Callimachus in Context

by Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin; Stephens, Susan A.

• ISBN13: 9781107008571
• ISBN10: 1107008573
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-19
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

Scholarly reception has bequeathed two Callimachuses: the Roman version is a poet of elegant non-heroic poetry (usually erotic elegy), represented by a handful of intertexts with a recurring set of images - slender Muse, instructing divinity, small voice, pure waters; the Greek version emphasizes a learned scholar who includes literary criticism within his poetry, an encomiast of the Ptolemies, a poet of the book whose narratives are often understood as metapoetic. This study does not dismiss these Callimachuses, but situates them within a series of interlocking historical and intellectual contexts in order better to understand how they arose. In this narrative of his poetics and poetic reception four main sources of creative opportunism are identified: Callimachus' reactions to philosophers and literary critics as arbiters of poetic authority, the potential of the text as a venue for performance, awareness of Alexandria as a new place, and finally, his attraction for Roman poets.

Table of Contents

List of maps	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. viii
List of abbreviations	p. x
Maps	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
Literary quarrels	p. 23
Suicide by the book	p. 23
Plato in the Aetia Prologue	p. 31
"Mixing Ions"	p. 47
Hipponax and mimetic play	p. 57
The power of the poet	p. 68
"Common things"	p. 78
The crowd	p. 80
Performing the text	p. 84
The sounds of reading	p. 84
Dramatic performance	p. 90
Lyric	p. 102
The paean	p. 105
"Lyrics"for Alexandria	p. 108
Choruses and choral dancing	p. 112
Stichic meters	p. 116
Textual and intertextual symposia	p. 130
In the public sphere	p. 133
In the private sphere	p. 140
Changing places	p. 148
De-centering Greece	p. 145
Cyrene	p. 155
The Cyrenaica	p. 160
Alexandria	p. 163
The Argive ancestors	p. 168
The "causes" of Alexandria	p. 170
Attica viewed from Alexandria	p. 196
The new center	p. 202
In my end is my beginning	p. 204
Early "translation"	p. 207
The doctus poeta	p. 212
Writing for royals	p. 233
Callimachus in Propertim	p. 244
The Roman Callimachus	p. 255
Ovid and Callimachus	p. 257
Conclusions	p. 270
Appendix: The Aetia	p. 275
Bibliography	p. 292
Index locorum	p. 307
Subject index	p. 317
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