The malignant gnomes who write reviews in Rhodes
are muttering about my poetry again –
tone-deaf ignoramuses out of touch with the muse –
because I have not consummated a continuous epic
of thousands of lines on heroes and lords
but turn out minor texts as if I were a child
although my decades of years are substantial.
To which brood of cirrhotic adepts
I, Callimachus, thus:
(Prologue to the Aetia,translated by Lombardo and Rayer, p. 65)He also wrote six Hymns,which survive entire, in a learned allusive style. His ‘Hymn
to Zeus’ begins in a slightly sceptical spirit, questioning of the mythic, contrasting with
the dedication of Aratus quoted above:
What song but of Zeus for the God’s libations?
Eternal Lord, eternally great, mythic scourge
of the Sons of earth, lawgiver of the sons of heaven,
Diktaean, Lykaian – how praise the mountain-born god?
Disputed nativity
divides the mind in doubt.
Cretan hills of Ida, Zeus?
Arkadia?
Of these claimants, which has lied, Father?
‘Cretans are always liars.’
And your Cretan-built tomb, my Lord
will never hold your immortal essence.
(ll.1–12, translated by Lombardo and Rayer, p. 3)Towards the end, the poet associates Zeus with Kings, and one in particular:
And you lavished wealth
and prosperity on them, on all, but not equally
if we may judge by our monarch,
for Ptolemy Philadelphos is preeminent by far.
He accomplishes by dusk what he thinks of at dawn –
the monumental by dusk, the minor in a trice –
while the projects of others drag on for years,
their programs curtailed by your executive order.
(ll. 113–120, translated by Lombardo and Rayer, p. 6)LITERATURE 179