Callimachus and His Critics

548 Pages·2017·14.907 MB·English

by  Cameron, Alan

Callimachus and His Critics

Callimachus and His Critics
ALAN CAMERON
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1995 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Cameron, Alan.
Callimachus and his critics / Alan Cameron,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-04367-1 (alk. paper)
1. Callimachus—Criticism and interpretation—History. 2. Greek poetry, Hellenistic—
Egypt—Alexandria—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Title
PA3945.Z5C28 1995
88Γ.01—dc20 95-2674
This book has been composed in Times Roman, using Nota Bene 4,
on a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4M
The publisher would like to acknowledge Alan Cameron for
providing the camera-ready copy from which this
book was printed
Princeton University Press books ate printed on acid-free paper
and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources
Printed in the United States of America
by Princeton Academic Press
1 3 5 7 9 10 8642
For Geoff and Jean

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Frequently Used Abbreviations xi
Chronologia Calumachea xiii
Chapter I
Cyrene, Court and Kings 3
Chapter II
The Ivory Tower 24
Chapter III
The Symposium 71
Chapter IV
Prologue and Dream 104
Chapter V
The Ician Guest 133
Chapter VI
Epilogue and Iambi 141
Chapter VII
Callimachus Senex 174
Chapter VIII
The Telchines 185
Chapter IX
Mistresses and Dates 233
Chapter X
Hellenistic Epic 263
Chapter XI
Fat Ladies 303
Chapter XII
One Continuous Poem 339
viii Contents
Chapter XIII
Hesiodic Elegy 362
Chapter XIV
The Cyclic Poem 387
Chapter XV
The Hymn to Apollo 403
Chapter XVI
Theocritus 410
Chapter XVII
Hecale and Epyllion 437
Chapter XVIII
Vergil and the Augustan Recusatio 434
Appendix A
Hedylus and Lyde 483
Appendix B
Thin Gentlemen 488
Appendix C
Asclepiades’s Girlfriends 494
Bibliography 521
Index 525
Index Locorum 533
PREFACE
Books (mine anyhow) have a way of growing in unexpected directions.
This one started life as a reinterpretation of the Aetia prologue, its limited
purpose to show that Callimachus’s concern was elegy, not epic. But I soon
realized this could not be done without a more detailed examination of the
curious modem preoccupation with Hellenistic epic and epyllion, held to
be so important for the understanding of Roman as well as Hellenistic
poetry (Ch. X; XVI-XVIII). For these misconceptions appear at their
starkest in modem scholarly writing on Catullus and the Augustans.
The identification of Callimachus’s Telchines led me to reconsider the
dates, works, interrelationships and ancient biographies of most of the
other leading poets of the age; and thence to a wider study of the transmis­
sion and interpretation of their works in the later Hellenistic and Roman
age (Ch. IV and VIII). Thus the “Critics” of my title, originally just the
Telchines of the prologue, ended up with a far wider reference, ancient and
modem. No new papyri of Callimachus have appeared since Lloyd-Jones
and Parsons published their Supplementum Hellenisticum in 1983, but a
number of other new texts help to cast welcome (if sometimes unexpected)
new light on the picture I have tried to draw.
Callimachus has generally been considered the archetypal ivory tower
poet, his work identified as the first appearance of art for art’s sake, poetry
for the book rather than fellow citizens. He has been damned with faint
praise as a scholar writing for libraries, a court sycophant writing to flatter
divine kings. Ch. I-III present a very different perspective, based on the
abundant evidence instead of twentieth-century rationalisation of
nineteenth-century prejudice against the postclassical. Much of the book is
in fact more of a prolegomena to the study of Hellenistic (and so also
Roman) poetry than a study of Callimachus alone. It is a social as much as
a literary history of Greek poetry in the early third century. I have tried to
situate Callimachus as firmly as I could in the real world in which he lived
as well as in his real literary context, a world of cities as well as courts, a
world of private symposia and public festivals, in which poetry and poets
continued to play a central r61e.
As a result, the book has turned out much longer than I had planned or
hoped. I trust no one will quote F 465 at me; for wherever Callimachus’s
mind was when he said that a big book was a big bore (p. 52), his tongue
was firmly in his cheek. The notion that he was the uncompromising
apostle of the short poem dies hard, but anyone who can count can work
x Preface
out for himself that none of his contemporaries wrote more books or longer
poems than Callimachus. Even Apollonius’s Argonautica was little if at all
longer than the four books of the Aetia.
Many friends answered questions, discussed problems, gave me
references, read chapters, argued me out of perverse solutions or helped me
in one way or another: Roger Bagnall, Richard Billows, Pamela Bleisch,
Mary Depew, Matthew Dickie, Marco Fantuzzi, Kathryn Gutzwiller,
Christian Habicht, William Harris, Adrian Hollis, Richard Hunter, Richard
Janko, Amd Kerkhecker, Peter Knox, Nita Krevans, Luigi Lehnus, Jen­
nifer Lynn, Oswyn Murray, Carole Newlands, Dirk Obbink, Daniel
Selden, Alexander Sens, David Sider, Wesley Trimpi, Martin West,
Stephen White, Gareth Williams, Jim Zetzel and no doubt many others
whose contributions I can no longer recall individually. Hugh Lloyd-Jones
made salutary criticisms of a very early (not to say premature) draft, and
Sarah Mace helped eliminate obscurities at the last moment. Guido
Bastianini gave me information on the Milan Posidippus papyrus, at the
time of writing still mostly unpublished. Claude Meillier, on behalf of the
Institut de Papyrologie et d’Egyptologie de Lille, kindly supplied the photo
of the Lille papyrus reproduced on the dust-jacket. The camera-ready copy
was prepared on a BUS 286 and Toshiba Satellite T1800 using Nota Bene 4
and printed on a Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 4.
In conclusion, I would like to name three scholars to whom I owe a
more general debt of longer standing: W. W. Ciuickshank, who at St
Paul’s School first introduced me to the meaning of scholarship; Eduard
Fraenkel, whose unforgettable Oxford seminars exemplified its methods
and something of its history; and Arnaldo Momigliano, who always had
time for young unknowns with no legitimate claim on it, and who encour­
aged without attempting to direct or influence my own first contributions to
fields he knew better than anyone.
New York
May 1995