standards, and later they interested Roman satirists. The best may have come from that sympathetic figure, Timon. One-eyed, he was
remembered for many virtues, his love of gardens, his skill at avoiding pupils, and his hatred of interruptions from dogs and servants. In
satirical sketches he took off the philosophers and made fun of contemporary geographers. He called the inmates of the Museum
'cloistered book-worms' and deflated the literary scholars, saying that the best texts of Homer were the old ones, before the poems had
been altered out of recognition. It would be good to know more of this man who began by earning his living as a dancer.
Less attractively, the decade after Alexander's death saw the extension of school declamation with its mock speeches on particular
dilemmas and legal decisions: we first hear of them in the early years of the New Comedy which shared something of their spirit. We
also know of a taste for rhythmical, inflated rhetoric which became known as the Asianic style. Critics in the Augustan age gave Romans
the credit for ending this extravagance and returning prose to a sober classicism by their steadying, moral influence. This view is
questionable. Oratory had not declined into bombast, for it remained central to the cities' endless embassies to the kings and, later, to
Rome. We have lost this practical oratory, and already in the 140s the master of 'Asianism' was being criticized by Agatharchides, whose
own prose style earned high praise later for its dignity and nobility, its clarity and artistry with words.
Hellenistic Poetry
Poetry, however, is the form in which surviving Hellenistic literature excels. Of the classic styles of poetry, lyric was the obvious
candidate in the wake of Aristotle and Alexander. The days when an aristocrat could advise or abuse his fellow citizens on politics were
gone, but men still died and fell in love, wined and dined and pursued their ever-elusive boys. The traditional drinking party, or
symposion, flourished among citizens and courtiers and remained a natural setting for polished poetry. Without any royal
encouragement, the first Hellenistic poets saw their chance and returned to the themes, metre, and manner of older lyric masters. Like the
early poets, they also attended to lower, popular songs. They twisted these themes to suit new settings and added the learning, wit, and
urbanity which befitted true 'old boys' of a civic education.
We know so little of poetry in the fourth century that we may miss the roots of lyric's rediscovery. For us its impact is plainest in the
epigram, which enjoyed a golden age between about 300 and 240 B.C. Its masters filled it with their personality and literary tastes,
capping one another's poems and contriving doubles entendres so neat that they are still being unravelled with pleasure. In Alexandria,
especially, the epigrams convey the impression of a coterie of intimate and free-living friends, revelling in the polish of their new device.
They give us more poems with point and dialogue, and they cast them in enigmatic settings. They convince us of their self-awareness
and their life among wine and women, symposia and fickle boys.
The earliest master was Asclepiades from Samos, a respected poet who survives for us largely in his love poems. There is point and a
genial self-awareness in his poems on favoured courtesans and on themes made familiar in the setting of the symposion. The relations of
love and wine are his main subjects, with an awareness that if one love fails there is always another for another day. Posidippus covers
similar ground and has also left us some pleasant epigrams on major buildings in the city. Scholars found it hard to separate Asclepiades'
poems from those of a fellow Samian, Hedylus, and perhaps they were close companions. Hedylus' epigrams survive as poems against
gluttons and gross banquets; they remind us that a good symposion was an expression of taste and civility. This trio were followed by the
ornate and appealing Dioscorides, who takes us out of this small urban world in his epitaphs for a Persian and for settlers in the Egyptian
countryside. A series of poems on past and present dramatists raise tantalizing problems of literary history, while his florid phrasing sits
well round the pudgy, hospitable figure of Doris, his bed-fellow.
The master of the epigram was Callimachus, the royal tutor. He knew the others' work and attacked them for their taste in longer poems.
In return, they took one of his best lines and reset it in an obscene context. If Callimachus' epigrams were all we had of his work, how
differently we would picture him. In them his language is clear and fluent, while his grasp of the verse form remains the envy of all
composers of Greek elegiacs. In his epigrams we meet Callimachus, the unhappy lover of boys, prey to passions which he cannot control
and others will not oblige. He is Callimachus who 'knew how to have fun while the wine passed round', Callimachus who can chide the
judgement of the gods. Nothing defies his art. He can construct good puns on a salt-cellar or defend his own refined literary tastes. The
self-awareness is sharper, the emotions deeper than the themes to which our poems of Asclepiades are now limited. The royal tutor and
cataloguer could also be playful. He addressed a perfect set of verses to his friend Philippus the doctor, to assure him that while poetry
was one cure for the love of boys, hunger could prove as effective: the poet and his friend can defy love, as they possess both remedies.
The reference to poetry possibly alluded to a poem by the great Theocritus. The epigram's language had a medical tone which suited a
doctor.
More profoundly, Callimachus has left us a group of the best epitaphs in Greek. These themes were traditional for the epigram, and
flowered again for several lost friends, among them poor, talented Heraclitus who 'tired the sun with talking' and left us one subtle
funerary poem as his memento. These are great poems: simple, well angled, and profoundly moving. Epigrams, however, were