Much of the spirit of this complex age can be caught in its sculpture. The most favoured medium was bronze, tragically all too easily melted down and so often surviving only in later Roman marble copies. If the fifth century was one of calm idealism and proportion, there now evolved a more luxuriant and ornate style that sometimes bordered on the grotesque. The wonderful third - (possibly fourth-) century bc sculpture of a dancing satyr that dominated the first gallery of the 2012 London Royal Academy’s exhibition Bronze provides a superb example of the period’s exuberance. In architecture this was the age of the Corinthian column with its rich foliage (the earliest example found was in fact on the temple to Apollo at Bas-sae, built at the end of the fifth century), but there was a freedom for the patron to mix classical styles according to taste.
There is also a renewed interest in the personal. Figures are shown undertaking everyday tasks—a boy takes a thorn from his foot, a girl dressed in a chiton and mantle sits on a stool and gazes modestly at the ground. There is less inhibition in poses and often a preoccupation with movement. Another superb example of a figure in motion is the bronze jockey boy found in the sea off Cape Artemisium and now in the National Museum in Athens. Figures may sprawl rather than stand in perfect balance. A favourite is Hermaphrodite, whose sexual ambivalence, male genitals, female body, was created when a nymph fell in love with Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, and asked the gods if she could be joined to his body. Alongside the Hermaphrodites comes the appearance of the female nude in sculpture. (Female nudes were already common on vases, and could be seen in paintings after the early fourth century.) The first known is the celebrated Aphrodite by Praxiteles discussed earlier (p. 3) and she reappears in a variety of poses, some coyly modest, others more openly erotic. (On art in this period see Lucilla Burn, Hellenistic Art: From Alexander the Great to Augustus, London, 2004; J. J. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age, Cambridge and New York, 1986; and R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook, London, 1991.)
A new interest in the individual, stimulated perhaps by the growth of wealthier lifestyles, is reflected in the emergence of portraiture. It originates in the coins of the period but then spreads to bronze and marble. Thousands of famous figures and local patrons, including kings, philosophers, dramatists, and athletes, were commemorated by statues in the market-places of the great cities. The monuments, which had traditionally lined the way into cities for centuries, now become more elaborate and widely spread. In some cities it seems as if there was a forest of statues cramming the public places.
The Hellenistic age was also an extraordinarily fertile and influential one for literature, although most of it has been lost. The great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum dominate. Founded by the first two Ptolemies in the first half of the third century bc, Alexandria’s collection may have run to a million texts. The librarians set out with the ambition of acquiring copies of every known work, even down
To cookery books. Bookstalls were scoured, ships docking at Alexandria were raided, and the official copies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides borrowed from Athens and then never returned. The library contributed more than any individual institution to preserving the literary works of Classical Greece in an age where Homer still enjoyed Shakespearian status among the educated. It was through the sponsorship of Ptolemy II, who wanted to have copies of even Hebrew texts in the library, that the scriptures were translated into Greek, the so-called Septuagint.
Alexandria’s is the first known library to have its works shelved alphabetically (although this extended only to the first letter of each title.) The erudite Callimachus (C.310-C.240 Bc) compiled a list of the books by authors grouped into the category in which they wrote, such as history, philosophy or lyric poetry. Distinct from the Library was the Museum (the word means a place of the Muses, where the cultivation of the arts and learning takes place). It was founded by the first of the Ptolemies, Ptolemy Soter, and became the haunt of scholars from throughout the Greek world. Those who failed to gain entry lampooned it as a centre of frivolous research and alcoholism. ‘In the polyglot land of Egypt many now find pasturage as endowed scribblers, endlessly quarrelling in the Muses’ birdcage’, as one Timon of Phlius put it in the best tradition of ridiculing intellectuals as essentially ineffectual members of society; but overall Museum and Library played an essential role in keeping Greek culture alive and intact.
Alexandria’s Library had a rival at Pergamum where the Attalid king Eumenes II (197-160) built up his own collection so ruthlessly that there are even reports that the works of Aristotle had to be hidden in a trench so that Eumenes could not get his hands on them. Eventually he is said to have accumulated 200,000 rolls of papyrus and this is borne out by excavations at Pergamum that have identified the original building. It is a moving experience to stand between its walls and distinguish the three rooms where the rolls were kept and the colonnade where readers would take out the rolls to consult them in the light. The competition from Perga-mum infuriated the Ptolemies and they even banned the export of papyrus from Egypt. The response was a fruitful one. Papyrus survives well in the aridity of Egypt but soon rots in the damp. The Attalids were forced to use parchment (from animal skins, calves, sheep, or goats) for their texts. The production became so linked with Pergamum that the Latin pergemena, ‘paper of Pergamum’, provides the source for the word ‘parchment’ itself and parchment became for centuries the durable medium for all forms of manuscript. Yet, if the later Greek writer Plutarch is accurate, Alexandria won out in the end. Plutarch records that Mark Antony gave the complete library of Eumenes to his lover Cleopatra and transferred it to Alexandria.
The Library of Alexandria eventually disappeared. A number of distinct moments of destruction and burning are recorded between the first century Bc and the Arab conquests of the seventh ad. The site of a series of lecture rooms may have been identified in recent excavations. The loss of Hellenistic literature, both from Alexandria and other regions such as southern Italy, has been devastating. Of the enormous number of histories believed to have been written, only one, that of Polybius, survives and even then only in parts. (It is described in Chapter 22.)
What does remain is mostly poetry, and vast sections of even this—tragedy, for instance—are missing.
