Hamadan, Iran and Ai Khanoum, Afghanistan (figure 69). The many tragedies that were written in the
Hellenistic Period have for the most part perished. An intriguing exception is a 250-line fragment of a
tragedy written by a Hellenistic Jew named Ezekiel who most likely lived in Alexandria. The tragedy,
called The Exodus, dramatizes the Old Testament story and is written in a Greek that bravely tries to
imitate the language, style, and meter of Aeschylus and Euripides. Other dramatists of the Hellenistic
Period seem to have imitated the plots, as well as the diction, of fifth-century Attic tragedy, to judge from
such titles that we know of as Oedipus and Telephus.
Imitation does not necessarily imply lack of originality or creativity. Certainly Euripides, the most
original of all classical Greek poets, imitated and was influenced by Aeschylus, among others. The
difference in the Hellenistic Period is that poets were now applying their creativity to imitation of
predecessors who were felt to have inhabited a world that no longer existed. That no-longer-existent
world of the past could only be recovered by study and research, and the poets of the Hellenistic Period
were among the foremost scholars and literary historians who worked in institutions like the library at
Alexandria. (One does not, after all, think it necessary to conduct “research” into a living tradition of
which one feels a part.) This lends a scholarly, almost academic, tone to much of Hellenistic poetry. This
is especially apparent from the work of Callimachus, the most outstanding poet of the Hellenistic Period
and also one of the most outstanding scholars. Most of his vast literary and scholarly output has been lost,
but enough of his poetry survives to enable us to get a sense of his style and his literary aims. For
Callimachus, as for all Greeks, poetry is virtually defined by the epics of Homer, whom the Greeks often
referred to simply as The Poet. Callimachus and all the other Hellenistic poets undertook an exhaustive
study, not only of the Homeric poems, but of the ways in which the Homeric poems had been imitated and
emulated by the various lyric, dramatic, and elegiac poets who lived between the time of Homer and the
Hellenistic Period. What emerged from this study was that, while it was not possible to compete directly
with Homer, there were various ways of being “Homeric” without composing large-scale epic poems on
heroic subjects. In fact, since direct comparison with Homer would always be to the later poet’s
disadvantage, the best way of asserting one’s Homeric credentials was by creatively emulating one or two
Homeric characteristics at a time, and doing it in a conspicuously unHomeric manner.