The city of Alexandria, as Daniel Selden has explored (Selden 1998: 289ff.), was founded through displacements, of local Egyptians required to move for the creation of the new city, and of Greeks and others from the rest of the world. Everyone there was from ‘‘somewhere else.’’ Through the third century most Greeks settling in Alexandria retained their foreign affiliation (Selden 1998: 294), rather than becoming citizens of Alexandria itself, and it is clear that a connection with a city of the traditional Greek world was important to the Greek residents of Alexandrian, as we can see from Idyll 15 of Theokritos, where the Alexandrian woman Praxinoa reacts to criticism of her accent by citing her proud ancestry:
Oh, where’s he from, then? What’s our twittering to you?
We’re not your slaves; it’s Syracusans you’re bossing about.
And listen: we’re from Corinth way back, like Bellerophon,
So we talk Peloponnesian. Dorians may speak Dorian, I presume? (Id. 15.89-93, tr. Verity)
The major poets and scholars of the high point of Ptolemaic literary culture were also mostly from elsewhere, such as Asklepiades from Samos, Philitas from Kos, Theokritos (though he is not exclusively associated with the Alexandrian milieu) from Syracuse, Kallimachos and Eratosthenes from Cyrene. The only exception is Apollonios, whom we know as ‘‘of Rhodes,’’ but who is said by the Lives transmitted with the Argonautika to have been an Alexandrian. It is unsurprising in this context that we find in Alexandrian poetry a self-conscious awareness of the distance between Alexandria and the Greek cities and islands from which its Greek population had come, and different ways ofpresenting this distanced Greece. In three ofKallimachos’ six hexameter Hymns (Hymns 2, 5, and 6), for example, the audience is taken to the midst of a Greek festival by a narrator presented as participating in a ritual. In Hymn 5, the Hymn on the Bath of Pallas or Hymn to Athena, we are transported to Argos to witness the ritual bathing of the statue of Athena:
All who pour water for the bath of Pallas,
Come out, come out! Just now I heard
The mares of the goddess whinny: she too
Is anxious to go! Hurry, then,
Blond daughters of Pelasgia, hurry. (Hymn 5.1-4)
We are pitched straight into the excited preparations for the celebration, with the arrival of the goddess herself imminent. But this hymn does not simply give an Alexandrian audience access to a far-away or exotic ritual from mainland Greece.
The poem is fundamentally concerned with the nature of representing in literature such rituals and the gods they celebrate (Hunter 1992: 13, Morrison 2005: 43-6). Males are not allowed to view the Argive statue of Athena:
But as for you,
Men of Pelasgia, beware of seeing the queen, even unwillingly. The man who sees Pallas, guardian of cities, naked looks upon this town of Argos for the last time. (Hymn 5.51-4)
The narrator through whom we are gaining access to the ritual also tells a ‘‘cautionary tale’’ before the statue emerges, which doubly reinforces this message: Teiresias once saw Athena naked accidentally and was blinded, and Aktaion received a worse fate for glimpsing the naked Artemis. But the very subject matter of these myths, illicit male sight of a goddess, raises the question of how the audience of the hymn itself is ‘‘seeing’’ Athena and her ritual. The narrator, who is ‘‘present’’ at the ritual and even seems to be directing it at times (e. g. in the opening lines quoted above), must (from one point of view) be a woman - how else could she witness the ritual? But there are also strong echoes of the historical author, the male Kallimachos, especially when the narrator declares:
And now, Lady Athena, do come out. Meanwhile I’ll these girls a story, not my own: I heard it from others. (Hymn 5.55-6)
This accounting for one’s source not only reminds one of the common scholarly persona of Kallimachos, but also underlines the poet’s control of the hymn: it is not really we who are waiting for Athena to come out - she must wait until the narrator has told the story (Haslam 1993: 124-5). This also serves to point out that what we are allowed to see by the hymn is not the ritual itself, but precisely a representation, a ‘‘mimesis’’: males in the Alexandrian (and modern) audiences are not blinded when Athena finally ‘‘emerges’’ at the end of the hymn (vv. 140-2). Hence the hymn brings with it a sense of the difference between the literary representation of a ritual and the ritual itself, and both the power of such representations to recreate the distant religious practices of Greece (and to penetrate even where male sight is forbidden), but also their limitations.
