PART TWO
IDENTITY AND CRISIS IN HELLENISTIC LITERATURE

Introduction

Anthony Bulloch

Ever since Choerilus of Samos (S.H . 317) suggested, toward the close of the fifth century BC , that earlier poets composed in a condition of purity and innocence, and that, by contrast, contemporary writing was somehow hackneyed and defiled (for those are the clear implications of his reference, in v. 2, to a time "before the meadow was mown," with its connotations of a religious sanctity still preserved), critics have seen the post-Classical period as one that is inevitably inferior to all that went before. Even the modern historian, seemingly in pursuit of objective truth derived from external evidence and a strict methodology, is often driven by a powerful subconscious need to believe in a state of grace, an earthly paradise from which mankind has fallen into its present sullied state. So Minoan Cnossus, for example, becomes a "historical" Phaeacia, the world now lost to us of a people who knew only the ways of peace, despite abundant evidence from the art that survives from the great palace, corroborated by myth, that the social and religious thinking of the inhabitants of Cnossus was full of unintegrated primitive impulses of violence and destruction; the Archaic and Classical periods become the short-lived decades of an exemplary society parallel to our own in its ideals and aspirations; and the post-Classical world, the Hellenistic, comes to represent decline and inferiority, marked in every field, to be disputed occasionally by scholars such as Wilamowitz, but never essentially in question for the historiographical mainstream. Thomas Gelzer's paper provides the historical and conceptual background for a study of this phenomenon, and Peter Parsons lays out many of the particulars, including a striking reminder how many of the Greeks themselves even in the first century BC succumbed to theories of decline and spoke of stylistic "depravity" and linguistic "corruption," and how often canons of

great writers consisted exclusively of figures from the Classical and Archaic periods. And Albert Henrichs challenges us to reconsider the notions that underlie the definition of "Hellenistic" with his detailed examination of Menander and the recently discovered fragment of the poem Meropis .

The most central issue, of course, in the question of "identity" in the Hellenistic period, and particularly in Alexandria in the third century BC , is to what extent individual writers were independent and free from the constraints of the past; this was a preoccupation of many Hellenistic writers themselves, and it continues to be a primary concern of modern historians and critics. The ancient writers often circle around the issue raised earlier by Choerilus and proclaim, in varying degrees, their individuality (always within the accepted bounds of the convention of mimesis and imitatio , of course), but it is striking how the modern interpreter often adopts an uneasy or inconsistent position. A figure such as Dionysius Scytobrachion may be cited, as he is very appositely by Peter Parsons, for his "domestication and rationalization" of traditional material, and the same tendencies may be seen in poets such as Theocritus or Callimachus; but the poets are often analyzed, and their language and diction especially so, as if they were primarily regressive traditionalists, seeking to vary and renew but never dislodge their Homeric "model." What is common to both, surely, and very significant, is that the mythographer and the poet, whether recounting a myth or maintaining a certain set of stylistic or linguistic features, seek both to renew and to preserve at the same time.

Among the practitioners of oral poetry in an earlier, nonliterate, age, these aspirations are not the least in conflict with one another (as Albert Lord has demonstrated very clearly): preservation and renewal are two complementary aspects of the living tradition of oral poetry and its transmission as an essential art from one generation to the next. So too the writers of the Hellenistic age (and particularly in the third century BC ) patiently seek to keep the past alive for the future: they are not mere bookmen, for all the stylistic features and turns that we may catalogue, but truly creative writers. And the really striking phenomenon is that almost all the major writers of this time succeed in achieving some kind of inner creative balance: the weight of the past is almost always acknowledged without sacrificing the creative vitality of the present. Dionysius Scytobrachion, for example, may well revamp and incorporate critique of the myth into the myth itself, but the critique does not actually prevent the storytelling. The story goes on, even if the fire-breathing bulls are seen as poetic fantasy for the Taurians; the warrior continues to advance, Alexander-like, a pioneer at the edge of the known world, and a new prose romance is born. Similarly when Theoc-

