from 'people who turn their powers against every place'. He was referring, surely, to the Romans.
Literature and Patronage
Between 300 and 145 B.C., how does the best Hellenistic literature fit into this context of lavish kings and a tenacious city culture? We
have lost so much, especially in prose, that judgements are all provisional; might there be a master to our taste among the 130-odd names
who wrote Hellenistic tragedy? It was an exciting time to be a man of talent, for new forms emerged from the old conventions in prose
and verse. Every author of high quality came into contact with the patronage of kings of royal cities. Do the kings, then, take the credit
for this new liveliness?
Only an exile, a gaolbird, or a starving man, said a character in late fourth-century comedy, would bother to resort to a king. Authors saw
their chance. They were always claiming to be hungry and often they took up writing when exiled from their homes. Although Menander
refused to leave Athens, subsequent literary men headed freely for the royal cities. At the courts, literary life was not too awkward. There
are no stories of official works which the poets were asked to write, but refused. There was no need for a tactful intermediary to guide
relations between the kings and their authors. The Attalids received their celebratory prose, the Seleucids their verse epics, but these
works were not the sum of their authors' interests. In Alexandria poetic compliments to the dynasty were often paid in a witty and
oblique style, and the best of them attached to the queens, not to the kings. At Pella, too, there are hints of give-and-take.
What studies, however, did the kings patronize with any permanency, beyond the occasional hand-out for good verses? We know most
about patronage in Alexandria, where the Ptolemies' record was limited: the literature they patronized did not produce major talents in
history and philosophy. They had an alphabetical list of pensions, a museum, and two libraries. They had a serious need for a royal tutor
to teach the little princes and a royal librarian to preside over the growing arsenals of books. Long-term patronage was for useful
industry: tutoring, science, the library, and textual scholarship. At first the tutors and librarians included men who also wrote excellent
poetry. In the second century B.C. they were critical literary scholars, not original authors.
Poetry, except drama, was incidental to their patronage. Poets moved freely from king to king, whereas textual scholars were less
mobile. The poetry which we still have and admire was not popular. Major Hellenistic poetry survives on only two papyri before about
100 B.C. One was probably a manual for schoolteachers; the other included a paraphrase in prose of the many verses which were too
difficult. On prose, too (except history), the kings' persons weighed less than heavily. Just as the development of monarchy in twelfth-
century Europe encouraged a better fund of royal stories, so the new age of kings and courtiers developed into a golden age of recorded
gossip. Some of the best attached to the kings themselves: in his memoirs, even Ptolemy VIII ran through the fascinating list of Ptolemy
II's mistresses a century or so earlier. An upper class reveals itself by its gossip, and to judge from theirs, the Hellenistic courts were
elegant, ironic, and not overawed by royalty. Gossip crossed the literary boundaries: in Alexandria Machon, the comic poet, published
witty verses on the dealings of great men and prostitutes, while later in Pergamum good anecdotes seem to have been a mainstay of
Carystius' Historical Notes in prose. High society liked to read how the tireless Hippe called Ptolemy II 'Daddy' in private, and how King
Demetrius the Besieger did and said the crudest things while asking Lamia ('Vampire') to choose from an array of scents and ointments.
In Antioch the popular nicknames of the later Seleucids "were bestowed in a similar irreverent spirit.
The libraries proved more of a dead weight. Scholarship had been the invention of fourth-century authors, and royal patronage merely
gave it its head. Literature was prized for being antiquarian, and in royal circles its scope (excepting history) bears a striking resemblance
to titles produced later by the scholars and courtiers in the equally polished society of ninth-and tenth-century Muslim rulers. It extended
to brief biographical dictionaries, lists and catalogues, lively works on natural curiosities, and a long chain of titles on the wonders and
marvels of the world. Like the Muslim courtiers, Hellenistic authors had an encyclopedic range and an interest in the fabulous and the
exotic, which made better reading than a brilliant scientific tract by Archimedes in 'peculiarly rusty Doric'. These books were works to
dip into, in search of something odder than Aristotle knew. They were totally unscientific, but they made for good conversation, like the
popular lists of the world's biggest rivers and most impressive sights. We should remember this saving grace. Very little survives from
the laborious volumes in which prose authors showed off so cheerfully, but the titles tell their own story, none more clearly than the
works of Callimachus. His Table of the Rare Words and Compositions of Democritus was for enthusiasts only, but readers may have
found more in his Customs of Barbarians, his Collection of Wonders of the World, and his books On the Rivers of Europe, On Birds, On
Winds - but perhaps not so much in his monograph On Changes of Names in Fish.
The most punishing endeavour of Hellenistic learning was better directed. The first librarians in Alexandria were "scholar poets, and
from this combination grew the science of specialized scholarship which was at its peak from the 220s onwards. The poet's role in its
origins is explicable. Prose used the common Attic dialect of the courts and did not react against its growing colloquialism until the
classical revival of the first century B.C. All Hellenistic poets, however, ignored the spoken dialects and looked back to the language and
metre of the old classics. Difficult metres were revived or applied to unlikely subjects: Callimachus added a new one, by copying the