Could a royal tutor escape the faults of a royal librarian? Like Apollonius, whom he may have taught, Callimachus could write fine,
uncluttered verse. His epigrams were exquisite. He had thought seriously about poetry's options and asserted his choice against what he
calls the 'envy' of his critics in epigrams, iambics, and a famous 'second Prologue' to a late, collected edition of his more experimental
work. He exalted 'technique' and 'skill', the 'slender' Muse, the 'untravelled road', the waters from pure, unvisited fountains. Hesiod was a
possible model, Homer an irrecoverable genius. He refused to write a long, continuous poem of epic proportions on a single subject of
myth or ancient history. 'A big book', he wrote, 'is a big pest.' If he differed from Apollonius, it must have been on this point. In his
forceful iambic pieces he defended his own versatility and his readiness to range between different genres, metres and dialects. With the
help of ancient commentators we can put names to his dislikes. His bugbear was 'the fat woman', a long poem by Antimachus, the Lyde,
which the great epigrammatists had admired, incurring his attack. He also opposed a critic who was probably Aristotelian. The issue,
perhaps, was Callimachus' dislike of 'continuous' plot.
To Roman poets no name was weightier to drop than that of Callimachus, and Virgil made famous use of his Prologues in a poem on
poetry's predicaments. Talk of 'new' poetry strikes home to readers in the wake of Pound and Eliot. Callimachus' learning and range were
powerful, but what of their results?
Unfortunately, his most original works are known only in fragments; new ones are still being discovered, and a major new piece -was
published from papyrus in 1977. His iambics -widen the range of the metre's subjects, but the surviving pieces are very difficult, written
in a style which is oblique and highly erudite. Posterity respected his four books On Origins (Aetia) but they are an odd collection. In the
first two books Callimachus asks puzzling questions, usually of the Muses, once of a stranger whom he had met and befriended at a
coarse symposium which is described in a flash of oblique liveliness. Here is the 'new' poetry, the 'untravelled way': questions on why
the people of Paros do not use flutes at sacrifices, or why the Icians are connected with Thessaly. The origin of a noble family on Ceos is
the peg on which he hangs a witty and allusive account of a mythical wooing (Acontius and Cydippe, frs. 67-75): he explores local cults
whose origins were linked with the Argonauts, handling prose sources which he and Apollonius could both read, but using them more
tersely and subtly. The virtues of this poetry defy translation. Callimachus found much of his material in scholarly prose works, and
strung it together with an abruptness which tested his readers. His vocabulary was very recherche indeed. In the poem's last two books
Callimachus seems to have worked in witty praises of Queen Berenice, her chariot-victory in Greece, and her lock of hair, set among the
stars as the Coma Berenices (the 'Lock of Berenice').
Like other Hellenistic poets, Callimachus ranged between the different genres, and some of his most appealing work belongs in forms
which he shared with contemporaries. Like them, he tried a 'little epic', the Hecale. Its occasion was a heroic exploit of the young
Theseus, but typically the poem dwelt on accompanying scenes, on Theseus' reception, the night before his ordeal, by the poor, but
hospitable, old woman Hecale; on her simple entertainment, her reminiscences, even a dialogue between a pair of birds.
Of his six Hymns, which survive complete, the best three are set in the cities of Cos, Argos, and Cyrene. They combine the spectators'
vivid sense of the gods' presence at their festivals with a playful excursus on relevant myths of their encounters with men. Are they proof
of Callimachus's own sincere piety? Rather, the poet amuses himself and us by playing with the simple faith of the uneducated, in a style
which presupposes high sophistication.
Born in Cyrene, Callimachus had taught as a school-master before coming to the Alexandrian court. Like many lyric poets and most
Greek historians, he was an exile. In his surviving love poems he writes wittily of his loves for boys, but never of women. However, this
taste was common among his contemporaries. His exile and his homosexuality have been curiously emphasized as forming his horizon,
but his most obvious debt is to his days as a schoolteacher. He recalls the strengths and vices of the literary education of his age: the
Homeric quizzes, the antiquarian catechisms, the sexual crushes, and the concern for rare words. Like so many schoolmasters,
Callimachus was most successful when most conventional, in his funerary epigrams and classic hymns.
On one point Callimachus was proved right. His Origins and Iambics claimed to be poems for the refined few. The new papyrus of his
Origins' third book was handsomely copied within a generation of the poet's death. Already it needed a literal prose paraphrase for many
of its lines. In the Roman age Callimachus' 'new path' became an acknowledged model for the great Augustan poets. It is not altogether
clear how much they read of it. Callimachus' poems survived to the end of antiquity, the delight of scholars and erudits manques: we
know of a tax clerk in Egypt in the 170s A.D. who amused himself by translating the name of an Egyptian on his register by
Callimachus' rare word for 'mousetrap'.
Like Apollonius, Callimachus had enjoyed the direct patronage of kings and access to the great royal libraries. Like Apollonius, he had a
playful, Hellenistic talent, immortalized in his epigrams and hymns, but he dressed it in learning and rare language. The library, one
feels, was at times his worst enemy. Between 300 and 240 B.C. the most fruitful impulse for poetry belonged elsewhere, in the use of