ritus presents the achievements of the baby Heracles in a context that satirizes and diminishes the once-heroic Amphitryon, or Callimachus exposes the social embarrassment of having a bulimic son like Erysichthon, the myths are being preserved and transmitted, whatever shifts of emphasis may be involved. It is an essential feature of living myth that it moves with the times and is continuously reshaping, and that quality of the process of renewal is no less a feature of the literate and "self-conscious" Hellenistic period than of the earlier preliterate or Classical time. The fact that we often find it difficult to see what exactly is going on in writers such as Theocritus or Callimachus, or are discomforted by what we do seem to find, is merely a function of the complexity of the subject and the sparseness of our evidence, not an indication that the rules are now completely different: our unease as readers and critics is often a sign of the inadequacy of the evidence available, and of the limitations of our own perspective, rather than a failing of the Hellenistic writers we are trying to understand. For what seems to stand out about the early Hellenistic period is the high degree of success that so many writers had in developing an integrated awareness of the past alongside their own identities. As we know well from our own times, modernist artists do not always preserve and sustain a line of continuity; the urge to break with the great tradition, to reject it and even to destroy it, is sometimes overwhelming, as the adolescent child often needs to overthrow the whole generation of parents in the quest for its own identity. Hellenistic writers, on the other hand, such as Callimachus (fr. 1.20) or, later, Antipater (A.P . 7.409) are clear that their great predecessor Homer is Zeus among poets: he is an Olympian, representative of order and civilization in its highest form, and eternal, not a Titan, a giant who is destined to be deposed by the up-and-coming, superior generation.

What emerges most strongly from these papers is the great diversity of the period. We look for an underlying identity and unifying set of features that give definition to the age, and what strikes us over and over again, from many different perspectives, is pluralism and variety. Our contributors did not set out to prove this, and, indeed, they come from quite different perspectives, but the true theme which they and other contributors in other sections help identify is multiculturalism, one of the preoccupations also of our own time.

Transformations

Thomas Gelzer

A fascinating—and extensive—task has been set before us, the fulfillment of which, however, will certainly not be easy within the scope of this paper.^[1] I cannot, and this is something which must be token for granted, here embark on a history of literature or a report on current research, but must limit myself to what I can say about the topic by way of thesislike statements that will lead to discussion, without derailed argument and illustrated by only a handful of examples. As it happens, practically all the concepts that I shall want to make use of in the course of my exposition are polysemous: their meaning, even the justification for using them at all, is disputed. So I must briefly say how I intend to understand them here, of course without any claim thereby to be providing them with a binding definition in general.

I

Firstly, what do we mean by Hellenistic literature ? The difficulties that literary historians have met with in defining and delimiting Hellenistic literature have been brought to the fore briefly by R. Kassel in a thorough historical investigation.^[2] The concept of "Hellenism" is modern; as is well known, it stems from J. G. Droysen, who introduced the term in his Geschichte des Hellenismus in 1836. But Droysen left neither its con-

[1] I wish to thank my colleagues Christoph Schäublin and Christoph Eucken for discussing this paper with me and for their helpful suggestions, as well as Mr. Richard Matthews for translating it.

[2] R. Kassel, Die Abgrenzung des Hellenismus in der griechischen Literaturgeschichte (Berlin and New York, 1987).

notation nor its time boundaries precisely defined, nor did he always use the term in the same way. Others then transferred it to isolated cultural phenomena of a period now designated as "Hellenistic"; its application to literature followed the hesitant path of trailblazers such as Erwin Rohde and especially Wilamowitz in his Hellenistische Literatur von 320 bis 3o v. Chr . in 1905. The literature of this period had previously been designated as Alexandrian , which was a term by no means without its justification in the facts. However, Wilamowitz used the new designation to wage a campaign against the passing of derogatory judgments on "Alexandrianism" on the part of proponents of classicism. In 1924 his Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos comprised the zenith of his presentation of this new outlook, but what he meant by it was in fact the poetry of only a very limited period of time.

In casting about for ancient precedent in establishing this distinction we can notice that in the realm of the theory of literature and art, and perhaps only there, there were attempts, apparently, at a definition of this period; not, however, in the realm of political history. It is in the realm of the theory of literature and art that we find the first impulse to classification into periods, leading to later, similar classifications in the realm of political and cultural history. This impulse is that of the proponents of classicism.^[3] and the periods it envisages are, more or less, those which concern us. In Latin we see it in Cicero's De oratore (55 BC ) and in his Brutus and Orator (46 BC ); in Greek, somewhat later, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The proponents of classicism (whom I shall hereinafter call classicists , whereby I mean not simply "students of ancient literature," but "advocates of the classical norms of this literature") distinguish three periods, as is well known: the first is that of good writers, later to be designated as classici scriptores . It is followed by a period of decline whose scope very largely corresponds to that which we are here calling "Hellenistic," and then by a third period, again a "good" one, in which—following the creative principle of and with recourse to the best classical models—literature (and art) of a new kind can be produced.^[4]

Regarding literature, this theory has its first practical application in the area of rhetoric. But "rhetoric," to be sure, means something over

[3] Cf. Gelzer, "Klassizismus, Attizismus und Asianismus," in Le classicismeà Rome aux 1 ers siècles avant et après J.-C ., Fondation Hardt, Entretiens 25 (Geneva, 1979), 1-41 (discussion, 42-55); for the terminology (German and English), cf. M. Brunkhorst, Tradition und Transformation: Klassizistische Tendenzen in der englischen Tragödie (Berlin and New York, 1979), 4-21.

