Callimachus by Richard Rawles (review)

This new study of Callimachus belongs in the series Ancients in Action, which is described (online) as providing “short and accessible introductions to major figures of the ancient world, depicting the essentials of each subject’s life and significance for later western civilization.” Accessibility here means that all Greek is offered in English translation (the author’s own); where Greek words are used they are translated immediately. There are four chapters plus an Introduction and Envoi, and suggestions for further reading at the end of each.

The Introduction having overviewed the poet’s life and oeuvre and introduced the main works to be discussed, the first chapter is on Callimachus, Philology, and Poetics. Its proof-texts are the epigrams on the Sack of Oechalia (6 Pf.) and Phaenomena (27 Pf.), the Hymn to Apollo, the Acontius and Cydippe, and finally the Aitia prologue. The selection of material justifies itself. The order of presentation is from least to most complex. Ending with the Aitia has the merit that the author uses it to segue into a discussion, with which the chapter ends, of philology ancient and modern, of the neat tie-in between the materiality of texts, which is one (only one) aspect of Callimachus’ presentation of them, and the fact that his works have largely come down to us because of painstakingly minute work on fragments of ancient books. It includes a lovely vignette of the modern greats in action in an Oxford seminar in 1968, when what is now Hecale fr. 69.1 Hollis was restored through the combined efforts of Lloyd Jones (ἕτερον γὰρ ἀπηλ̣ο̣ί̣η̣σ̣ε̣ κ̣ορύ̣ν̣η̣) and M.L. West (the inspired guess ο̣ἰ̣ό̣κ̣ε̣ρ̣ω̣ς̣); and it ponders a remark from A.S. Hollis that we might in fact prefer it that the texts are fragmentary because it keeps the reconstructive philologists in business (“let a complete text of Hecale be found—but not quite yet”). On the other hand, ending with the Aitia treats it (yet again) as a freestanding text and forestalls questions about its relationship with what follows. Why do more people not wonder about this? The range of intertexts is indeed extraordinary (including archaic elegy and Philitas, Aristophanes, Homer, Sappho, and Plato), but all this is familiar; what needs interrogation is the connection between a manifesto of smallness and finesse (and euphony)— and what the poem seems in practice to be foregrounding, namely compositional issues as much as stylistic ones, the nature and poetics of (dis)unity, of (dis)continuity (from which point of view the most important word in the proem would seem in fact to be διηνεκές). The manifesto of novelty and the meditations on the burden of the years could also be seen as preparation for what follows, a playful inscenation and deconstruction of Greek literary genres (catalogue poetry, epic, hymn, sympotic verse, historiography, epinician, sepulchral and dedicatory epigram, and others) here recast in the neutral medium of the elegiac couplet.

The second chapter is on Callimachean Voices (beginning with a nice demonstration of the proto-Hellenistic character of Nestor’s cup). The voices include that of the conch in Ep. 5 Pf., the reader of the Timonoe epitaph (15 Pf.—it might have helped the argument to make the point more clearly that the presentation of a neutrally informative grave inscription through an emotionally engaged reading of it is parallel to the Hellenistic treatment of ecphrasis, no longer a description of an object but a description of a person responding to that object), Simonides (fr. 64 Pf.), Hecale, and the trees and birds in Iambus 4. Hecale is the notable example here. Rawles sees Cercyon as a rewrite of Polyphemus (thorns in eyes; eating raw), which is interesting because the other monster worsted by Theseus, namely Sciron, is also a Polyphemus reprise in a different way (he forces his guests to wash his feet and then kicks them off a cliff, according the same logic as that by which the anti-host Polyphemus eats his guests instead of feeding them). More could be said about...