Callimachus

Greek poet

• Born: c. 305 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Cyrene, North Africa (now Shahhāt, Libya)
• Died: c. 240 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Alexandria, Egypt

Early Life

The world into which Callimachus (kuh-LIHM-uh-kuhs) was born was a very different one from the world of the great poets and prose writers of fifth century b.c.e.Greece. Alexander the Great’s empire had eclipsed and absorbed the old city-states and in turn had been divided into smaller warring empires after his death. Egypt had become the center of a new Greek state ruled by the Greek Ptolemies, and Alexandria had become not only a major political and commercial center and royal capital but also the center of a new and flourishing Greek culture, as rich as the old but somewhat diffident about its ability to live up to the glories of the past. Callimachus himself came from the Greek colony of Cyrene in Libya, a somewhat uneasy vassal of the Ptolemies. Although he was of a distinguished family that claimed Cyrene’s founder Battus as an ancestor, it was natural for Callimachus to be drawn to Alexandria, with its promise of literary friends and royal patronage.

Callimachus began as a teacher of grammar in the suburb of Eleusis, but at length he attracted royal notice and received an appointment in the great library, which with the museum, a sort of “university complex” with lecture halls and roofed walks, was the center for the literary and scientific life of the city. Euclid and Archimedes flourished there. Not much is known of Callimachus’s duties—only that he never became chief librarian and that he regarded a big book as a big evil—but the list of his lost prose works (“Catalog of Writers Eminent in All Fields of Literature,” “Local Names of Months,” “Rivers of the World,” and so on) suggests an industrious cataloger. Compliments scattered through his work indicate royal patronage throughout his life.

Life’s Work

The scanty evidence in his poems suggests that, once secure of royal patronage, Callimachus led a long, agreeable, and productive life in Alexandria. Symposia must have been frequent, although Callimachus prided himself on being a moderate drinker. Only one of his erotic poems was written to a woman, and he was almost certainly a bachelor. He valued the didactic poet Aratus for sharing his preference for brevity and craftsmanship. He may have been ambivalent toward Apollonius of Rhodes, a former pupil, for attempting a full-scale epic on the Argonauts. He wrote a romantic poem to one Theocritus, who is believed to be the inventor of pastoral poetry.

It is said that Callimachus wrote poems in every meter and that his books amounted to eight hundred (although this sum probably means counting parts of books as individual works). Callimachus sometimes brought together his shorter works under a loose framework—hence his most notable work, the Aitiōn (Aetia, 1958), in which a whole series of local rituals are described and explained, somewhat in the manner of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567), which indeed it influenced.

The Aetia shows Callimachus’s cataloging zeal as well as his interest in religious matters and in local affairs. The revised version begins with an apology in the manner of Alexander Pope in which Callimachus satirizes the works of his Rhodian critics, including Apollonius, who bray like donkeys while his own muse chirps like the cicada. The Aetia, which must have been a lengthy collection, included stories of the Graces, Hercules, the Argonauts, Ariadne, and much else. Only two episodes survive in substantial form: the charming love story of Acontius and Cydippe and a court poem, Lock of Berenice (1755), which is the remote inspiration of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). Berenice II was a real queen and a native of Cyrene.

Callimachus wrote a transitional poem to lead from the Aetia into his other great collection, the Iamboi (Iambi, 1958), of which only tantalizing fragments exist. Written in Greek iambic—a conversational meter used not only for drama but also for fables and lampoons—Callimachus’s Iambi sounds as much like Pope’s The Dunciad (1728-1743) as anything else. It included an Aesopian fable about the origin of language, a quarrel between the Laurel and the Olive, a satire on a pederastic schoolmaster, a poem in honor of a victor in the jar race, a serious poem honoring a friend’s daughter, and finally an answer to those who criticized Callimachus for failing to specialize. There was another invective poem, the “Ibis,” possibly directed at Apollonius, but of this little remains.

The Aetia and the Iambi were Callimachus’s longest poems. He was also a practitioner of the epyllion, or little epic, which differed from the full-scale epic not only in length but also in subject matter: The central episode might indeed be heroic, but the emphasis might be on some unheroic character. Thus, in Ekalē (Hecale, 1958) the ostensible subject is Theseus’s taming the bull of Marathon, but most of the poem told how Theseus sheltered in the hut of an old peasant woman, Hecale.

