At the end of the fifth century, several decades before the establishment of Alexandria and its cultural institutions, the poet Choirilos of Samos could bemoan the situation of the modern poet, faced with the formidable output of his predecessors:
Ah blessed was the man skilful in song, servant of the Muses,
Who lived at that time when the meadow was still virgin. (fr. 2.1-2 Bernabe PEG)
For a poet working in the Library at Alexandria the problem was more acute still: not only had the Archaic and Classical old masters of Homer, Hesiod, Archilochos, Sappho, Pindar, Sophokles, Aristophanes, etc. gone before, they were now physically present and available for consultation and comparison within the Library itself. How did the Hellenistic poets respond to such an intimidating challenge?
It is clear that the poets working during the zenith of Hellenistic poetry under the first three Ptolemies, such as Kallimachos, Theokritos, and Apollonios, regularly mark their poems as ‘‘coming after’’ in a number of different ways. Kallimachos’ book of Iambi, for example, which takes up and develops the Archaic genre of iambos (where invective and abuse were prominent elements), begins with one of the Archaic masters of the genre, the sixth-century bc Hipponax of Ephesos, returning from the dead to harangue the scholars of Alexandria:
Listen to Hipponax! That’s right:
I’m back from hell, where an ox sells for a penny. I’m back, loaded with iambi
Aimed not at old Boupalos. (la. 1.1-4)
Although Kallimachos is employing here the ‘‘limping’’ choliambic metre with which Hipponax was particularly associated, he also clearly indicates the epigonal and changed status of his iambos by giving us a Hipponax who does not attack his old enemy, Boupalos, and who has been transferred to Alexandria. His target is now different: Alexandrian scholars (philologoi), to whom he does not simply direct Archaic abuse, but whom he also advises to stop envying one another (according to the papyrus summary of the poem’s contents, Dieg. VI.4-6). Although the now fragmentary state of the Iambi makes it difficult to be certain, it seems that the opening poem anticipates a development of this kind of poetry in a new direction through the rest of the collection, which seems even to have included the celebration of an athletic victory (la. 8) and the celebration of the birth of a child (la. 12).
The Iambi indicate that, although Hellenistic poetry might be self-consciously epigonal, we should not imagine that succeeding to the literary inheritance of earlier Greek culture was viewed wholly negatively. Rather the impression which the Hellenistic poets regularly give is of taking advantage of their unprecedented ability to incorporate the literature of the past within their own work, and to re-make it for the very different circumstances of the Hellenistic Period. We find, for example, not only the transformation of Archaic genres into changed Hellenistic analogues (as we have seen with the Iambi), but also what we might see as the ‘‘preservation’’ of several different Archaic song-types through a process of‘‘transla-tion’’ from a range of lyric metres to the typical Hellenistic forms of the hexameter and the elegiac couplet. This too brings with it an acknowledgement of difference and of ‘‘coming after,’’ because what prompts the need to preserve these Archaic forms of song is the disappearance of the performance and wider social contexts in which they were embedded (Fantuzzi 1993: 42-6, Hunter 1996: 3-5). Even the choral lyric poetry of the self-consciously pan-Hellenic poet Pindar was composed for particular (usually public) occasions, and for first performance (at least) by a chorus to complex musical accompaniment. But from the point of view of Ptolemaic Alexandria this age was long past: many of the occasions for the performance of choral song had themselves disappeared, and Hellenistic poets probably no longer possessed the necessary musical expertise for the composition of the complex of song, dance, and music which formed choral lyric (Hunter 1996: 3-4, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 26-33).
Hellenistic poets such as Kallimachos and Theokritos ensured the continuing relevance of this earlier lyric poetry by engaging with it directly in their own work. In Idyll 24 of Theokritos, for example, we find an adaptation of a mythic narrative from Pindar’s Nemean 1 (a victory ode for Chromios of Aitna on Sicily, composed between about 475 and 467 bc), in which the goddess Hera sends two snakes to kill the baby Herakles. The Pindaric telling of this story concentrates on one or two details to convey the setting and the action:
When Zeus’ son had emerged from his mother’s womb
With his twin brother into the amazing brilliance of day,
Escaping her birth-pangs, golden-throned Hera was not unaware of him
As he lay there in yellow swaddling clothes.
