Ancient Greek Civilization

in fact, it deals with a myth that is so obscure that almost no poet before Callimachus had treated it.
Hecale was an old woman living alone who generously welcomed into her cottage the Athenian hero
Theseus when he was on his way to perform one of his heroic labors. Theseus returned to Hecale’s
cottage after he had completed his task, only to find that she had died. In gratitude for her hospitality,
Theseus established a shrine in her honor and named an Attic deme after her. The contrast between the
Homeric diction and the humble surroundings of Hecale’s cottage are striking and quite characteristic of
Hellenistic poetry. Also characteristic are the use of an arcane story, the interest in an elderly character,
and the inclusion of a link between the present and the mythical past, in the form of the shrine and the
deme. This last is something not found in Homer but is a frequent feature of Attic tragedy, as in Aeschylus’
explicit reference to the founding of the Areopagus in The Eumenides. In keeping with the more modest
subject matter, the scale of Callimachus’ Hecale was considerably more restrained than that of the Iliad
and the Odyssey: Each of the Homeric poems consists of 24 books, while the Hecale was contained in a
single book of perhaps 1,200 lines. This reduction in scale is another characteristic of the poetry of the
Hellenistic period. Callimachus is famous for reportedly having said, “Big book equals big disaster,” and
certainly there is nothing in Hellenistic poetry that remotely approaches the size of the Homeric poems. It
is not that lengthy compositions are inherently inferior – no one would deny that the Homeric epics are the
greatest works of Greek poetry – but that the nature of poetic composition in the Hellenistic Period is
incompatible with poetry on a very large scale. For the Hellenistic poet is expected to spend a great deal
of time, first seeking out arcane subjects for poetic treatment (or arcane versions of more familiar
subjects) and then laboriously refining the verse until it has been purged of anything that might strike a
learned reader as common or ordinary. If a Hellenistic poet had produced a poem the length of the
Odyssey, either the poet must have lived well beyond the normal human life span or standards of quality
control must have been unacceptably lax. The only possible explanation for the length as well as
excellence of the Iliad and the Odyssey was that Homer was, if not divine, at least divinely inspired
(figure 70).