I. a Crisis without Identity and Identities without Crisis

Few readers will seriously disagree with Gelzer's judicious comments on the formation, nature, and cultural ambience of Alexandrian poetry. But they are prefaced with reflections on the inner rhythm of literary history which call for a critical response. The one argument that seems particularly controversial has to do with Gelzer's thesis that the "new identity" achieved by Alexandrian poets in the first half of the third century was the direct result of a momentous "crisis in poetry" which had occurred in the preceding century.^[5]

Well aware of the problems inherent in any attempt to divide Greek literature into successive periods, Gelzer differentiates its Hellenistic phase from the classical phase that preceded and the post-Hellenistic or imperial phase that followed it.^[6] His next step, however, is more precarious. He postulates that the three phases, classical, Hellenistic, and imperial, were separated by transitional periods, and these he defines as "crises." The crisis that marked the transition from classical to Hellenistic began, according to Gelzer, around 400 BC and lasted for almost an

[5] Already three decades ago, W. Wimmel, Kallimachos in Rom: Die Nachfolge seines apologetischen Dichtens in der Augusteerzeit , Hermes-Einzelschriften 16 (Wiesbaden, 1960), 93-98, argued that the "new poetry" represented by Callimachus was conceived in response to "die Krise des Dichtens," which Wimmel dated to ca. 400 BC.

[6] Ultimately derived from ancient rhetorical theory, this conventional periodization of Greek literature was apparently adopted for the first time by Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) in his lectures on Greek literature, published in 1831. Its ancient model is the cycle of classical perfection, Hellenistic decline, and Augustan renaissance advocated by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his treatment of Greek rhetoric (see above, n. 3). On the history of the standard periodization of Greek literature see Kassel, Abgrenzung des Hellenismus , 4, 18f.; on Dionysius' periodization of rhetoric see T. Gelzer, "Klassizismus, Attizismus und Asianismus," in Le classicisme à Rome aux 1 ers siècles avant et après J.-C ., H. Flashar, ed., Fondation Hardt, Entretiens 25 (Vandoeuvres and Geneva, 1979), 1-41, esp. 32 ("jene typisch klassizistische Konstruktion der Einteilung der Zeit in drei Perioden"), and K. Heldmann, Antike Tkeorien über Entwicklung und Verfall der Redekunst , Zetemata 77 (Munich, 1982), 122-131; on similar periodizations in ancient criticism, see H.-G. Nesselrath, Die attische Mittlere Komödie: Ihre Stellung in der antiken Literaturkritik und Literaturgeschichte , Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 36 (Berlin and New York, 1990), 341-345.

entire century. In his eyes it was a literary crisis, more specifically a crisis of poetic self-confidence, as one might call it, and not a political one.^[7] He finds its symptoms in "the poetry itself," that is, in self-conscious statements about the contemporary state of poetic genres culled from one epic and three comic poets.

The earliest of Gelzer's witnesses is Aristophanes in the Frogs , who "makes it clear . . . that great tragedy has come to an end with the death of Euripides and of Sophocles." The next witness is Choerilus, who in the proem to his epic on the Persian Wars dramatizes the difficulty of finding new material for epic poetry (F 2 Bernabé = Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 317). He complains that most of the suitable terrain has been claimed by previous poets, and that the art of poetry has "reached its limits"—. As we move from the late fifth into the fourth century, a similar concern with poetic invention is voiced by two representatives of Middle Comedy. Xenarchus compares poets who are uninventive and repeat the same themes over and over again with fishmongers who make desiccated fish look fresh by sprinkling them with water (F 7 Kassel/Austin). Finally, the prologue speaker of Antiphanes' Poiesis —perhaps Poetry personified—argues that comic poets are required by the conventions of their genre to be much more inventive than poets of tragedy (F 189 Kassel/Austin).^[8]