The queen of the gods, furious in her heart, forthwith dispatched snakes,
And they made straight through the open doors
For the wide inner part of the chamber,
Impatient to envelop the infants in their darting jaws.
But Herakles raised his head upright and set about his first battle,
Seizing the two snakes by the throat in his two irresistible hands,
Strangling them. Time passed, and forced the breath from their dreadful bodies.
(Nemean 1. 35-47, tr. Verity)
Theokritos, however, gives this typically pacy and choppy lyric narrative a more languorous and ‘‘epic’’ pace. We begin with Alkmena, the mother of Herakles and his brother Iphikles, singing her boys a lullaby as she put them to sleep in an opening scene which itself takes up ten lines. When Hera finally send her snakes the differences from Pindar’s version become particularly clear:
But at the time when the Bear at midnight dips to its rest,
Next to Orion’s mighty shoulder, cunning Hera despatched Two terrible, monstrous serpents with arching dark blue coils Towards the broad threshold where the palace’s latticed doorposts Stood, with strict instructions to devour the infant Herakles. They Twisted and writhed their way over the ground on bloodthirsty bellies,
Evil fire flashed from their eyes, and their jaws spat lethal poison.
But when they were close to touching the boys with their flickering Tongues, Alcmena’s sons awoke. (Theokritos. Id. 24.11-21, tr. Verity)
In Pindar the ‘‘darting jaws’’ (and later the ‘‘dreadful bodies’’) of the snakes serve as the description of Herakles’ assailants, but Theokritos fills out the picture with their blue coils, twisting bodies, flashing eyes, spitting venom and flickering tongues. But this is not the only shift with regard to Idyll 24’s lyric model. We can also see further patterns which are widespread in the different treatment of Archaic and Classical narratives and characters in the Hellenistic Period: Theokritos is also concerned to bring his mythological heroes down to size by emphasizing the domestic aspects of the setting of Herakles’ first battle (Gow 1952: 2.415). This is already clear in the opening lullaby scene, and is further emphasized by the way in which Theokritos narrates the reactions of mother and father to the attack on their sons:
Alcmena first heard the scream, and woke with a start:
“Amphitryon, get up! I’m dreadfully scared! Get up - don’t wait To put your sandals on. Did you not hear those loud screams - it’s our Younger boy. And look: it’s deep midnight, but we can see the walls As clearly as if it was bright dawn. Dear husband, there is something Wrong in the house - there must be.’’ (Theokritos Id. 24.34-40, tr. Verity)
Alkmena sounds like an ordinary Hellenistic woman reacting to the sound of her screaming children in the night. This is also part of a wider pattern, in this poem and in Alexandrian literature more generally, of creating an effect of‘‘realism’’ (on which see, in general, Zanker 1987), even if this is ironized by the context or situation of the narrative itself. In Idyll 24, for example, Herakles is turned from the new-born baby of Pindar to a ten-month old toddler (v. 1), as if Pindar’s account was too implausible, even for an infant hero (Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 205-6). There may also have been a Ptolemaic dimension to Theokritos’ poem, as there is for much of the poetry produced in Alexandria: the latter part of Idyll 24, which does not have Pindar’s Nemean 1 as a direct model, tells of the education of Herakles, whom some scholars have seen as an idealized (if not unironized) Hellenistic princeling (e. g. Zanker 1987: 179-80).
The ways in which the one epic which survives complete from the Hellenistic Period, Apollonios’ Argonautika, deals with its unavoidable generic predecessors, the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, are also revealing. Here too there are distinct shifts with regard to an Archaic model. Instead of the twenty-four books of each of Homer’s epics (which division into books is probably Hellenistic and may have been contemporary with the composition of the Argonautika: see Pfeiffer 1968: 115-16) we have a modern slimmed-down four, where martial combat hardly features. Jason, apart from his performance of the tasks set him by Aietes, king of Kolchis, to secure the golden fleece (in which he has the magical help of Medea), only engages in anything like a heroic fight once:
Ash spears and shields clashed one against the other,
Like a swift blast of flame that falls upon dry bushes
And crests there. The noisy pandemonium of battle
Fell now, fearful, raging, upon the Dolionian people:
Nor was their king, overriding his fate, to return
Home to his bridal bed and marriage chamber,
But as he turned to face Jason, Jason sprang
And ran him straight through the breast, and the bone shattered
Under the spearpoint, and he on the sand, in spasms,
Accomplished his destiny. (Argon. 1.1026-35, tr. Green)
There is much here to remind us of Iliadic descriptions of battle, such as the poignant mention that the king of the Doliones will not return home (cf. e. g. Il. 17.300ff., one of the many flashes of a warrior’s biography which elicit pathos in the audience of the Iliad - see Griffin 1980: 103-43) and the description of the fatal wound Jason inflicts on him. But crucially this is an accidental killing: Jason and the Argonauts have been blown back onto the shore of Kyzikos, where they have recently been guests. The king Jason kills is the eponymous Kyzikos, and the consequences of the error, once realized, are great:
For three whole days they tore their hair and lamented, they and the Doliones together. But then after they’d circled his corpse three times in their brazen armor they entombed him with honor and contested in funeral games, as ritual demands, on the plain called the Meadow, where still to this day his tumulus stands for posterity to witness.
