The Poets of Alexandria by Susan Stephens (review)

The title of Susan Stephens's The Poets of Alexandria is purposefully chosen. The city of Alexandria, especially its position in between the Greek and Egyptian worlds, takes centre stage throughout. We do, of course, still learn much about common critical approaches to Hellenistic poetry; Stephens, though, weaves aesthetic questions about genre and form into a more accessible narrative. Approximately 70 of the book's 160 pages are drawn from material already published elsewhere (xi). Despite this, the book flows naturally. The bibliography is also quite up to date: at least 30 items are from within the last decade. If you are teaching a course that addresses Alexandria or the Ptolemies and you have struggled to find an accessible yet meaningful introduction to Hellenistic poetry, this book fills that gap.

The Introduction, "Changing Places," lays out why and how "Alexandrian poetry is different" (1). The authors discussed in this volume (Posidippus, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius) came from elsewhere to a new kind of place: one where Greek and Egyptian elements sat side by side, queens were on par with kings, and poems targeted a reading audience. These poets were in the business of creating cultural memory (11), so we must judge these texts and their authors on their own terms rather than by constant reference to the Classical period. Stephens also gives the reader a clear sense of what Alexandria looked like and why it looked the way it did (12–17).

In Chapter 1, "The Canon of Truth: Posidippus of Pella," an overview of Posidippus' oeuvre leads to an insightful comparison of his epigram collection to a mosaic: "if individual pieces of tile or stone appear bland or insignificant, when viewed from a distance the vibrant pattern emerges" (28). Posidippus reveals aspects of Alexandrian life to us as he "stages the movement of valuable objects, of people and of political power towards Alexandria" (29). Stephens presents Posidippus' aesthetic program as one of "juxtaposing large and small," but also pushes her reader to recognize that Posidippus is "evoking the intellectual milieu of the Ptolemaic empire" (55). Stephens discusses the poems in their thematic order, printing, for example, five of the lithika poems and considering two of the anathematika closely. This chapter throughout does an excellent job of contextualizing Posidippus' poetic program in its contemporary worlds of art and politics, but the frequency of transliterated Greek terms might slow down some readers who are encountering them for the first time.

Chapter 2, "The Bucolic Imagination: Theocritus of Syracuse," demonstrates how Theocritean poetry "constructs the ruler and the pastoral landscape as mutually interdependent" (83). Stephens uses Idylls 1.1–4 to demonstrate Theocritus' "experiments with sound" and the "formal symmetries" that underlie his poetic strategy (60). Idylls 13, 24, and 22 also receive close attention, the last in the context of connections between Egypt and Sparta. The problematic intrusion of the heroic world into the pastoral one is addressed with Idylls 4 and 5 (69–72). Stephens intriguingly connects Theocritus' Polyphemus with Antigonus "the One-Eyed" and Philip II of Macedon (73–74). Idylls 14 and 15 are read as a juxtaposed pair (74–79), as are 16 and 17, with a comparison between Hiero II and Ptolemy (79–83).

Chapter 3, "Beyond the Reach of Envy: Callimachus of Cyrene," opens with a cautious biography (85–86) and rejects the idea that Callimachean aesthetics is about a recherché elitism and distance from sociopolitical realities (86–91). In Stephens's reading, the Aetia, like the works of Posidippus and Theocritus, develops a geographical and chronological trajectory toward Alexandria (93–96). She helpfully addresses Callimachus' motivations for writing aitia, suggesting that "Callimachus is interested in the cultural context of an explanation" (92–93) and proposing that the Aetia offers "a tapestry of not just Greek, but Graeco-Egyptian behaviors" (99). The Hecale, as a doublet of the Victory of Berenice, similarly "bind[s] Greeks from locally distinct cities into a common whole...