Three of the four texts invite direct comparison. By putting a premium on invention and originality, Xenarchus and Antiphanes comically recall a criterion of poetic craftsmanship that can be traced back via the poets of Old Comedy to Pindar; it was to become de rigueur among Hellenistic poets.^[9] Disguised as an elaborate captatio benevolentiae , the

[8] It surely amounts to special pleading to describe the Xenarchus fragment as an "outcry." The comparison with fishmongers is as conventional as the emphasis on novelty (see below, n.9)—in Amphis (F 30 Kassel/Austin) and Alexis (F 16 Kassel/Austin) the high-handed behavior of Athenian strategoi is compared to the combination of arrogance and benign neglect with which fishmongers treat their customers; cf. Nesselrath, Mittlere Komödie , 294f. n. 26.

same topos lies behind Choerilus' programmatic proem, which calls attention to his innovative approach to epic poetry.^[10] I submit that far from providing evidence for a crisis of poetry, such statements represent conventional voices in an ongoing dialogue on poetics between the poets and their audiences that stretches far back into the classical and archaic past.^[11] Even if these texts may be read as reliable witnesses for poetic self-definition in the pre-Hellenistic period, they reflect an awareness not of a poetry in crisis but, as I read them, of poets who strive to explore new avenues of expression. They serve as a reminder that any literature that is alive and well must call its own identity into question, and must do so consciously. The growing pains which can still be felt beneath the mixture of nostalgic retrospection and caustic wit found in all four of Gelzer's witnesses reflect the creative tension between continuity and change, that is, between the poet's recognition of the "burden of the past" and his inner compulsion to find his own poetic voice. Poetic acknowledgements of the creative process tend to be couched in a provocative language that is either defensive or defiant. Choerilus adopted a stance that puts him on the defensive. Working within a time-honored genre, he asserted his own identity by pretending to bow to his predecessors. By contrast, his contemporary Timotheus, the creator of a new dithyrambic music, defied previous poets by turning his back on them: "I don't sing in the ancient mode, for my new mode is better. . . . Away with the ancient Muse!"^[12] Timotheus and Choerilus represent opposite

[10] Cf. N. Hopkinson, A Hellenistic Anthology (Cambridge, 1988), 1 (on Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 317): "Choerilus' response to this problem was an epic poem which dealt, unusually, with a recent historical subject—the Persian Wars." Hopkinson recognizes an affinity with Callimachus' equally programmatic prologue to the Aetia (F 1.1-40 Pfeiffer). But unlike Choerilus, Callimachus refrained from the despondent rhetoric of epigonism and adopted the more assertive convention of the priamel to distance himself from the poetic tradition and to assert his own exclusiveness in no uncertain terms (Epigrammata 28; cf. A. Henrichs, HSCP 83 [1979]: 207-212, and E.-R. Schwinge, Künstlichkeit von Kunst: Zur Geschichtlichkeit der alexandrinischen Poesie [Munich, 1986], 4-9).

[11] Cf. E. W. Handley, "Comedy," in Cambridge History of Classical Literature 1:412 on Antiphanes F 189 (see above, n. 9): "We need to take what he says about tragedy and comedy much more as advertising material for the kind of play he is presenting than as documentation."

attitudes toward the poetic tradition that stem from an identical need for artistic self-definition.

