The nightime effort refers not only to Aratus’s study of the sky but wittily expresses
Callimachus’s appreciation for the poem’s precision and polish, qualities embodied
in his own verse. The reference to ‘the Ultimate Epic’ here reflects Callimachus’s
preference for small-scale genres like the epigram here over epic narratives on
familiar themes composed by the continuators of Homer in the Epic Cycle. ‘Big book,
big pest’ was also reputedly one of his slogans.
Probably the best known of his surviving poems is one of his short poems, a brief
and simple epitaph on the death of his friend Heraclitus.
News of your death.Tears, and the memory
of all the times we talked the sun down the sky.You, Heraclitus, of Halicarnassos,
once my friend, now vacant dust,
whose poems are nightingales
beyond the clutch of the unseen god
(Epigram 1, translated by Lombardo and Rayer, p. 43)In his work in the Alexandrian library, Callimachus produced a prodigious catalogue
of texts. He was also something of a poet-critic and champion of a new aesthetic.
I hate the poems of the Epic Cycle, I don’t like highways
that are heavily travelled, I despise
a promiscuous lover, and I don’t drink from public fountains:
Everything public disgusts me. And yes, Lysanias
you are handsome as handsome, but before I can even say it,
back comes the echo: ‘Some other man has him’
(Epigram 58, translated by Lombardo and Rayer, p. 59)‘Everything public disgusts me’; poetry is becoming more private, reflective and
idiosyncratic, as here when he voices a personal attraction only to immediately
acknowledge its impossibility.
His esoteric learning was given full rein in his Aetia, apoem of four books,
surviving only in fragmented form, in which the poet is instructed by the Muses in the
origins of various Greek customs and religious rites. It is a long poem of several
thousand lines, united by its aetiological theme but discontinuous in its structure. In
this way it can be regarded as a lot of small poems strung together and so not incon-
sistent with the abhorrence he expresses for big books elsewhere. In his preface, he
comes over as a rather prickly poet:
178 THE GREEKS