-13):
Envy spoke secretly in Apollo’s ear: ‘‘I do not admire the poet who does not sing like the sea.’’ Apollo gave Envy a kick and said: ‘‘Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but it carries much filth and refuse in its water. The bees do not bring water from everywhere to Demeter, but only the pure and undefiled stream that rises up from a holy spring, the supremely best.’’ Hail, lord; but let Blame go where Envy dwells.
Many critics have seen in this passage a further statement of Callimachus’ antipathy to narrative epic, including even Homeric epic (F. Williams 1978: 85-9). The passage closely parallels the Aetia Prologue in its denunciation of the big and crude, but it also serves a function within the hymn in cutting short what the poet had promised would be a performance of the god’s virtues that would last for days. Callimachus’ pronouncements on literary values were enormously influential, both among his contemporaries and eventually at Rome; but they are never cut-and-dried statements to be taken as prescriptive. Catullus and Callimachus’ other readers at Rome for the most part knew how to read his works in context and adapted his aesthetics to their own.
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