In the Aitia we find Kallimachos exploring in a different manner how the Greeks of Alexandria might react to their dislocation from the traditional Greek world. After the prologue the primary narrator of the Aitia, who is the aged Kallimachos (a version of the historical author), gives us an account of a dream he has had about meeting the Muses on Mount Helicon in Boiotia as a boy (fr. 2.1-2 Pf.), modeled on Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses at the beginning of the Theogony (Cameron 1995: 130-2). This dream seems to be the context for the dialogue with the Muses which makes up most of Aitia 1-2. Hence this dream transports Kallimachos from Egypt to a favorite haunt of the Muses back in Greece, and closely associated with one of the greatest of Archaic poets, Hesiod. One might see this simply as another example of the marking of difference and distance from the poetry of the past which we have seen elsewhere. But there is more to be said: in fr. 178 Pf. of the Aitia (which perhaps formed the opening of Aitia book 2, Zetzel 1981: 31-3, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 80-1) the narrator is probably telling the Muses about a conversation at a past symposium (which may have ended with the comments of Kallimachos to the Muses in fr. 43.12ff. Pf. about only recollecting what he had heard at a symposium, Cameron 1995: 134-5). In this fragment Kallimachos reverses some of the motifs from Herodotean ethnographic investigation. Kallimachos is in Egypt (fr. 178.5-7 Pf.) and questions his couch-companion at dinner about the customs of his homeland, the island of Ikos (see §3 above):
Tell me
What I’m dying to hear from you:
Why do you Ikians worship Peleus, the Myrmidon king? What has Thessaly to do with Ikos, and why... does the girl with an onion...
In the hero’s procession. (vv. 22-6, tr. Nisetich)
Herodotos, of course, often presents conversation with ‘‘locals’’ as the source for his account of the beliefs or practices of a particular place, as when he cites his ‘‘conversations with the priests of Hephaistos’’ (2.3) for the investigations of the Pharaoh Psammetichos into who are the oldest race on earth. But Herodotos lays great stress on his often having traveled to the places about which he is enquiring: his conversations with the priests take place ‘‘in Memphis’’ (2.2), and what he hears there leads him to travel to Thebes and Heliopolis (2.3). The debate about the truth of Herodotos’ claims to autopsy (e. g. in 2.29, 2.99) is not important here: what matters is that Herodotos presents himself as having traveled in order to answer particular questions, as when he does so in order to investigate the antiquity of the god Herakles:
I wanted to understand these matters as clearly as I could, so I sailed to Tyre in Phoenicia, since I had heard that there was a sanctuary sacred to Herakles there. (2.44, tr. Waterfield)
Herodotean ethnographic enquiry necessitates travel outside Greece, but in the Aitia Kallimachos remains in Egypt - the dialogue with the Muses takes place on Helikon, but this is a dream of Kallimachos who remains in Alexandria. In fact the Kallimachos of the Aitia is famously a non-traveler, as we can see from what the Ikian Theogenes says to him in fr. 178 Pf.:
Happy three times over, and lucky as few people are, if yours is a life ignorant of seafaring! As for me,
I’ve been more at home among the waves than a seagull. (vv. 32-4)
Part of what makes it possible for Kallimachos not to travel is, of course, the Library of Alexandria, which contains within it Greek culture turned into texts to which a scholar or poet has ready access, but his pose of non-traveling also points us to a change in the position of Egypt with regard to the rest of Greece. It is now the cultural ‘‘center’’ of the Hellenistic Mediterranean, for all that it is distanced from the Greece of the literature of earlier periods, and from the social and religious life of the cities from which the Greeks in Alexandria have come (remember that Pollis, the host of the symposium in fr. 178 Pf. creates facsimiles of Athenian festivals in Egypt). Kallimachos can wait for visitors to Egypt to bring him explanations of their customs (of which he already has some knowledge, as fr. 178 Pf. shows us). The attractions of Egypt, and its ‘‘pull’’ on Greeks from around the Mediterranean, are clear from a passage from the first of Herodas’ Mimiamboi (literary choliambic ‘‘mimes,’’ roughly contemporary in date with Kallimachos), where Gyllis explains to Metriche why her man has gone there and not returned:
For everything in the world that exists and is produced is in Egypt: wealth, wrestling schools, power, tranquillity, fame, spectacles, philosophers, gold, youths, the sanctuary of the sibling gods, the King excellent, the Museum, wine, every good thing he could desire. (Herodas 1.27-31, tr. Cunnigham)
World History
