Callimachus

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This article is about the ancient Greek poet. For other uses, see Callimachus (disambiguation).

Callimachus
Aetiology, Epigram, Iambus, Hymn, Epyllion
Notable worksAetia
Hecale

Callimachus (

aesthetic philosophy, known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and, through them, on all subsequent Western literature
.

Born into a prominent family in the Greek city of Cyrene in modern-day Libya, he was educated in Alexandria, the capital of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt. After working as a schoolteacher in the city, he came under the patronage of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus and was employed at the Library of Alexandria where he compiled the Pinakes, a comprehensive catalogue of all Greek literature. He is believed to have lived into the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes.

Although Callimachus wrote prolifically in

aetiological poem, six religious hymns, around 60 epigrams, a collection of satirical iambs, and a narrative poem entitled Hecale. Callimachus shared many characteristics with his Alexandrian contemporaries Aratus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus, but professed to adhere to a unique style of poetry: favouring small, recondite and even obscure topics, he dedicated himself to small-scale poetry and refused to write longwinded epic poetry
, the most prominent literary art of his day.

Callimachus and his aesthetic philosophy became an important point of reference for Roman poets of the late

Hellenist Kathryn Gutzwiller, he "reinvented Greek poetry for the Hellenistic age by devising a personal style that came, through its manifestations in Roman poetry, to influence the entire tradition of modern literature".[2]

Life

Dark stone bust of a young man wearing a headband
Callimachus is thought to have worked under the patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. This bust of Ptolemy is held at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.

An entry in the

romanized: Battiades), but this may be an allusion to the city's mythological founder Battus rather than to his father.[4] His grandfather, also named Callimachus, had served the city as a general. His mother's name was Megatima, falsely given as Mesatma by the Suda. His unknown date of birth is placed around 310 BC.[3]

During the 280s, Callimachus is thought to have studied under the philosopher

Classicist John Ferguson puts the latest date of Callimachus's establishment at the imperial court at 270 BC.[6]

Despite the lack of precise sources, the outlines of Callimachus's working life can be gathered from his poetry. Poems belonging to his period of economic hardship indicate that he began writing in the 280s BC, while his poem Aetia shows signs of having been composed in the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, who ascended to the throne in 246 BC. Ferguson writes that Callimachus stopped writing and died at some point after 240 BC.[8]

Literary work

According to the Suda, Callimachus wrote more than 800[9] individual works in prose and poetry.[2] The vast majority of his literary production, including all prose output, has been lost with the exception of his Epigrams and Hymns. All other works mentioned below have been preserved in fragments.[9]

Epigrams

erotic and purely literary themes.[11] Most of them were transmitted in the Palatine Anthology, a 10th-century manuscript discovered in 1606 at Heidelberg containing a collection of Greek epigrams and poems.[12] Often written from a first-person perspective, the Epigrams offer a great variety of styles and draw on different branches of the epigrammatic tradition.[13] According to the Callimachus scholar Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, "[t]heir intelligent play on language, meter, and word placement" have placed the poems among the most prominent works of the Hellenistic period.[14]

Hymns

Greek Pantheon, including one to Zeus. This statue of the god was found at Camirus and is housed at the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes
.

Among the oldest forms of religious writing,

mimetic because they present themselves as live re-enactments of a religious ritual in which both the speaker and the audience are imagined to take part. The Hymn to Zeus, to Demeter, and to Delos are viewed as non-mimetic since they do not re-create a ritual situation.[18]

It is contested among scholars of ancient literature whether Callimachus's hymns had any real religious significance. The dominant view holds that they were literary creations to be read exclusively as poetry, though some scholars have linked individual elements to contemporary ritual practice. This issue is further complicated by Callimachus's purposeful amalgamation of fiction and potential real-world performance.[19]

Aetia

Main article: Aetia (Callimachus)

The Greek word αἴτιον (aition, 'cause')

Hellenist Kathryn Gutzwiller as one of the poem's most influential features.[22]

The poem is thought to have had about 4,000 lines and is organised into four individual books, which are divided in halves on stylistic grounds.

