textual order. Texts were standardized and methods of copying improved. Classical
literature was now officially canonized. Two of the leading poets of the third century,
Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes worked professionally in the library,
Apollonius as its head. The literati of the Hellenistic era worked in a rarefied scholarly
atmosphere that was very different from that of the Classical polis,and wrote for a
cultivated audience delighting in artifice. A few of the surviving texts may indicate
the range of their literary production.
What became one of the most famous poems of antiquity is the Phaenomena, a
didactic poem of over 1,500 lines by Aratus of Soloi in Cilicia. He had studied at
Athens and was poet at the courts of Antigonus II at Pella and later of Antiochus in
Syria. The poem was undertaken at the suggestion of Antigonus.
Let Zeus be foremost – never may our hymns
Omit him. Zeus fills roads and markets, brims
Oceans and bays. By Zeus alone we live
Born as his children, too. He deigns to give
Signs out of kindness to remind us rest
Must yield to work. He shows which soil is best
For cows, and which for hoes, and oversees
Seasons for sowing seeds and planting trees.
(translated by Aaron Poochigian, ll. 1–8)As this opening suggests, the poem, written in traditional hexameters is generically
related to Hesiod’s Works and Days, apoem emanating from Homeric times largely
concerned with agriculture and the seasons. There is something comparable here
with the way in which Hellenistic sculptors consciously adapted the Classical forms
of the past. However, though the last four hundred lines are concerned like Hesiod
with weather signs, the bulk of the poem versifies a prose work on the constella-
tions by the mathematician Eudoxus (c. 390–c.340), a pupil of Plato, thus breaking
new ground for poetry and reflecting the interest in science in his era. There is
much mythological lore included but for the most part the constellations with
their traditional Classical names are described in relation to one another as they
occur in the heavens, starting with those visible to the viewer in the northern
hemisphere.
Day in day out, innumerable mixed
And scattered stars process above us. Fixed
Forever, never bending, an axle pins
Earth in its centre of all; around it spins
Heaven on opposing poles, the axle’s ends.176 THE GREEKS