Callimachus

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The Greek poet Callimachus (ca. 310-240 B.C.) is regarded as the most characteristic representative of Alexandrian poetry. Learning, polish, and contemporaneity characterize his work, which had enormous influence on the Roman elegiac poets.

Very little is known about the life of Callimachus. What is known comes primarily from the 10th-century encyclopedist Suidas, not all of which is reliable, and from other, limited references in ancient sources. Callimachus was born in Cyrene; he apparently claimed descent from Battus, the founder of Cyrene, and lived during the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (reigned 285-247 B.C.) and survived into the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes (reigned 246-221 B.C.).

Prior to his introduction into the Ptolemaic court, Callimachus, who many scholars argue had been poor, taught school in the Alexandrian suburb of Eleusis. Among Callimachus's more famous pupils were Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Apollonius of Rhodes. Callimachus is most often mentioned in connection with Apollonius because of a literary quarrel that eventually led to a personal feud. Apollonius believed in the viability of the Homeric tradition (in modified form) for epic poetry, whereas Callimachus argued for a learned modernized poetry, attuned to Alexandrian times, that was short and highly polished. From this quarrel resulted the poem of invective Ibis, after which Ovid modeled his own poem of the same name, and there is no doubt that it is Apollonius who is being castigated and viewed as a traitor.

Callimachus was also the librarian of the great library at Alexandria and is often said to have succeeded Zenodotus. Callimachus is credited with having compiled the first scientific literary history, the Pinakes (Tablets), an annotated catalog in 120 volumes of all the books in the library, from Homeric manuscripts to the latest cookbooks - a feat of no mean accomplishment.

Suidas reports that Callimachus wrote some 800 works and mentions a wealth of titles, including satyric dramas, tragedies, comedies, and lyrics. Only a few hymns and epigrams have survived.

Style and Influence

At one point early in his career Callimachus had apparently been criticized for not writing anything of great length. He countered this criticism by producing the Hecale, a sizable work cited frequently by Greek and Roman authors but now lost. It narrated, with unusual digressions, Theseus's encounter with the Marathonian bull. However, it is clear that Callimachus was not primarily interested in bulk but in perfection of poetic form, refinement and purity of style, innovative ways of expressing the familiar, and graceful descriptions. Certainly one of the most influential figures in later ancient times, Callimachus outdistanced all contemporary poets in prestige and popularity, was quoted frequently by grammarians, metricians, and lexicographers, as well as scholiasts, and was studied by the Byzantines.

Callimachus's poetry seems to have survived till the time of the Fourth Crusade (1205). Modern critics have rediscovered Callimachus and have found true poetic genius in his works, even though he may not actually have been the most popular or most important poet as far as his contemporaries were concerned.

His Works

Since only a small portion of Callimachus's writings has survived, it is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate what a prodigious author he was. The six extant hymns are not necessarily his best work or even the most representative, but they do give an idea of his interests and range, dealing with Zeus's birth, raising, and might; a festival in Apollo's honor in Cyrene; Artemis; Delos, including the story of Apollo's birth, mythology, and Ptolemy's Gallic encounter; the bath of Pallas and how Tiresias saw her bathing and was struck blind; and Demeter's search for her daughter Kore and the punishment of Erysichthon.

The elegiac Aitia, in four books, also survives in fragments and deals with legendary origins of various localities and rites; it was much cited in antiquity. The Lock of Berenice survives in a Latin rendition by Catullus.

In Callimachus's hands the epigram emerges as a literary genre. Even though some of his epigrams are tomb inscriptions, the epigram now becomes a literary vehicle for real emotions, including love.

Further Reading

There are two Loeb Library editions of Callimachus: Callimachus and Lycophron, translated by A. W. Mair (1921), and Aetia, Iambic, Lyric Poems, Hecale, Minor Epic and Elegiac Poems, translated with notes by C. A. Trypanis (1958). Accounts of Callimachus in English are extremely limited and sometimes contradictory. The standard work, in Latin, is undoubtedly R. Pfeiffer's two volume study, Callimachus (1949, 1953). Georg Luck, The Latin Love Elegy (1959), is indispensable for students of Latin elegiac poetry; Luck includes a discussion of Callimachus as the Romans saw him.