Thus, as far as I can see, Gelzer's concept of a literary crisis does not find support in the meager remains of fourth-century poetry. The true Achilles' heel of Gelzer's argument, however, is its failure to take sufficient account of the sudden transformation of the Greek world in the wake of the tremendous political, territorial, and cultural changes brought about by the exploits of Alexander the Great and the activities of his successors.^[13] It is true that Alexander did not change the course of Greek literature overnight, but it is equally true that his conquests and cosmopolitanism created a different climate which offered unprecedented opportunities for new ventures in literature. For many of the writers of his time, Alexander was not a distant figure; for some he was a patron. We know of at least one dramatic performance at which Alexander himself was present. In 324 BC the satyr play Agen , by a certain Python, was performed at the Dionysia—not in Athens or Pella, but in the Macedonian military camp on the banks of the Hydaspes. In retrospect the occasion was truly a literary event. Instead of satyrs, the characters were contemporary political figures. The extant prologue scene describes a satirical ghost-raising ritual reminiscent of Aeschylus and appropriately performed by Persian magi near the reeds of a lake. But no Tiresias or Darius returned from the dead to predict the future. Instead the hetaira Pythionike was brought up from the underworld to comfort her lover, the notorious Harpalus, who had just defected from Alexander. The unabashed topicality of this play and its performance at a traditional Dionysiac festival in a place far removed from any Greek polis exemplify the powerful alliance of new political forces and widened horizons that shaped even the most conventional genres of literature in ways unimaginable before the new age inaugurated by Alexander.^[14]

[13] Parsons disagrees with Rudolf Pfeiffer, who thought that Alexander inaugurated a renaissance of letters, "the age of scholarship and rediscovery." Nevertheless he seems slightly more inclined than Gelzer to take political constellations into account and to recognize the significance of the momentous events that took place during the last third of the fourth century: "Alexander represents a geopolitical crisis, perhaps, but not a literary one."

[14] Python (?) TGF 91 F 1. The play is variously ascribed to Python of Catana (otherwise unknown), to the orator Python of Byzantium, or even to Alexander himself Cf. B. Snell, Scenes from Greek Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), chaps. 5-6, esp. 105-108 (revised as Szenen aus griechischen Dramen [Berlin, 1971], chap. 4, esp. 109-113). On the controversial date of the Agen see H. Lloyd-Jones, Gnomon 38 (1966): 16f. (reprinted in his Greek Epic, Lyric, and Tragedy [Oxford, 1990], 215f.).

In the course of the fourth century, Greek attitudes toward literature doubtless changed, in Athens as well as elsewhere, and so did the standard of taste, as Gelzer has shown so well: a gradual recognition of old masters and an emerging notion of the classic; performance giving way to books; a new concept of literature produced for individual consumption in the public library or the private study, dissociated from the social institutions of an earlier period; an interest in literature as a historical phenomenon and the creation of the history of literature as a discipline, including the formation of a canon. Gelzer puts these new developments in proper perspective when he recognizes them as the earliest manifestations of features typically associated with Hellenistic literature. But is a period of transition, however momentous, by definition one of "crisis?"

The problem lies partly in the interpreter's own outlook and his choice of words. The word is a highly specialized term in Greek medical literature, where it describes the state of a patient whose life hangs in the balance. Applying this term to the condition of an entire body of literature comes close to falling into the Romantic trap of treating literature and literary genres as if they were biological organisms that pass through successive stages of birth, maturation, and death. Thus understood, a crisis could lead to the unnatural or premature death of the literary patient, for example classical literature. We are obliged, I think, to remind ourselves that the analogy is powerful but misleading. Literature and art do not behave like biological organisms, which are preprogrammed; actual history, including the history of literature, is infinitely more complex, and less predictable, than the alternating pattern of decline and revival postulated by Gelzer.^[15]

On Parsons' paper I have much less to say. In a magisterial display of hard facts which speak for themselves, he reexamines the basic elements of Hellenistic literature in the light of new discoveries—the infinite variety of genres, styles, meters, modes of expression, and authorial stances that constitute its core. More than one hundred names of Helle-

[15] The notion of a recurrent literary crisis ultimately reflects an outmoded classicistic model of literary history and merit. Its numerous nineteenth-century predecessors include the Schlegel brothers' theory of the rise and decline of tragedy from Aeschylus via Sophocles to Euripides, which Nietzsche adopted in his Birth of Tragedy . See N. Himmelmann-Wildschütz, "Der Entwicklungsbegriff der modernen Archäologie," Marburger Winckelmann-Program 1960 (1961), 13-40, esp. 20f., on the "circulus vitiosus" of cyclical theories. In essence Himmelmann's criticism also applies to Gelzer's model.

nistic authors, helpfully organized by more or less traditional categories, suggest the complexities hidden behind the topic of identity, which the conference has set itself the task of considering. Parsons presents us with a pluralistic world of many different literary identities which not only coexist but overlap and interact. By correlating individual authors with generic literary categories, he shows that the same Hellenistic author can often be identified in more than one way and that the deliberate crossing of boundaries is a persistent hallmark of Hellenistic literati.