[4] Cf. H. Flashar, "Die klassizistische Theorie der Mimesis," in Classicisme à Rome , 79-97 (discussion, 98-111); F. Preisshofen, "Kunsttheorie und Kunstbetrachtung," in Classicisme à Rome , 263-277 (discussion, 278-289).

and above the mere art of speaking. Rather, it entails a general higher education resting on a basis of ,^[5] and in addition to the three prose genres (to wit: history, oratory, and philosophy), the list of its literary precedents gives pride of place to poetry. All four genres in turn comprise Quintilian's famous parallel lists of model authors in both languages.^[6] The classicists (in the sense adopted here) designated the orators of this degenerate middle "Hellenistic" period as Asiatici ; they were held to be representatives of "Asianism," irrespective of whether or not they came from Asia. Ancient classicists themselves did not always delimit this middle period clearly or proceed from the same points of view: most of them make the Hellenistic period begin with the death of Alexander the Great, thereby proceeding from an event of predominantly political importance, while others find their point of departure in the appearance of figures belonging to the art of speaking itself: thus perhaps Demosthenes' successors, or the historian-orator Hegesias, are viewed as the founders of Asianism. And likewise the beginning of the subsequent "classicist" period cannot be delineated unambiguously either.

We should now attempt to delineate more precisely just what we choose to regard as "Hellenistic literature" in what follows. Here certain drastic limitations are called for. First of all we shall confine ourselves to the first of our four genres, that of the poets, leaving prose literature unexamined. There are two main reasons for this. The first is the fact that of the literary prose of this period almost no complete work has been preserved, precisely because the classicists did not deem such pieces to be literary works of art. What we do possess—such as, for example, a few letters by Epicurus or parts of the historical work of Polybius—has (as in the case of technical writings) been preserved only because of its content. The second reason, which is complementary to the first, is that it is just Hellenistic poetry which by its novelty succeeded in leaving an extraordinarily strong imprint. Among the Greeks this imprint can be traced as far as Nonnus and his successors, but among the Romans it had been earlier and more explicitly recognized as a poetic program ever since Catullus and Lucretius, and then by Horace, Vergil, and the elegiac poets, to name but a few. By way of contrast with the despised prose writers of this period, it was precisely the poets—and just those poets who will be dealt with in what follows—who for their part

became classical models of imitatio , as is evident in the very fact of their mention in the lists of Quintilian to which I have referred above.^[7]

Two limitations, of a certain methodological significance, within the Hellenistic poetry to be dealt with in this study should also be mentioned. Firstly, that imposed by the time boundaries of the period. Here, too, there are very different ways of approach, as is well known. The problem of classification into periods has always been a problem of points of view. One can propose to call "Hellenistic" the poetry of a period of political history, perhaps from the death of Alexander to the Battle of Actium; or one can, as the editors of the Supplementum Hellenisticum have done, set the limits of this period at 300 and 1 BC for practical reasons.^[8] Another point of view, which is that adopted here, results in period divisions which derive from the poetry itself and need not necessarily coincide with periods of political history. A foothold for this approach is provided by the specific task which lies before us, namely, to give special preponderance in this investigation to the issues of identity and crisis. Putting the problem in this way presupposes that the production of literature does not proceed uniformly and in unbroken continuity but is punctuated, if not by full-scale interruptions, then at least by turning points characterized by crises.

In our investigation we may permit ourselves to draw on the tripartite scheme devised for rhetoric by these ancient classicists and apply it to poetry by analogy. We shall then try to interpret as "crisis" the process of transformation that lies between the beginning of new Hellenistic poetry and the end of its preceding classical counterpart. We can then understand as the beginning of Hellenistic poetry that point in time at which it finds its new identity. In doing so we shall find ourselves directed toward Callimachus above all others, who together with his library catalog also put together an implicit "history of literature." From that point on, production proceeds for a certain length of time according to the principles newly established, until a subsequent crisis shakes the foundations of this identity, thus creating a need for new creative principles. That would then be the crisis that points the way forward from Hellenistic to classicist poetry. This later crisis is harder to come to grips with than the former, as we shall see.