No, nor did his wife Kleite live on, survive her husband’s decease, but compounded bad with worse by knotting
A noose around her neck. Her death the very
Nymphs of the woods and groves lamented; all the tears
That from their eyes dropped earthbound on her account were gathered
By the goddesses into a spring, which men still call
Kleite, illustrious name of that unhappy bride. (Argon. 1.1057-69, tr. Green)
The fate of Kleite obviously adds to the pathos of the scene (and the situation which leads to her death might remind us of tragedy), but we can also see that Apollonios is interested in connecting up these past mythological events with the contemporary Hellenistic present (‘‘still to this day’’; see Zanker 1987: 120-41, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 49-51). This interest in the origins of names, geographical features and customs should remind us of the investigations and ethnographic interest of Herodotos, and also of Kallimachos’ own poetic exploration of origins, the Aitia, but it also probably reflects ethnographic research then under way - we have evidence of works on non-Greek customs, for example, being written by Kallimachos and one Nymphodoros of Amphipolis, an approximate contemporary of Apollonios. We shall return to the ethnographic interests of the Argonautika when we examine how Egypt is thought and talked about in Ptolemaic literature.
Jason’s accidental killing here, alongside his frequent episodes of helplessness and self-doubt (e. g. ‘‘amazed and at a loss, | said never a word, one way or the other, but sat there | bowed under his heavy load of ruin, in silence, | consuming his spirit,’’ Argon. 1.1286-9, tr. Green), and his dependence on Medea to recover the golden fleece have meant that his ‘‘heroism’’ has often been called into question and seen as part of a Hellenistic awareness that Archaic heroes (such as those in Homer) are out ofplace in the modern world and must be transformed in some manner (cf. Carspecken 1952; Lawall 1966; Beye 1969; Zanker 1987: 201-3). But it seems clear that Jason plays a number of distinct roles in the Argonautika and himself develops different epic predecessors, such as the Iliadic Paris, the lover of Helen, in his attractiveness to Medea (and perhaps also his lack of conspicuous martial success) or the Odyssean Telemachos in his youth, his need of advice, and his enduring of a ‘‘rite of passage’’ (which his killing of Kyzikos may also be meant to echo: see Hunter 1993a: 15-25 on the ‘‘ephebic’’ elements here).
To seek in Jason a consistent portrayal of a new type of hero is perhaps to over-estimate the importance of an Aristotelian consistency of character (cf. Poetics 1454a26-8) for Apollonios’ epic (Hunter 1993a: 12-13). Part of the negotiation with the epic model of Homer (the approved epic in Aristotle) which we find in Apollonios involves producing an epic where the narrative focus and impact are not where we would expect it to be if our only reference-point is Homer. When Apollonios reaches what we might regard as the ‘‘climax’’ of the epic action of the poem, the getting of the fleece, his narrative reveals that this is an epic very different in kind from its Homeric predecessors. His description of the snake is evocative and epic in its use of similes, but also (for an epic) brief and lacking in heroic valor:
As when from smouldering brushwood countless soot-black eddies of smoke go spiraling skyward, each ascending directly after the other, wafted aloft from below in rings, so then did the monster
Undulate its enormous coils, with their protective
Armor of hard dry scales. Now as it writhed
Medeia forced it down there, holding it with her eyes,
In sweet tones calling on Sleep, supreme among gods,
To charm this fearful creature, then invoked the night-wandering
Queen of the Nether World for success in her venture.
