The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome (review)

The publication of Rudolf Pfeiffer’s magisterial edition of the fragments of Callimachus’ poetry in 1949–1953 led to a general reassessment of the relationship between Roman poets and their Hellenistic models, best exemplified perhaps by Walter Wimmel’s Kallimachos in Rom (1960), “a book,” as Hunter notes, “increasingly cited rather than read” (2). With the publication of this modest volume, Wimmel is now sure to be cited a good deal less. Developments over the course of the generation after Wimmel’s work make the time ripe to revisit the influence of Callimachus on Roman poetry, and not least among those developments is the reappraisal of Hellenistic poetry to which Hunter has himself contributed, most notably in his recent (with M. Fantuzzi) Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge 2004). In much of his critical work on Hellenistic poetry Hunter has moderated the former orthodoxy that these poets represented a break with the past, a view that underlies his reading of the Roman poets here. In Hunter’s interpretations (4), “Hellenistic poetry attempts recuperation at least as much as it glories in difference.” This makes a suitable starting point for the four case studies in this volume, exploring the ways in which some of the Roman poets sought not only to appropriate the Greek literary tradition, but also to incorporate themselves into it.

The first chapter, “In the Grove,” most closely tracks the subject matter of Wimmel’s earlier work without aiming at an exhaustive treatment of the programmatic passages in which Roman writers depict scenes of initiation into the traditions of Greek poetry. Hunter focuses on three texts, Propertius 3.1, Vergil’s Sixth Eclogue, and Ovid, Amores 3.1, to illustrate the principle that the Romans saw their Hellenistic models as part of a longer and deeper strain of tradition that stretched back to include classical and archaic works: not just Philitas, but Mimnermus as well. Not just Callimachus, but Hesiod too: “the Roman engagement with Callimachus is always part of a complex engagement with Greek literary and intellectual culture in a much wider sense” (41). The ramifications of this analysis are explored in subsequent chapters that take in much broader territory than was ever conceived of by Wimmel.

In the second chapter Hunter pursues this expanded analysis of the cultural intersection of Greek and Roman through an examination of the role of Dionysus in poems of Horace (Carm. 1.37), Tibullus (1.7), and Propertius (3.17). The most interesting part of this discussion is perhaps Hunter’s brief investigation of Isiac hymns as part of the literary and cultural heritage exploited by Tibullus (57–61). In the third chapter, “Nothing Like This Before,” Hunter develops his theme through an exploration of Catullus’ adaptations of Callimachean similes. The final chapter is a revised version of his contribution to Fantuzzi and Papanghelis’ splendid Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral. Here Hunter reprises in a pastoral key many of the themes already developed earlier in the book in a compact and learned survey of Virgil’s use of the bucolic tradition. The shadow of Callimachus is long enough to take in Theocritus as well as many other strands of Hellenistic poetry: as Hunter later notes (146), “Callimachus’ name has always been made to stand, almost by metonymy, for things beyond his own poetry.”

This point is taken from the brief afterword, which concludes the volume, but it is a leitmotiv running throughout the book. As we learn more about Greek literature from the third to first centuries b.c.e., and continue to recontextualize what we already think we know, Callimachus remains as a dominant presence, a shadow, to use Hunter’s metaphor, that sometimes seems to overwhelm other presences whose importance we are now better positioned to gauge than was Wimmel...