Callimachus Revisited: New Perspectives in Callimachean Scholarship

401 Pages·2019·1.384 MB·English

by  Jacqueline Klooster (editor)

H G
ELLENISTICA RONINGANA
C R
ALLIMACHUS EVISITED
N P
EW ERSPECTIVES IN
C S
ALLIMACHEAN CHOLARSHIP
EDITED BY
J.J.H. K
LOOSTER
M.A. H
ARDER
R.F. R
EGTUIT
G.C. W
AKKER
PEETERS
CALLIMACHUS REVISITED
HELLENISTICA GRONINGANA
MONOGRAPHS
Editorial Board:
M.A. Harder
J.J.H. Klooster
R.F. Regtuit
G.C. Wakker
Advisory Board:
K. Gutzwiller, Cincinnati, OH
R.L. Hunter, Cambridge
A. Köhnken, Münster
R.F. Thomas, Cambridge, Mass.
F. Williams, Belfast
1. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Callimachus, 1993.
2. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Theocritus, 1996.
3. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Genre in Hellenistic Poetry, 1998.
4. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Apollonius Rhodius, 2000.
5. L. Rossi, The Epigrams Ascribed to Theocritus: A Method of Approach, 2001.
6. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Hellenistic Epigrams, 2002.
7. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Callimachus II, 2004.
8. G. Berkowitz, Semi-Public Narration in Apollonius’ Argonautica, 2004.
9. A. Ambühl, Kinder und junge Helden. Innovative Aspekte des Umgangs mit
der literarischen Tradition bei Kallimachos, 2005.
10. J.S. Bruss, Hidden Presences. Monuments, Gravesites, and Corpses in Greek
Funerary Epigram, 2005.
11. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Beyond the Canon, 2006.
12. É. Prioux, Regards alexandrins. Histoire et théorie des arts dans l’épigramme
hellénistique, 2007.
13. M.A. Tueller, Look Who’s Talking: Innovations in Voice and Identity in
Hellenistic Epigram, 2008.
14. E. Sistakou, Reconstructing the Epic. Cross-Readings of the Trojan Myth in
Hellenistic Poetry, 2008.
15. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Nature and Science in Hellenistic
Poetry, 2009.
16. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Gods and Religion in Hellenistic
Poetry, 2012.
17. E. Sistakou, The Aesthetics of Darkness. A Study of Hellenistic Romanticism
in Apollonius, Lycophron and Nicander, 2012.
18. C. Cusset, N. Le Meur-Weissman, F. Levin, Mythe et pouvoir à l’époque
hellénistique, 2012.
19. J. Kwapisz, The Greek Figure Poems, 2013.
20. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Hellenistic Poetry in Context,
2014.
21. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Past and Present in Hellenistic
Poetry, 2017.
22. Y. Durbec, F. Trajber, Traditions épiques et poésie épigrammatique, 2017.
23. M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker, Drama and Performance in
Hellenistic Poetry, 2018.
HELLENISTICA GRONINGANA 24
CALLIMACHUS REVISITED
NEW PERSPECTIVES IN
CALLIMACHEAN SCHOLARSHIP
Edited by
J.J.H. KLOOSTER
M.A. HARDER
R.F. REGTUIT
G.C. WAKKER
PEETERS
LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT
2019
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
© 2019 – Peeters – Bondgenotenlaan 153 – B-3000 Leuven – Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any forms or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the holder of the copyright.