Akragas, who were known for their excessive cruelty.[28]

The second half of the Aetia does not follow the pattern established in Books 1 and 2. Instead, individual aetiologies are set in a variety of dramatic situations and do not form a contiguous narrative.

epinician narrative is an aetiology of the games themselves.[31] The end of Book 4 and the Aetia as a whole is marked by another court poem, the Lock of Berenice. In it, Callimachus relates how the queen gave a lock of her hair as a votive offering which later became a constellation, the Coma Berenices ("Hair of Berenice").[32]
Another notable story from the second half of the work is the love story of Acontius and Cydippe.[33]

Iambs

At the close of his Aetia, Callimachus wrote that he would proceed to a more pedestrian field of poetry.

carpenter who is praised for crafting many different objects.[36]

The Iambs are notable for their vivid language. Callimachus couches his aesthetic criticism in vivid imagery taken from the natural and social world: rival scholars are compared to wasps swarming from the ground and to flies resting on a goatherd. He often mixes different metaphors to create effects of "wit and incongruity", such as when a laurel tree is described as "glaring like a wild bull".[37] Ferguson also notes the poems' witty use of proverbs in dialectic passages of dialogue.[37]

Hecale

Main article: Hecale (poem)

Callimachus made only one attempt at writing a narrative poem, a mythological epic entitled Hecale. Since the poem is estimated to run to have had around 1000 lines, it constitutes an epyllion, a shorter form of epic poetry dealing with topics not traditionally present in larger-scale works.[36] It recounts a story about the Greek hero Theseus, who, after liberating the city of Marathon from a destructive bull, was hosted by a poor but kindly old woman named Hecale. They form a friendship as she recounts her former life as a member of the upper class. At the end of the poem, Theseus establishes an annual feast and a sanctuary to Zeus in honour of his host.[38]

Since most of Callimachus's poetry is critical of epic as a genre, there has been some speculation about why he chose to write an epic poem after all. The author of the scholia, an ancient commentary on the work of Callimachus, stated that Callimachus abandoned his reluctance after being ridiculed for not writing lengthy poems. This explanation was probably derived from the poet's own intimation at the start of the Aetia and is therefore of limited authority.[39] According to Cameron, Callimachus may have conceived the Hecale as a model epic according to his own tastes.[40]

Pinakes

Main article: Pinakes
drawing of column-studded room in which men study rolls of papyrus.
19th-century artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria, where Callimachus compiled the Pinakes

When working at the Library of Alexandria, Callimachus was responsible for the library's cataloguing.

romanized: pinax),[43] amounted to 120 volumes or five times the length of Homer's Iliad. Although the Pinakes have not survived the end of antiquity, scholars have reconstructed their content from references in surviving classical literature. Authors and their works were divided into the broad categories of 'poetry' and 'prose'.[42] Both categories were further broken down into precise subcategories. For poets, these included, among others, 'drama', 'epic', and 'lyric'; for prose writers, 'philosophy', 'oratory', 'history', and 'medicine'. Entries were sorted alphabetically, giving an author's biography and a list of his works.[44] According to the classicist Lionel Casson, the Pinakes were the first comprehensive bibliographic resource for Greek literature[45] and a "vital reference tool" for using the Alexandrian Library.[46]

Callimacheanism

In his poetry, Callimachus espoused an

heroic epic, which could run to dozens of books in length. Contained in the allegory are two reasons why Callimachus did not write in this genre: firstly, to Callimachus, poetry required a high level of refinement which could not be sustained over the course of a drawn-out work;[50] secondly, most of his contemporaries were writers of epic, creating an over-saturation of the genre which he sought to avoid.[51] Instead, he was interested in recondite, experimental, learned and even obscure topics. His poetry nevertheless surpasses epic in its allusions to previous literature.[9]

Although Callimachus attempted to differentiate himself from other poets, his aesthetic philosophy is sometimes subsumed under the term of Alexandrianism, describing the entirety of Greek literature written in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. In spite of their differences, his work shares many characteristics with that of his contemporaries including the didactic poet Aratus, the epicist Apollonius of Rhodes, and the pastoral poet Theocritus. They all interacted with earlier Greek literature, especially the poems of Homer and Hesiod. Drawing on the Library of Alexandria, they all displayed an interest in intellectual pursuits, and they all attempted to revive neglected forms of poetry.[52]

Reception

Ancient

Vergil's Aeneid interacts frequently with the work of Callimachus. This late-18th-century painting by Jean-Baptiste Wicar shows Vergil reciting his poem to the emperor Augustus
.