Of all Callimachus’s works, the least frustrating are the hymns—to Zeus, Apollo, Artemis, Delos, the Bath of Pallas, and Demeter—which are nearly intact. There seems no reason to doubt that these were designed to be performed as part of religious ceremonies and that they embody genuine religious feeling as well as a feeling for nature and Callimachus’s usual curiosity about local customs and traditions. The hymns Eis Loutra tēs Pallados (The Bath of Pallas, 1755) and In Delum (To Delos, 1755) are particularly striking.

Callimachus’s epigrams, of which a fair number have survived in Epigrammata (Epigrams, 1793) and other sources, including a Roman wall, contain epitaphs, votive dedications, love lyrics, and other miscellaneous short poems. Many seem to be occasional poems written as a favor to friends or patrons and have the limited appeal of occasional poetry, such as the following lament for the poet Heraclitus:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.I wept, as I remember’d how often you and IHad tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

William Cory’s translation, “Heraclitus,” published in 1858, lacks the conciseness that was Callimachus’s ideal but is otherwise worthy of the original. Some of the epitaphs have grace and dignity that rise above the immediate occasion:

Shipwrecked stranger, Leóntikhos found yourAnonymous corpse and gave you burialOn the seabeach here. His tears, though, were forHis own mortality. Restless sailor,He beats over the sea like a flashing gull.

Because most of Callimachus’s work is lost, his epigrams are prized. With any other poet, these occasional poems would be treated as an appendix rather than a central portion of the lifework. Scholarly editions of Callimachus, however, include dozens of isolated quotations, often mere phrases quoted in a dictionary, for the sake of preserving a rare word from this master.

Significance

Callimachus was a far greater poet than the surviving fragments would indicate; in the Greek and Roman world, which knew his work in its entirety, his prestige was enormous. When modern scholars piece together what is left of Callimachus’s work, they can conjure up the ghosts of the Hecale, the Aetia, and the Iambi. They can prove how great these poems were and even give something of their flavor, but in the end they can only point to how much of Callimachus’s distinguished poetry is lost. (On the other hand, if the prose works had survived, perhaps they would have only a historical interest.)

The hymns are impressive even in translation and would have been even more impressive in their liturgical setting. The epigrams, however, seldom translate well and too often depend on some figure or allusion that must be elaborately footnoted. A reader who knows Greek literature thoroughly and who can work with the available parallel editions (original Greek and English translation on facing pages) has a better chance of enjoying Callimachus; for others, there is still hope. Every so often papyruses containing fragments of Callimachus’s work are found in Egypt, and perhaps a less fragmentary manuscript of the Hecale or the Aetia will surface. If that happens, Callimachus will be read as much as his rival Apollonius.

Bibliography

Blum, Rudolph. Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Translated by Hans H. Wellisch. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. In his study of the Alexandrian Library, Blum argues that Callimachus, the second director of the library, was the inventor of two essential scholarly tools: the library catalog and the biobibliographical reference work.

Callimachus. Aetia, Iambi, Lyric Poems, Hecale, Minor Epic and Elegiac Poems, and Other Fragments. Translated by C. A. Trypanis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. Provides a Greek text, a serviceable prose translation, and excellent notes.

Callimachus. The Poems of Callimachus. Translated by Frank Nisetich. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. This translation of Callimachus’s extant works and major fragments includes an introduction that discusses the poet’s life, his achievements, and the difficulties in the way of modern appreciation. Presents fragments as integral parts of the poetry books in which they originally were contained.

De Romilly, Jaqueline. A Short History of Greek Literature. Translated by Lillian Doherty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Includes excellent impressionistic accounts of Callimachus and Apollonius. De Romilly doubts that Callimachus shared the “simple faith” of the Homeric hymns.

Ferguson, John. Callimachus. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A general survey of Callimachus, this work is interesting and thorough. Ferguson pieces together fragments of gossip to make a coherent life of Callimachus, and he includes the fragments of the poems. Callimachus’s social and cultural background is treated. Contains an excellent bibliography.

Kerkhecker, Arnd. Callimachus’ Book of Iambi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. An extended discussion of Callimachus’s collected Iambi, arguably one of the earliest surviving Greek “books of poetry.”