Jason followed behind her in terror; but already
The dragon, charmed by her spells, was relaxing the long spine
Of its sinuous earthborn frame, spreading out its countless coils,
As some dark wave, stealthy and noiseless, rolls over
A sluggish expanse of ocean; yet still it struggled
To rear up its frightful head, still obstinately urgent
To wrap its killer jaws round the pair of them together.
But she with a branch of juniper, newly severed,
Dipping it in her potion, chanting strong spells, drizzled
Her charged drugs in its eyes, and their most potent odor
Enveloped it, laid it unconscious. Its jaw dropped where it lay,
In one last spasm, and far behind it those endless
Coils lay stretched out, through the dense trunks of the forest.
Then Jason, at the girl’s urging, reached into the oak tree and brought down the Golden Fleece; but still Medeia stood there smearing the monster’s head with her salves, till Jason forced her to get moving, to make tracks back to their ship,
And so they hurried away from Ares’ shadowy grove. (Argon. 4.139-66, tr. Green)
The use of magic here in the main narrative of the epic is a change from Homer (most ‘‘magical’’ elements there are restricted to Odysseus’ own version of events prior to the main action of the Odyssey in Books 9-12), as is the prominent role played by a woman, who performs what is necessary to recover the fleece. Jason simply reacts to her prompting to grab the target of his endeavors, and the scene ends without the killing of the monster we might have expected from other versions of this and other stories of heroes and snakes (including that of the snakes sent by Hera against Herakles in Pindar, Nemean 1 or Theokritos, Idyll 24, of which there seem to be significant echoes here). But there is a poetic precedent for shifting the main focus of an Argonautika away from the overcoming of the dragon and the getting of the fleece. In Pindar’s Pythian 4, a poem which celebrates a chariot-race victory by the king of Cyrene, the narrator disposes of the end of the story in similar fashion to Apollonios:
Then the marvellous son of Helios told him
Where Phrixus’ knives had staked out the shining fleece;
But he did not expect him to accomplish that labor too,
For it lay in a coppice close to the ravening jaws of a serpent,
Which in thickness and strength was bigger
Than a fifty-oared ship, built by blows of iron tools.
But it is too far for me to travel by the high road, for time presses.
I know a short way, on which I lead many others in poetic skill.
Arcesilas, by guile he killed the grey-eyed serpent with its mottled back,
And with her willing help stole Medea away, who would kill Pelias. (Pyth.4.241-50, tr. Verity)
Here Jason still heroically kills the snake, but the interests of the poem are elsewhere: far more space is devoted to the Argonaut Euphemos, from whom Arkesilas, king of Cyrene, claimed descent (through the sojourn with the Lemnian women, and then the colonization of Thera and thence Cyrene). This forms an example, therefore, of the widespread Hellenistic incorporation of different poetic genres within hexameter poetry, in this case within a full-blown epic. This characteristic of Hellenistic poetry is sometimes described as a ‘‘crossing of genres’’ (cf. Kroll 1924: 202-24), related to a rejection of or dissatisfaction with the generic rules adhered to by earlier poets (cf. e. g. Rossi 1971). But the idea that in earlier poetry such genres were pure and distinct, and only in the Hellenistic period combined to produce hybrids, is problematic (Fantuzzi 1993: 50; Farrell 2003: 392-3; Morrison 2007: 18-21). We find several examples of pre-Hellenistic poems which appropriate or incorporate elements from a range of genres (e. g. Erinna’s hexameter Distaffs which echoes lyric threnos and elegy, or Pindar’s Pythian 4, with its strong echoes of Stesichoros). There are also clear differences in style to be found between different Hellenistic poems: genre is not irrelevant to the much less prominent narrating voice of Kallimachos’ epic Hecale as compared to his elegiac poetry (e. g. Hunter 1993a: 115, Cameron 1995: 440). As we have seen, reasons for the range of types of earlier poem which a Hellenistic poem will echo and appropriate include the availability of this earlier literature in the Alexandrian Library, and a desire to preserve Archaic and Classical poetry by ‘‘translating’’ it into new forms.