Callimachus, Greek poet and scholar of the Hellenistic age, who was born c.310–305 BC in Cyrene (North Africa) and died c.240. He is occasionally referred to as Battiades (i.e. ‘son of Battus’). During the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, king of Egypt 285–246 BC, he arrived at Alexandria and was commissioned by the king to prepare the great catalogue (pinakěs) of all the books in the Alexandrian Library. This enormous undertaking (the catalogue ran to 120 volumes) not only benefited the library but also influenced the poet's style: like other Hellenistic poets who combined poetry with scholarship he found in his researches material to be polished and incorporated in his verse. During this time Callimachus produced several prose works of scholarship which have not survived. Of his many poetical works the only ones to survive intact are the six Hymns and perhaps sixty-one short epigrams. The Hymns were modelled on the (so-called) Homeric Hymns but were not, like the latter, intended for recitation at festivals. Rather they were complex literary compositions, designed to be recited to, or read by, a cultivated audience appreciative of an intriguing narrative and a learned and sometimes ironic imitation of an earlier form. Hymn 1 is to Zeus, 2 to Apollo, 3 to Artemis, and 4 to Delos; Hymn 5, ‘The Baths of Pallas’, is written in elegiac couplets, unlike the others which are in hexameters; Hymn 6, to Demeter, tells the gruesome story of the insatiable hunger of Erysichthon. In the epigrams Callimachus plays subtly with the conventions of this (relatively new) literary form. The epigrams which appeal most to us seem to reflect the poet's own experiences and emotions.

The rest of Callimachus' surviving poetry exists only in fragments, most of it on papyri discovered in the twentieth century; it includes the Aitia, the Hecǎlē, the Iambi, a lyric poem called Apotheosis of Queen Arsinoe, and an elegiac poem, Victory of Sosibius. The Aitia (‘causes’) was an elegiac poem in four books, comprising about 7, 000 lines. The first two books have an elaborate framework: the poet is transported in a dream to Mount Helicon where (like the poet Hesiod) he is instructed by the Muses, in his case in the origins of all kinds of mythical lore connected with Greek history, customs, and religious rites. None of the stories except for one is known from earlier literature, and the sources appear to have been local histories. The style is learned and allusive but it is enlivened by dry humour and is not without true poetic touches. The third and fourth books, which were probably composed much later, do not have this framework, and are a collection of separate ‘causes’. The first and last poems are in praise of the queen Berenice, the last being the famous Plokamos (Lat. Coma) or Lock of Berenice. The Aitia was also imitated by Ovid in his Fasti. By way of introduction to the whole work Callimachus composed the Answer to the Telchines, apparently his critics, who belittle his achievement because he has not written one long continuous poem on an epic theme. His reply is that the small-scale poem is more attractive; moreover Apollo himself has commanded the poet to ‘cultivate a slender Muse’ and ‘tread an unworn path’. As he reputedly said elsewhere, ‘a big book is a big evil’; poetry should aim at small-scale perfection. A late tradition relates that chief among his opponents was the epic poet Apollonius Rhodius, who was thought to be the object of Callimachus' (lost) verse invective, Ibis, later translated and adapted to his own purposes by Ovid. (See also ANTIMACHUS.)

Hecale is an example of the kind of epic Callimachus approved, an epyllion perhaps about a thousand lines long (now known only in fragments) in which the poet tells how Theseus was on his way from Athens to Marathon to fight the Marathonian bull when a storm arose and the hero took shelter in the hut of an old woman, Hecale, who prepares a simple meal for him (the source perhaps of a similar meal in the hut of Philemon and Baucis in Ovid's Metamorphoses). When Theseus returns from killing the bull he finds that Hecale has died and men are digging her grave.

The fragmentary Iambi consist of thirteen short poems, in iambic and choliambic metres, which look back to the sixth-century vituperative poet Hipponax; they are satirical in tone and often criticize contemporary literary attitudes.

Callimachus was a writer of astonishing output (reputedly 800 volumes) and remarkable originality and versatility, who aimed to be both a poet and a man of taste and erudition. His contribution to the development of a new literary taste in a new cosmopolitan society was very considerable (see HELLENISTIC AGE). His blend of sensitivity and detachment, elegance, wit, and learning, had a profound influence on later Roman poets, especially Catullus, Ovid, and Propertius (the last thought of himself as the Roman Callimachus), and through them on the whole European literary tradition.