The loss is the greater as the Roman poets learnt much from the Hellenistic poets. The Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence were heavily dependent on the comic playwright Menander (342-292 Bc), whose plots they freely adapted. Some of Menander’s work does survive, including at least one full play found only recently in a cache of papyrus in Egypt. Menander is seen as the master of the so-called New Comedy, which originated in Athens in the late fourth century and became popular throughout the Graeco-Roman world. It is middle-class comedy, centring on the affairs of the well-to-do who find themselves caught up in complicated plots and coincidences. Kidnapped children reveal themselves as long-lost heirs, while wellborn girls raped and made pregnant under cover of darkness at festivals emerge to find the man they wish to marry is in fact the father of their child. There is little on politics, a great deal on marriage and money. The end is always happy with even the most obstinate of problems resolved. Moliere, Sheridan, the Italian Carlo Goldoni, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw are among those who appear to be in Menander’s debt.
The poets of the period enjoyed a private world of intimacy based on friendship, nostalgia, and scholarship. Their poetry is self-consciously literary. Some of the mood has been captured in William Cory’s famous, if not strictly accurate, translation of Callimachus’ lament for his dead friend, Heracleitus:
They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake;
For Death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
Callimachus was the most influential of the poets of the period, a particular favourite of the Romans, including Catullus and Ovid. He was a man of learning, responsible, as has been mentioned, for a 120-volume catalogue of the library at Alexandria and a supposed 800 volumes of other works. He set a tone for the age, one of striving after good taste and refined scholarship in an unashamedly elitist manner. ‘I despise neo-epic sagas: I cannot welcome trends that drag the populace this way and that. Peripatetic sex-partners turn me off; I do not drink from the mains, can’t stomach anything public.’ (Translation: Peter Jay.) His waspish criticisms of modern soap operas would have been a joy to read. His Hymns, of which six survive, were elaborate compositions designed to be read among discerning friends, while his epigrams, such as the most famous to Heracleitus quoted above, deal with his more personal feelings, including his love for boys. It was his range, versatility, and lively intelligence that made him the archetypal poet of the age, and he is more quoted in this period than any other poet apart from Homer. His major works are now lost. They were copied and survived into the Middle Ages but are
Then believed to have perished in the sack of the Imperial Library in Constantinople following the Fourth Crusade of 1204. (For poetry in general see G. O. Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry, Oxford and New York, 1988, and Richard Hunter, ‘Literature and its Contexts, in Erskine (ed.), A Companion to the Hellenistic World.)
Relationships between these poets were often uneasy, and Callimachus was supposed to have had a spat with Apollonius Rhodius (c.295-215 Bc), another habitue of the library at Alexandria, who had made his home in Rhodes. While Callimachus was the supreme exponent of the short and polished epigram, Apollonius revived the epic in the form of a long account of the adventures of the Argonauts. This difference in their approach to poetry probably fuelled their quarrel. Apollonius’ Argonautica is chiefly remembered for its portrayal of the love of Medea for Jason, ‘the Greeks’ most brilliant portrayal of a girl falling passionately in love, in the words of Robin Lane Fox. It may have provided the inspiration for Virgil’s affair between Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid, and continued to be a favourite into medieval times.
As important for European literature was the emergence of pastoral poetry. Its father is usually seen to be Theocritus (first half of the third century). Theocritus was a native of Syracuse and probably lived in southern Italy before being attracted to Alexandria by Ptolemaic patronage. He may have drawn on the traditional songs of the shepherds of southern Italy to create a world in which shepherds banter with each other, woo playful girls, or lament the death of a companion against a backdrop of the changing seasons and fertile countryside. Love-making is at first joyful and freely enjoyed on the grass or among the cypress groves, though often disillusion follows. Theocritus describes the seduction of a girl by Daphnis, a legendary Sicilian herdsman who reappears in pastoral poetry through the ages, and goes on:
Thus did this happy pair their love dispense With mutual joys, and gratified their sense;
The God of Love was there a bidden guest;
And present at his own mysterious feast.
His azure mantle underneath he spread,
And scattered roses on the nuptial bed;
While folded in each other’s arms they lay,
He blew the flames and furnished out the play,
And from their foreheads wiped the balmy sweat away.
First rose the maid, and with a glowing face Her downcast eyes beheld her print upon the grass;
Thence to her herd she sped herself in haste:
The bridegroom started from his trance at last,
And piping homeward jocundly he passed.
(Translation by the English poet John Dryden, 1685)
The happiness was not to last, and Daphnis was to die of love, leading to a lament by Theocritus which was to echo down the years and provide a model for such pastoral elegies as John Milton’s Lycidas:
But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Thee, shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves,
With wild thyme and the gadding vine oergrown,
And all their echoes mourn.
The attraction of the countryside as refuge is explored by another Syracusan poet, Moschus (c.350 bc). The translation is by the poet Shelley.
When winds that move not its calm surface sweep The azure sea, I love the land no more;
The smiles of the serene and tranquil deep Tempt my unquiet mind. But when the roar Of Ocean’s great abyss resounds, and foam Gathers upon the sea, and vast waves burst,
I turn from the drear aspect to the home Of Earth and its deep woods, where, interspersed,
When winds blow loud, pines make sweet melody.
Whose house is some lone bark, whose toil the sea,
Whose prey the wandering fish, an evil lot Has chosen. But I my languid limbs will fling Beneath the plane, where the brook’s murmuring Moves the calm spirit, but disturbs it not.
World History
