Ancient Greek Epigrams: Major Poets in Verse Translation

Chapter 6: Callimachus

119 Callimachus was the most famous and influential of all the Greek poets of the third century. His epigrams were read by schoolchildren, his poetry quoted and translated into Latin, and his name mentioned (usually with approval) in the verse of many of the most important Latin poets, including Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. Since Callimachus used Asclepiades as a model in several of his epigrams, he probably belongs (like Posidippus) to the next generation of poets, born perhaps about 300 bce. Callimachus came from the African city of Cyrene, originally a Greek colony but later a part of the empire of the Ptolemies Callimachus Chap ter Six 120 / Callimachus in what is now Libya. Callimachus tells us (in epigram IV) that his grandfather was also named Callimachus and led the army of Cyrene; the poet’s family is likely therefore to have been wealthy and part of the ruling class. He was a pupil of the grammarian Hermocrates and was appointed as a royal page to the court of the Ptolemies. According to the Suda, he married the daughter of Euphrates of Syracuse and lived during the reigns of both Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III Euergetes, dying perhaps about 240 bce. Though never actually the head of the library at Alexandria, Callimachus was an important scholar associated with the court and took on the task of composing the Pinakes or Tablets, a bibliographic encyclopedia in 120 scrolls of the books in the Alexandrian library. Surviving fragments of Callimachus’s work show that it listed the books of each author with titles and often first lines, together with additional information of a biographical or literary nature. This must have been an enormous labor, since the books in the Alexandrian library included nearly all of the transmitted works of Greek literature. He is also said by the Suda to have written many additional scholarly books in prose, such as On the Rivers in Europe, On Birds, and Names of Months According to Tribe and Cities. Callimachus’s great learning is on display in his poetry as well, especially in the fragments we have of his long elegiac poem the Aitia (or Causes), much of which consists of obscure explanations of minor religious customs or cultural traditions. Other than his epigrams, the only poems of Callimachus that have survived nearly intact are the six Hymns, each 100–300 lines long; though different in structure from epigrams, they are of a style and character that reveal much about Callimachus the poet. The Hymns are modeled on the much older Homeric Hymns, which are based on myths of major gods and goddesses and may have been recited at religious festivals. Callimachus’s poems seem superficially similar, but on closer reading they reveal themselves to be literary texts—witty, often irreverent, and sparkling with humor and learning. The first hymn, To Zeus, begins by asking what better god there could be for singing among libations, for- Callimachus / 121 ever great, forever king; but it then ends by saying that no one could possibly praise all of Zeus’s works, and it is the shortest of the hymns. To Apollo also seems to end abruptly, with Envy—symbolizing Callimachus’s detractors—complaining about poets whose poems are too short, who don’t “sing like the sea.” Apollo (the god of poetry) then kicks Envy to one side and declares that “the Assyrian river is a great stream but carries lots of filth and rubbish” and that poetry should be “a small trickle, pure and undefiled from a holy spring.” The fifth hymn, On the Bath of Pallas, is written in elegiac meter, an untraditional meter for a hymn though the most common meter for epigrams (see chapter 1); and the fifth and sixth hymns are both in an untraditional dialect. Callimachus used the form of an archaic hymn but took this genre into new territory, as if in exploration of the conventions upon which the genre was based. He took much the same approach in his Iambi, which have survived only in fragments. The generic guidelines of iambic poetry were established by the work of two earlier Greek poets, Archilochus and Hipponax, who both used iambic meter to write satirical invective and personal slander . All of Callimachus’s Iambi are also in some form of iambic meter, and Hipponax even appears in the first poem, a programmatic reminder of his...