Quotes:

"I wept as I remembered how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky."

This article is about the poet. For the Athenian polemarch at the Battle of Marathon, see Callimachus (polemarch). For the sculptor, see Callimachus (sculptor). For the Renaissance scholar, see Filip Callimachus.

Callimachus
Occupation	poet, critic and scholar

Callimachus (Greek: Καλλίμαχος, Kallimachos; 310 BC/305 BC-240 BC) was a native of the Greek colony of Cyrene, Libya. He was a noted poet, critic and scholar of the Library of Alexandria and enjoyed the patronage of ancient Egyptian Greek Pharaohs Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III Euergetes. Although he was never made chief librarian, he was responsible for producing the catalogue of all the volumes contained in the Library. His Pinakes (tables), 120 volumes long, provided the complete and chronologically arranged catalogue of the Library, laying the foundation for later work on the history of Greek literature. As one of the earliest critic-poets, he typifies Hellenistic scholarship.

Contents 1 Family and early life 2 Works 3 Bibliography 4 Commentary 5 Translations 6 Criticism and history 7 External links 8 References

Family and early life

Callimachus was a man of Libyan Greek origin. He was born and raised in Cyrene, as member of a distinguished family, his parents being Mesatme (or Mesatma) and Battus, supposed descendant of the first Greek king of Cyrene, Battus I, through whom Callimachus claimed to be a descendant of the Battiad dynasty, the Libyan Greek monarchs that ruled Cyrenaica for eight generations and the first Greek Royal family to have reigned in Africa. He was named after his grandfather, an "elder" Callimachus, who was highly regarded by the Cyrenaean citizens and had served as a general.

Callimachus married the daughter of a Greek man called Euphrates who came from Syracuse. However, it is unknown if they had children. He also had a sister called Megatime but very little is known about her: she married a Cyrenaean man called Stasenorus or Stasenor to whom she bore a son, Callimachus (so called "the Younger" as to distinguish him from his maternal uncle), who also became a poet, author of "The Island".

In later years, he was educated in Athens. When he returned to North Africa, he moved to Alexandria.

Works

Elitist and erudite, claiming to "abhor all common things," Callimachus is best known for his short poems and epigrams. During the Hellenistic period, a major trend in Greek-language poetry was to reject epics modelled after Homer. Instead, Callimachus urged poets to "drive their wagons on untrodden fields," rather than following in the well worn tracks of Homer, idealizing a form of poetry that was brief, yet carefully formed and worded, a style at which he excelled. In the prologue to his Aitia, he claims that Apollo visited him and admonished him to "fatten his flocks, but to keep his muse slender," a clear indication of his choice of carefully crafted and allusive material. "Big book, big evil" (μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν, "mega biblion, mega kakon") is another of his verses, attacking long, old-fashioned poetry using the very style Callimachus proposed to replace it. Callimachus also wrote poems in praise of his royal patron and a wide variety of other poetic styles, as well as prose and criticism. Callimachus' most famous prose work is the Pinakes (Lists), a bibliographical survey of authors of the works held in the Library of Alexandria. It is said to have comprised 120 books.

Due to Callimachus' strong stance against the epic, he and his younger student Apollonius of Rhodes, who favored epic and wrote the Argonautica, had a long and bitter feud, trading barbed comments, insults, and ad hominem attacks for over thirty years. It is now known, through a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus listing the earliest chief librarians of the Library of Alexandra, that Ptolemy II never offered the post to Callimachus, but passed him over for Apollonius Rhodius. Some classicists, including Peter Green, speculate that this contributed to the poets' long feud.