ISBN 978-90-429-3850-2
eISBN 978-90-429-3851-9
D/2019/0602/82
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Jacqueline KLOOSTER
Introduction ........................................ 1
Benjamin ACOSTA-HUGHES
A Lost Pavane for a Dead Princess. Call. fr. 228 Pf. ........ 5
Peter BING
Thanks Again to Aristaenetus: The Tale of Phrygius and Pieria
in Callimachus’ Aetia (Frs. 80-83b Harder) through the Eyes
of a Late-Antique Epistolographer ...................... 27
Ewen BOWIE
Callimachus and Longus .............................. 51
James J. CLAUSS
The Near Eastern Background of Aetiological Wordplay in
Callimachus ........................................ 65
Kathryn GUTZWILLER
The Reception of Callimachus in Meleager ............... 97
Annette HARDER
From Scamander to Demeter: Allusions to Homer in the Sixth
Hymn of Callimachus ................................ 121
Alex HARDIE
Callimachus Ep. 32 Pf. (Ap 12.148) and Menippus of Gadara 147
Richard HUNTER
Reading and Citing the Epigrams of Callimachus .......... 171
Robert KIRSTEIN
New Borders of Fiction? Callimachean Aetiology as a Narrative
Device in Ovid’s Metamorphoses ....................... 193
Jan KWAPISZ & Katarzyna PIETRUCZUK
Your Own Personal Library of Alexandria: Callimachus’
Scholarly Works and their Readers ..................... 221
Jackie MURRAY
Poetically Erect: The Female Oriented Humor in Callimachus’
Hymn to Demeter ................................... 249
VI TABLE OF CONTENTS
Floris OVERDUIN
The Didactic Callimachus and the Homeric Nicander: Reading
the Aetia Through the Theriaca? ....................... 265
Ivana PETROVIC
Poetry for the New Goddess: A Gift that Keeps on Giving .. 285
Alexander SENS
Some Aspects of Closure in Callimachus’ Epigrams ........ 305
Evina SISTAKOU
Denarrating the Narratable in the Aetia: A Postmodern Take
on Callimachean Aesthetics ........................... 329
Susan STEPHENS
Celebrating the Games ............................... 351
Frederick WILLIAMS
Did Erysichthon Eat the Cat? Some Reflections on Call.
H.6.110 .......................................... 369
Index rerum et nominum ................................ 385
Index locorum ........................................ 391
INTRODUCTION
Jacqueline KLOOSTER
We are happy and proud to present this special volume of the Hellenistica
Groningana. The volume is a result of the conference held on 12-14 Sep-
tember 2017 as a celebration of Annette Harder’s career as a professor
of Greek Language and Culture at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, where
she has worked for over thirty years, ever since 1986. The organizers of
this event, Gerry Wakker, Remco Regtuit, Martine Cuypers and myself,
thought that nothing could be more fitting as a tribute to Annette Harder’s
scholarly achievements than a festive edition of the Groningen Workshops
on Hellenistic Poetry, which she herself first instigated. To this end we
invited a number of renowned international scholars who had been par-
ticipants since the first workshops, as well as some younger ones who
are prominent in the field of Hellenistic studies. Of course no other poet
than Callimachus could form the focus of the workshop. Indeed, it was
exactly twenty-five years earlier, in September 1992, that the first ever
Groningen Workshop was organized by Annette Harder. That event, like
the 2017 edition, focused on Callimachus, who at the time was receiving
renewed attention thanks to the papyrological reconstructions of his Aetia
and Hecale by Peter Parsons and Adrian Hollis. Since Annette Harder’s
own magnum opus, the 2012 two-volume Oxford edition and commentary
on the Aetia, had been giving a boost to new scholarship on Callimachus
through its lucid and comprehensive presentation of the fragments, it
seemed like a beautiful ring composition to return to Callimachus after
twenty-five years, take stock of current approaches, and see what the future
might have in store.
One thing this volume shows is that there are still un-trodden paths
onto which Callimachean scholarship can lead us today. Along these
narrow lanes, various themes and concerns emerge: a first cluster of
papers focuses on Callimachus’ experimental poetics and his striking
formal choices from a literary-theoretical point of view, showcasing
some important recent trends in literary theory and their significance for
the study of Callimachus’ poetry. Robert Kirstein takes his starting point
from the study of unreliable narrators in structuralist narratology and asks
how Callimachus’ Aetia straddle the border between fiction and reality,
and how Ovid read them, and recreated similar unreliable narrators in his
2 JACQUELINE KLOOSTER
Metamorphoses. Evina Sistakou approaches the Aetia from the angle of
post-modern literary theory and highlights the surprisingly far-reaching
implications of Callimachus’ experimental narrative techniques, which
ultimately question what narrative is: ‘The Aetia begin as an epistemo-
logical survey of reality (…) and develop into a series of ontological
questions: ‘Are there possible worlds and alternative realities? What is
their status in reference to historical truth and literary fiction? Who has
the ability to perceive them and the authority to recreate them?’
