Hymn 5, ‘The Bath of Pallas’ addresses the attendants of the stern warrior goddess
Pallas Athena:
Ladies of Akhaia, come!
but not with alabaster, not with myrrh
[I hear the whir of her axle now!]
no myrrh in alabaster for the bath of Pallas
the goddess Athena does not wear perfume
and no mirror either: she is sure of her beauty.
Not even when Paris judged the contest on Ida
did the great goddess gaze into orichalch’s glow
or the diaphanous flow of the river Simois.
(ll. 15–23 translated by Lombardo and Rayer, p. 32)The goddess does not need the aids of beauty and is not concerned with her
appearance. The poet’s art, however, in its internal rhymes and rarified vocabulary
conjures an atmosphere of beauty to honour the goddess.
His learned allusiveness and his refined style have come to represent a mode or
style of literary composition called ‘Alexandrianism’ which was greatly influential with
later Roman poets such as Catullus and Horace in the first century BC. There is a
tradition that he quarrelled with his younger contemporary Apollonius of Rhodes
(c. 295–c. 215), author of the Argonautica, on the respective merits of epic and the
short poem.
Apollonius’s hexameter poem in four books about the journey of the Argonauts
from Greece to Colchis and Jason’s triumphant winning of the Golden Fleece, though
on a larger scale than anything written by Callimachus, when compared to the
Homeric epics is relatively short. There is supernatural involvement, notably when
the goddesses send Cupid to enflame Medea, and an evocation of the great heroic
era of Heracles who accompanies them on their voyage which is full of larger than
life encounters, as when they sail by Mount Caucasus and come in sight of the eagle
that preys on the entrails of Prometheus, all narrated in the grand style with extended
similes, set speeches and elevated diction throughout. There are battles on the way
but the atmosphere of the epic bears a greater resemblance to the Odysseythan the
Iliad; indeed in the fourth book narrating their return journey, the Argonauts cover
some of the same ground as the Homeric Odysseus, encountering Circe, Scylla and
Charybdis, and the Sirens as they go. Apollonius’s epic is in marked contrast to the
tragedy of Euripides, which had dramatized the acrimonious relations between
Medea and Jason in the later stages of their story when love turned to hatred on
Jason’s proposal to divorce Medea after the pair had settled in Greece. At the centre
of the plot is the love affair between Medea and Jason, as a result of which, with
180 THE GREEKS