Though Callimachus was an opponent of "big books", the Suda puts his number of works at (a possibly exaggerated) 800, suggesting that he found large quantities of small works more acceptable. Of these, only six hymns, sixty-four epigrams, and some fragments are extant; a considerable fragment of the Hecale, one of Callimachus' few longer poems treating epic material, has also been discovered in the Rainer papyri. His Aitia ("Causes"),^[1] another rare longer work surviving only in tattered papyrus fragments and quotations in later authors, was a collection of elegiac poems in four books, dealing with the foundation of cities, obscure religious ceremonies, unique local traditions apparently chosen for their oddity,^[2] and other customs, throughout the Hellenic world In the first three books at least, the formula appears to ask a question of the Muse, of the form, "Why, on Paros, do worshippers of the Charites use neither flutes nor crowns?"^[3] "Why, at Argos is a month named for 'lambs'?"^[4] "Why, at Leucas, does the image of Artemis have a mortar on its head?"^[5] A series of questions can be reconstituted from the fragments. ^[6] One passage of the Aitia, the so called Coma Berenices, has been reconstructed from papyrus remains and the celebrated Latin adaptation of Catullus (Catullus 66).

The extant hymns are extremely learned, and written in a style that some have criticised as labored and artificial. The epigrams are more widely respected, and several have been incorporated into the Greek Anthology.

According to Quintilian (10.1.58) he was the chief of the elegiac poets; his elegies were highly esteemed by the Romans (see Neoterics), and imitated by Ovid, Catullus, and especially Sextus Propertius. Many modern classicists hold Callimachus in high regard for his major influence on Latin poetry.

Callimachus was undoubtedly an authority on dogs in his day^[7] and his works shed light on the origins of the Maltese Dog as being sprawn from the island of Mljet (Latin: Melita), which he placed near Korčula along the Dalmatian coast in the Adriatic Sea.

Bibliography

• Pfeiffer, Rudolf. Callimachus. V. 1, Fragmenta. (Oxford 1949, repr. 1965); V. 2, Hymni et epigrammata (Oxford 1953). (in classical Greek)
• Source for Family Information
• Callimachus
• Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia - 2002

Commentary

• Bing, Peter. Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos 1-99: Introduction and Commentary (U. Michigan Ann Arbor, 1981).
• Bulloch, A. W. Callimachus: The Fifth Hymn (Cambridge 1985).
• Hollis, Adrian Swayne. Callimachus: Hecale (Oxford 1990).
• Hopkinson, Neil. Callimachus: Hymn to Demeter (Cambridge 1984).
• Kerkhecker, Arnd. Callimachus' Book of Iambi (Oxford 1999).
• McKay, K. J. Erysichthon: A Callimachean Comedy (Brill 1962).
• McKay, K. J. The Poet at Play: Kallimachus, The Bath of Pallas (Brill 1962).
• McLennan, G. R. Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus (Edizioni dell'Ateneo & Bizzarri 1977).
• Williams, Frederick. Callimachus: Hymn to Apollo (Oxford 1978).

Translations

• Nisetich, Frank. The Poems of Callimachus (Oxford 2001). ISBN 0-19-814760-0
• Lombardo, Stanley and Diane Rayor. Callimachus: Hymns, Epigrams, Select Fragments (Johns Hopkins 1988). ISBN 0-8018-3281-0

Criticism and history

• Bing, Peter. The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets (Göttingen 1988).
• Blum, Rudolf. Kallimachos. The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press 1991)
• Cameron, Alan. Callimachus and his Critics (Princeton 1995).
• Green, Peter. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age Ch. 11: The Critic as Poet: Callimachus, Aratus of Soli, Lycophron and Ch. 13: Armchair Epic: Apollonius Rhodius and the Voyage of Argo.
• Selden, Daniel. "Alibis," Classical Antiquity 17 (1998), 289-411.
• Richard Hunter. The Shadow of Callimachus (Cambridge 2006)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Callimachus

• Poems by Callimachus English translations
• Online Text: Callimachus, Hymns translated by A. W. Mair
• Greek Text: Hymns & Epigrams, Perseus

References

1. ^ An aition is a founding myth.
2. ^ Noel Robertson, "Callimachus' Tale of Sicyon ('SH' 238)" Phoenix 53.1/2 (Spring 1999:57-79), p. 58
3. ^ Aitia 1, frag. 3.
4. ^ Aitia 1, frags. 26-31a.
5. ^ Aitia 1, frags. 31b-e.
6. ^ Robertson 1999:58f, note 5.
7. ^ Rawdon Briggs, Lee. A history and description of the modern dogs of Great Britain and Ireland (Non-sporting division), published by H. Cox, London, 1894, pp 312-322

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