Jackie Murray’s paper represents a third highly relevant theoretical
approach, discussing Callimachus’ mode of dealing with gendered narrat-
ing voices in his Hymn to Demeter. She finds that Callimachus is able to
create in this poem ‘a transgendered subjectivity, (…) by transforming
the Erysichthon story into one about the collapse of the household,
focalizing the narrative through females or feminized males, and by
infantilizing Erysichthon himself.’ Alexander Sens, finally, looks at the
way a Callimachean poem inscribes its own ending in itself, aligning a
variegated and subtle array of closural techniques in the epigrams.
A second thematic focus is on the question how Callimachus’ works
are embedded in previous Greek and other ancient poetic traditions.
Answering this, the contributors go above and beyond the old concept of
Kreuzung der Gattungen and moreover show how intertextual references
and etymological wordplay are much more than a mere display of learn-
ing on the poet’s part. In this vein, James Clauss relates the intriguing
topic of etymological wordplay and puns, which has a prominent place
in Callimachean aetiological stories, to the similar traditions in Near-
Eastern origin stories. He suggests that Callimachus, writing as he did
for the Ptolemaic court, may have had the intention of assimilating to the
Egyptian branch of this particular tradition. Floris Overduin throws light
on the relation of the Aetia to didactic poetry: if we look beyond the
formal characteristics, as he demonstrates, Callimachus’ poem shows
many common features with this poetic genre. Taking the Victoria
Berenices of the Aetia and the Victoria Sosibii as her starting point,
Susan Stephens illuminates Callimachus’ epinician court poetry by com-
paring them to some of the less conventional examples of Pindaric poetry
for athletic victors. She argues that Callimachus is not so much blending
the elegiac genre with the epinician one, but rather grafting his new
poetry upon an earlier genre, thus creating a new form by anchoring it in
an established tradition. Annette Harder herself, the laudanda of the work-
shop and the volume, contributes a version of her valedictory lecture:
a thoughtful reading of the Hymn to Demeter against the background of
Homeric poetry, with a keen eye for the specific significance that the
INTRODUCTION 3
heroic and kingly Homeric values alluded to in this hymn might have
held for Ptolemaic royalty.
Court and context return in the next thematic cluster. Ivana Petrovic
shows how Callimachus’ Iambus 12 and Hymn to Apollo metapoetically
comment on the value of panegyric poetry for the semi-divine Ptolemaic
dynasts. An excellent example of such panegyric, the fragmentary poem
on the death and apotheosis of Arsinoe Philadelphus (fr. 228 Pf.) is
placed in context and enlightened with parallels in the contribution of
Benjamin Acosta-Hughes. Jan Kwapisz and Katarzyna Pietruczuk explore
the courtly significance and panegyric dimensions of the great scholarly
production of Callimachus in his role of kritikos in the Alexandrian
Library and Mouseion.
Even in the close study of issues of seeming detail a lot can yet be
learned and clarified, as the contribution by Alex Hardie, on the vexed
identification of the addressee ‘Menippus’ in the Callimachean epigram
32 Pf. demonstrates. Indeed, questions of Callimachean detail may be as
unruly as a herd of cats, as Fred Williams shows us in a paper that is as
amusing as it is erudite, centering on the question of whether Erysichthon
did or did not actually eat one of Annette Harder’s favourite animals?
A final topic concerns the reception of Callimachus in poetry, prose
and beyond. Kathryn Gutzwiller explores the Callimachean dimensions
of Meleager’s epigrammatic production, in which she identifies what she
aptly describes as a ‘debt with deviation’ to the earlier poet. Ewen Bowie
makes a case for Callimachean elements in Longus’ pastoral novel
Daphnis and Chloe, beyond the more obvious allusions to pastoral poetry
in that work, and explores their possible implications. The late antique
epistolographer Aristaenetus once more receives thanks — as he had
once before in an article by Annette Harder herself — from Peter Bing for
preserving important clues to the reconstruction of Callimachus’ narratives
about Acontius and Cydippe and Phrygius and Pieria. Additionally, Bing
throws light on the possibile significance of these specific Callimachean
subtexts about happily married couples in the contemporary historical
context of the elusive ‘Aristaenetus’. Richard Hunter, finally, looks at the
Callimachean reception (both as a scholar and a poet) in the indirect
tradition of Greek literature, to refine and add to our current image of
Callimachus’ centrality as a poet.
* * *
In the long run of the Groningen Workshops, a group of regular partici-
pants naturally formed. As some have remarked, the workshops felt like