It is difficult to unravel Parson's fight fabric. His judgment is admirably sound, but I sense a note of frustration—genuine caution or Oxonian understatement?—that I am reluctant to share. He says: "Nothing remains, then, but the subjective. I want simply to illustrate some possible identities: literary men in relation to their profession and to their audience; to their unhellenic surroundings and their Hellenic inheritance; to literary tradition and to current ideologies, as exemplified in experiments, rivalries, and sloganizing." Are we to understand that Hellenistic literature, as currently understood, is mere quicksand, constantly shifting and without fixed boundaries or content, and that the modern concept of "Hellenistic" is nothing but a conglomerate of subjective impressions, quot homines, tot sententiae? This is indeed the conclusion reached by Reinhold Bichler in his recent monograph on the modern history of the "Hellenismusbegriff" and its inherent problems.^[16] Parsons himself is perhaps not quite as skeptical as he sounds. After all, he has mapped long stretches of the Hellenistic literary landscape with such skill and accuracy that, using his map as a guide, the disoriented and the disillusioned should find it much easier from now on to locate the elusive entity known as Hellenistic literature.

Parsons and Gelzer cover a lot of ground. They move so fast that they rarely pause to consider the distinctive identity of a given author and his work. In Gelzer's treatment, the individual poets disappear behind the artistic or cultural roles assigned to them in the grand scheme of things. Parsons marshals an impressive array of names and personalities, yet his very inclusiveness leaves us still looking for what constitutes the essential identity of the period and of the major authors who represent it. Aware of the imbalance, both scholars have tried to remedy it by singling out individual authors for more detailed consideration. Gelzer returns to Theocritus and Callimachus near the end of his presentation to consider them in some detail as court poets who cultivated the "Praise of Princes."

[16] I agree with Gehrke, Geschichte des Hellenismus , 130, that the modern concept of "Hellenismus" is not quite as ill-defined and lacking in definite characteristics as Bichler suggests. But as Bichler, "Hellenismus " (see above, n. 3), reminds us, our understanding of the term "Hellenistic" needs to be constantly reexamined if the concept is to remain viable.

Parsons pays a final tribute to Callimachus in his digression on the Victory of Berenice , whose text and exegesis owe so much to his papyrological and interpretative skills. When they point to individual poets and their place in literature, Parsons and Gelzer open a door out of the constraints posed by the separate treatment of identity and crisis. I propose to follow their example by focusing, in the remainder of my response, on two other figures that suggest ways in which identity and crisis are interrelated.

Far removed from one another in time, talent, and the impact they have made on posterity, Menander and Apollodorus represent two distinct literary identities, the playwright and the scholar poet. Apart from the fact that both of them composed iambic verse and that Menander is quoted once or twice in the extant fragments of Apollodorus, these two men have nothing in common.^[17] But they happen to illustrate the dilemma of critics, both ancient and modern, who do not know what to do with poets whose place in literature is ambiguous. Apollodorus' rudimentary attempt to classify an obscure epic poet and the long-standing modern disagreement over Menander's literary status suggest the existence of a different and more tangible type of recurrent literary crisis than the one contemplated by Gelzer. Although it remains doubtful that the new poetic identities associated with Hellenistic literature were produced by a "crisis in poetry," it is one of the lessons of literary history that poets whose date, quality, or distinctiveness is controversial have produced prolonged crises of criticism. Such crises rarely change the overall picture of Greek literature, but they deeply affect our appreciation of individual authors and their literary identity.