It would be a mistake, however, to present poems themselves as the only texts or type of literature being incorporated into Hellenistic poetry. As we have seen, Herodotean and contemporary ethnography is echoed in the Argonautika, and when Apollonios describes the physical symptoms of Medea’s longing for Jason we can see echoes of contemporary medical and scientific research on the nervous system (e. g. by the Alexandrian doctor Herophilos, cf. Fraser 1972: 1.352, Hunter 1989: 179-80), as well as classic poetic depictions of erotic feelings such as Sappho fr. 31V. (e. g. ‘‘a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh’’ (vv. 9-10), tr. Campbell):
Her virgin heart now beat a tattoo on her ribs,
Her eyes shed tears of pity, constant anguish
Ran smoldering through her flesh, hot-wired her finespun
Nerve ends, needled into the skull’s base, the deep spinal
Cord where pain pierces sharpest when the unresting
Passions inject their agony into the senses. (Argon. 3.760-5, tr. Green)
The patterns we have discerned above, such as the changed nature of Hellenistic literary heroes in Theokritos and Apollonios, or the influence of scholarly prose works on the poetry of Kallimachos and Apollonios, might suggest to some readers a common view of poetry and its most important features (in style, content, manner, models). Accordingly, Hellenistic poetry is often seen as having developed a particular set of aesthetic principles embodying its main characteristics, and expressing its self-consciousness as different from the literature of preceding centuries (and perhaps also contemporary literature more slavishly imitative of this earlier work). Many have seen Kallimachos as most representative of this new aesthetics and have taken several apparently ‘‘programmatic’’ passages in his work as evidence of a literary-critical ‘‘manifesto’’ outlining how he thought all poetry should now be written (e. g. Cairns 1979: 11-20). His most famous ‘‘programmatic’’ passage, of course, is the prologue to the Aitia, where Kallimachos responds to detractors whom he calls ‘‘Telchines’’ thus:
‘‘To hell with you, then, spiteful brood of Jealousy: from now on we’ll judge poetry by the art, not by the mile. And don’t expect a song to rush from my lips with a roar:
It’s Zeus’ job, not mine, to thunder.’’ (Aitia fr. 1.17-20 Pf., tr. Nisetich)
The gripe of the Telchines is that Kallimachos has not produced ‘‘a monotonous I uninterrupted poem featuring kings | and heroes in thousands of verses’’ (Aitia fr. 1.3-5 Pf., tr. Nisetich). Hence Kallimachos seems to associate his own poetry not with epic style and length, but with artistry and delicacy. He expands upon these associations by quoting Apollo’s advice to him when he was first starting out as a poet:
‘‘Make your sacrifice as fat as you can, poet, but keep your Muse on slender rations. And see that you go where no hackneys plod: avoid the ruts carved in the boulevard, even if it means
Driving along a narrower path.’’ (Aet. fr. 1.23-8 Pf., tr. Nisetich)
Many critics have seen here a rejection of epic poetry (e. g. Brink 1946: 15) and a preference for shorter and less bombastic genres. The prologue to the Aitia certainly had a long afterlife in the recusatio or ‘‘refusal’’ we find in several Roman poets foregoing the chance to write epic (e. g. Virgil, Ecl. 6.3-8, and see Cameron 1995: 454-83). But it is important to remember the function of‘‘programmatic’’ passages within the context of the poems in which they appear (Hutchinson 1988: 80-4). The main job of a poetic introduction such as the Aitia prologue is to promote the quality of the wider poem and convince the audience of its excellence (Schmitz 1999: 157), so that the principal focus of the prologue to the Aitia is the Aitia itself, rather than the production of a reasoned justification of one’s entire poetic oeuvre. Something similar is true of the other so-called passages which have been seen as forming the Kallimachean ‘‘manifesto,’’ such as the end of the Hymn to Apollo, where Apollo rejects the complaints of personified Envy, ‘‘Phthonos,’’ and declares a preference for the small, pure stream over the large, filthy river (Hymn 2.105-13). While it is true that across these different Kallimachean passages we can see that there are some qualities which tend to be privileged more than once, such as purity, refinement, smallness of size, it is also clear that these are either qualities which most poets would want to associate with their poems, or conveniently elastic ones, such as a lack of size. When does a short poem become a long one (the Aitia stretched to perhaps 6,000 verses)? Programmatic passages are, in fact, a poor short-cut to gaining a sense of the nature and character of Hellenistic poetry. One might think that the Aitia prologue suggests that Alexandrian poets would be hostile to epic, but, in fact, both Kallimachos and Apollonios wrote epics, the Hekale and the Argonautika.
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