archaic lyric. So far as patronage helped, it was as a source of leisure and as the setting for secure life in a great capital city. To that
degree, there is a connection between literature and the political fate of the monarchies. Stable kingdoms meant stable cities, in which
poets could mature and practise, and court societies in which they could experiment and come and go.
The earliest Hellenistic poets grew up in the city-states before Alexander and moved into the range of the kings while their courts were
still young. By the 270s the new monarchies seemed settled: these are the years in which poets write of the 'calm weather' of the
Alexandrian court. That serenity was never repeated. Failures abroad, internal squabbles, the rise of the new barbarians, Rome and
Parthia, and the savagery of the Egyptian crowds whom Alexandria had simply excluded and exploited: the Hellenistic poets did not
have the talent to make art from anarchy, and by the 240s the best was done. After the 240s the new excitement of Alexandria wore off,
and poets were left to imitate the previous age's inventions. Scholarship emerged as a specialized art, and poetry, by the second century
B.C., relapsed into provincial sweetness. In 145 Ptolemy VIII drove the scholars and intellectuals out of Alexandria and scattered them
like sparks across the Aegean. Writers of pretty Greek verses reached Roman patrons in the first century B.C., but Catullus, Horace, and
Virgil were right to look back and pick their models with such taste.
The great poetry had been wholly divorced from politics. It was witty and ironic, urbane and perceptive, yet aware of the sadness in life.
It delighted in scenes of emotion which it found in odd episodes of myth, in the child and the old, the housewife as well as the heroine.
Like much poetry of seventeenth-century Europe it drew an image or two, no more, from the sudden horizons of new science and travel.
It preferred rococo wit and colour and the world of the older Greek city. We might long to tug Callimachus east to look for Zoroastrians
or hear the minstrels of east-Iranian nobles. But he and his contemporaries had the polish of excellent 'old boys', brought up in a school
and a civic culture which no eastern peoples matched. A host of unacknowledged schoolmasters had done far more for this last age of
poetry than any well-intentioned king.
Between us and their playful urbanity lies the barrier of Romantic taste. The contrast brings out the best in these first, Hellenistic minds.
In his fine Sonnets on the River Dudden, Wordsworth used an art which Callimachus would have applauded. The poems were short and
their topic was a river and its origins. They were abrupt in their changes of tone and subject and were packed with learning and local
legend. As the river ran into the sea, Wordsworth turned to Hellenistic pastoral:
We, the brave, the mighty and the wise,
We men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish: be it so!The lines were based on the Lament for Bion. But, he concluded,
"enough ... if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower
We feel that we are greater than we know".In the wake of Aristotle, the best Hellenistic minds had had no room for such feelings. From Egypt to India, Greek culture made sense of
human life; the marvels of the world made excellent reading, but its elements ran by natural rules; and third-century men of taste,
through their schooling and philosophies, were neither less nor greater than wit and reason knew.
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