668 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY
cities. Their skepticism about traditional religion caused a strong conservative
reaction, which finds its expression in Aristophanes' play the Clouds (423) and
in the condemnation and execution of Socrates (who was not a Sophist) in 399.
The charges against Socrates show how serious was the debate about the gods
of the state (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1):
Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state and
introducing other, new gods. He is also guilty of corrupting the young.
About twenty-five years later, Plato banished Homer from the educational
curriculum of his ideal state because he believed the Homeric gods and their
myths set a bad moral example for the young. People turned more and more to
philosophy for assurance, and the great philosophical schools—such as the Acad-
emy of Plato—were founded during the fourth century B.c.ALEXANDRIANISM
The conquests of Alexander the Great renewed the influence of Oriental ideas and
religions in the Greek world. He and his father, Philip II of Macedon, further weak-
ened the independence of Greek city-states and loosened the hold of traditional
religion. The period after Alexander's death in 323 B.c. is called the Hellenistic
Age, which continued until the final absorption of Greece into the Roman Empire
in 146 B.c. The intellectual center of the Greek world in the Hellenistic Age was
the Egyptian city of Alexandria, and its library was the greatest of the Greek cen-
ters of scholarship. Here in the third century scholars were interested in traditional
mythology, which they explained and classified or used as a source of learned al-
lusions. Callimachus (ca. 265) was the most distinguished of the Alexandrian
scholar-poets. Amongst his works was the Aetia (Causes), a poem more than four
thousand lines in length, of which only about four hundred survive, containing
many myths and legends about the origins of customs, institutions, and histori-
cal events. He also wrote six hymns modeled on the Homeric Hymns. Among his
contemporaries were Apollonius of Rhodes, who wrote an epic on the Argonauts,
and Theocritus of Cos, whose poems included episodes from the sagas of Hera-
cles and the Argonauts. Often, however, the Alexandrians used mythology as a
source for literary ornamentation or learned allusion.
One of Callimachus' Aetia was adapted by Catullus in his sixty-sixth poem,
"Berenice's Lock," and we give here a few lines whose ingenuity is typical of
the Alexandrian use of mythological allusion. Berenice was queen of Egypt, wife
of Ptolemy III, who vowed to dedicate a lock of her hair if her husband returned
safe from a campaign in Syria. After the lock disappeared from the temple where
it was dedicated, it was identified with a newly discovered constellation, coma
Berenices. The lock of hair is the speaker (Catullus 66. 51-56):¥
The sisters of the lock that had just been cut off were mourning my fate, when
the twin of Ethiopian Memnon arrived on hovering wings, the horse that be-