Callimachus and his aesthetic philosophy became an important point of reference for Roman poets of the late

Latin: maius opus). Vergil's formulation leaves open whether he sought to write an epic with the refinement called for by Callimachus or whether he had turned his back on Callimacheanism as his career progressed.[54]

Having referred to himself as a "Roman Callimachus" (

Latin: Quamvis ingenio non valet, arte valet).[56] His statement, though seemingly a criticism of the poet, pays homage to Callimachus's belief that technical skill and erudition were the most important attributes of a poet.[57]

Modern

Classical scholars place Callimachus among the most influential Greek poets.

false dichotomy between the "content-laden and socially engaged poetry of the archaic and classical periods"[59] and a sophisticated, but meaningless style proposed by Callimachus.[60] Echoing Hunter's assessment in their 2012 book on the reception of Callimachus, the Hellenists Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens comment that the scarcity of primary evidence and the reliance on Roman accounts has created a label of Callimacheanism that does not accurately represent his literary work.[47]

References

  1. ^ a b Hunter 2012, p. 1.
  2. ^ a b c Gutzwiller 2007, p. 60.
  3. ^ a b c Ferguson 1980, p. 23.
  4. ^ Gutzwiller 2007, pp. 61–62.
  5. ^ Ferguson 1980, pp. 23–24.
  6. ^ a b c Ferguson 1980, p. 24.
  7. ^ Cameron 1995, p. 5.
  8. ^ Ferguson 1980, p. 26.
  9. ^ a b c d e Parsons 2015.
  10. ^ Ferguson 1980, pp. 136–7.
  11. ^ Gutzwiller 1998, p. 188.
  12. ^ Ferguson 1980, p. 138.
  13. ^ Acosta-Hughes 2019, pp. 319–320.
  14. ^ Acosta-Hughes 2019, p. 319.
  15. ^ Stephens 2015, p. 9.
  16. ^ Stephens 2015, pp. 9–10.
  17. ^ Gutzwiller 2007, p. 62.
  18. ^ Stephens 2015, p. 11.
  19. ^ Stephens 2015, pp. 11–12.
  20. LSJ. Oxford. 1940.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  21. ^ a b Fantuzzi 2006.
  22. ^ Gutzwiller 2007, p. 65.
  23. ^ a b Gutzwiller 2007, p. 63.
  24. ^ Callim. Aet. fr. 26–8
  25. ^ Callim. Aet. fr. 24–5.
  26. ^ Callim. Aet. fr. 7.19–21.
  27. ^ Harder 2012, p. 10.
  28. ^ Callim. Aet. fr. 44–6.
  29. ^ Hutchinson 1997, p. 45.
  30. ^ Harder 2012, p. 11.
  31. ^ Gutzwiller 2007, p. 66.
  32. ^ Clayman 2011, pp. 229–30.
  33. ^ Hutchinson 1997, pp. 47–8.
  34. ^ Callim. Aet. fr. 112.
  35. ^ Gutzwiller 2007, p. 67.
  36. ^ a b Gutzwiller 2007, p. 68.
  37. ^ a b Ferguson 1980, p. 73.
  38. ^ Gutzwiller 2007, p. 69.
  39. ^ Cameron 1995, p. 137.
  40. ^ Cameron 1995, pp. 137–138.
  41. ^ Casson 2001, pp. 38–39.
  42. ^ a b Casson 2001, p. 39.
  43. ^ Witty 1958, p. 132.
  44. ^ Casson 2001, pp. 39–40.
  45. ^ Casson 2001, pp. 40–41.
  46. ^ Casson 2001, p. 41.
  47. ^ a b Acosta-Hughes & Stephens 2012, p. 1.
  48. ^ Gutzwiller 2007, pp. 60–61.
  49. ^ Callim. Aet fr. 1.23–30
  50. ^ Ferguson 1980, pp. 159–160.
  51. ^ Ferguson 1980, p. 160.
  52. ^ Ferguson 1980, pp. 161–162.
  53. ^ Barchiesi 2011, p. 512.
  54. ^ Barchiesi 2011, p. 522.
  55. ^ Barchiesi 2011, p. 514.
  56. ^ Ov. Am. 1.15.14
  57. ^ a b Gutzwiller 2007, p. 61.
  58. ^ Ambühl 2012.
  59. ^ Hunter 2012, p. 2.
  60. ^ Hunter 2012, pp. 2–3.

Bibliography

External links

Library resources about
Callimachus
By Callimachus
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