hardest of all forms, the staccato galliambics which were used in one type of cult-hymn. Scholar poets set out to enrich the language by
their own researches. In our own age W.H. Auden allotted poets the duty of legislating for language and guarding its purity. Hellenistic
poets laid down the law too, but on dead, literary words. Much of their poetry is very difficult to translate, as it is packed with their sub-
Homeric coinages, puns and glosses on obscure phrases in the classics, and an extravagant love of synonyms. On a mid-third-century
papyrus we have a piece of a poetic 'vocabulary' which lists rare compound words. When searching for the mot juste, lesser poets could
look at these handy catalogues. By the early second century, Aristophanes, the librarian in Alexandria, had compiled a big work called
Words, perhaps the same as his On Words Suspected of Not Being Used by The Early Writers. By 200, literary scholarship had its own
specialists who were no longer poets.
In the service of Philip and Alexander, the royal tutor Aristotle and his kinsman Callisthenes had worked on the text of Homer, whom
their great pupil loved. In Alexandria scholarship became a science, spearheaded by the royal librarians from about 201 to 145 B.C.
Callimachus had already published a famous catalogue in 120 books, the Tables of Persons Conspicuous in Every Branch of Learning
and a List of Their Compositions. Future scholars did more to swell libraries than reduce them. No critical work on forgeries is attested,
and as scholars declared the old texts to be unsatisfactory, kings had to acquire their works and the new texts too. The master of the art
was Aristarchus (c.215-143). Both tutor and librarian, he taught the best critics of the next generation and was distinguished by his
flashes of historical sense, his caution, and his sane theory of regularity in grammar. The conjectures and deletions which these critics
proposed have had less influence than their arrangement of the texts we now read.
The great age of scholarship ran from the later third century to the mid second, and afterwards, like philosophy, it lapsed into the
industrious synthesis of rival views. As in philosophy, so in criticism: this synthesis followed an age of fierce dispute between sects, the
second-century 'analogists' of Alexandria and the 'anomalists' at Pergamum. These subjects were best learnt by personal contact and thus
among grammarians the ties of master and pupil were drawn very tightly. What exactly had Aristarchus said? There were no mass copies
of his teaching, and a familiar industry developed in the circulation of first-hand lecture notes. Inevitably scholarship began to be
practised on the scholars' works themselves. Ammonius, librarian and pupil of Aristarchus, wrote that jewel of Hellenistic piety, On The
Fact That There Were Not More Than Two Editions Of Aristarchus's Recension Of The Iliad.
Royal men of letters did not only have to live with their texts. They had to live with each other. How did a man prove himself more
learned than some wretched contemporary, except by compiling more information and attacking other men's views? An apt legend later
credited the Alexandrian scholar Didymus with 3,500 books, justifying his nickname 'Brass Guts'. The remarkable Eratosthenes spanned
a range -which few have matched since, writing well on geography, chronology, astronomy, on Good and Bad Qualities, and adding
some notable poetry, including a brilliant epigram on the method of doubling a cube. A host of lesser minds ranged almost as widely and
at similar length.
The quarrels, at first sight, are more depressing. The Museum was once described as the 'bird-cage of the Muses', and its subjects saw
some spectacular cock-fights. They were led by Callimachus' attacks on poets and critics who did not share his taste and aims. On the
topic of textual scholarship, Alexandria and Pergamum staged their own minor Hellenistic war. Literary critics throve on attacks:
Aristarchus attacked Zenodotus, Demetrius and Crates attacked Aristarchus, Polemo attacked Eratosthenes, and so forth. One-upmanship
made a man's name: Aristophanes even wrote a book Against Callimachus' Library Lists. Yet it is a dead subject which does not cause
scholarly dispute. The personal tone was frightful, but on inspection these quarrels were not mere fights for promotion or the savage
reaction of the old to the young. The competitors believed that principles were at stake. Callimachus, not unjustly, thought one wing of
poetic taste entirely misguided. In scholarship it mattered greatly if a man was sensible and an analogist, or irresponsible and an
anomalist, with a faith in allegory as a device to make the poets 'mean' things quite remote from their manifest meaning. Through the
grammarians' invention, the worst-attested personal quarrel has become the most notorious. The two Alexandrian poets, Callimachus and
Apollonius, were later alleged to have fought bitterly, perhaps because Callimachus' pugnacity was well known and, as master and
supposed pupil, the two seemed inevitable enemies to later scholars who cast them in their own image. Modern scholars have given the
legend a new twist, alleging that Callimachus abused his pupil for taking his material without acknowledgement. That is an amusing
comment on scholars, but not on poets, who are happy to be imitated. The 'quarrel' lacks any good evidence.
In this atmosphere of industry and competition, where is good, readable writing still to be found? In the little which we still know of
prose, new forms and a new emphasis show through, but they owe nothing directly to royal patrons. The earlier forms of biography
blossomed in this age of individuals and educated interest in great men of the past. It was feeble, however, because it lacked a sense of
social and psychological context and tended to be static and anecdotal. The germs of romantic fiction also hatched generously. The
Alexander Romance excelled them all, beginning within a decade of the great man's death. Popular novels were matched by a new form
of popular moralizing, cast in prose as the 'diatribe' and attached to the name of the itinerant Bion. The scholar Eratosthenes dismissed
him as a fraud decked out in the flowery dress of a harlot. We know too little to decide, but there was some originality in the satirical
mixtures of prose and verse invented by his near-contemporary Menippus. These pieces made fun of philosophers and their double