A second limitation concerns the scope and character of the poetry to be included in our study. Konrat Ziegler, in his somewhat unjustly ne-

[7] Quint. Inst. or . 10.1.54f.; Quintilian mentions some of them precisely because they were esteemed by Roman poets (especially Horace).

[8] The options of the historians of literature are compiled by Kassel, Abgrenzung des Hellenismus .

glected booklet, Dos hellenistische Epos,^[9] rightly insists that alongside the poetry of Callimachus and his circle a broad stream of poetry comes in at the same time, yet not following his principles or doing so only to a very limited extent.^[10] Rather, it maintains the traditional pattern of "cyclic epic" which Callimachus had rejected. In terms purely of bulk, this "traditional" poetry, of which moreover very little has been preserved, seems considerably to have exceeded that of the Callimacheans, but— and this is the point—the shape it persisted in taking did not correspond to the claims of that poetry's recently acquired identity, so that we may here leave it completely out of account.

We shall also leave out New Comedy, from Menander onward. True, it also exercised a very strong influence, and that too among the Romans, but nonetheless it took shape on the basis of quite other presuppositions, and with quite other intentions as to its effects, than that new style of poetry that I wish to consider in what follows. New Comedy comprises a stage in a stream of tradition that reaches a long way back and also endures for a long time to come, but the public it is aimed at—the common people gathered in the theater—is different from the poetry-reading public of Hellenistic times, for whom poetry was indeed something to be read . New comedy was not this, but was rather intended for immediate success on the occasion of a once-only stage performance and was thus meant to be heard , even though no longer exclusively in Athens.

It is, then, not by chance that the new poetry's center of production lies outside Athens, in a place as weak in tradition as Alexandria, so that it would, at a minimum, be acceptable to designate the poetry that we are going to turn our attention to as "Alexandrian," provided that this is dissociated from any negative value judgment. In order to pursue our inquiry into its identity and into the crises that led to it and again led away from it, we should again follow up one of the leading threads of this conference, namely, poets' definitions of themselves and, to further this, any useful indications given by their contemporaries. As regards the identity of the new poetry, we should consider it with a view especially to its political (in the broadest sense) or social function, and not only in view of its purely artistic qualities as art for art's sake, a judgment that this very Alexandrian poetry has now and again tempted its readers to make.^[11]

[9] K. Ziegler, Das hellensitische Epos: Ein vergessenes Kapitel griechischer Dichtung (Leipzig, 1966); referred to by H. Lloyd-Jones, "A Hellenistic Miscellany," SIFC 77 (1984): 58.

[10] There were, however, poets other than those who wrote epics (cf. n. 70, below).

[11] So, recently, E.-R. Schwinge, Künstlichkeit yon Kunst: Zur Geschichtlichkeit der alexandrinischen Poesie , Zetemata 84 (Munich, 1986).

II

The crisis that precedes the self-definition of Hellenistic poetry begins much earlier, at the end of the fifth century, and extends over quite a long stretch of time. The utterances of the poets and the symptoms that enable us to recognize this crisis in poetry are interrelated with the crisis of the , attested by Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Demosthenes, who are our primary witnesses for it. But these utterances do not coincide in time so neatly with striking events of political history such as, for example, the end of the Peloponnesian War (at the beginning of our period), or the power takeover in Greece after Chaeronea by the kings of Macedon, or, later, the foundation of the Hellenistic empires by Alexander and the Succession. In the first instance this concerns quite different genres of traditional poetry and also of prose literature, which we shall now illustrate by means of a few examples.

Even before the end of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes makes it clear, in the Frogs of 405 BC that great tragedy has come to an end with the death of Euripides and of Sophocles shortly after him. Fifteen years after the collapse of Ancient Athens in the defeat of 403, he presents Plutos , the last play that can still be counted as Old Comedy; and in the following years he leaves the mise-en-scène of Kokalos and Aiolosikon , already to be considered as so-called Middle Comedy,^[12] to his son Araros. In respect of their origins, tragedy and comedy are both specifically Athenian genres, and even after these break points they do not cease to exist but continue in another form within the framework of the lasting institution, the Athenian Theater Festival. The festival is itself transformed in a manner corresponding to changed conditions, as, for example, by the abolition of the post of and the introduction of a civil servant called the in his place, probably in the time of Demetrius of Phaleron.^[13] Productions also increasingly become more generally "Hellenic" so as to facilitate their presentation outside Athens.

On the other hand, because their institutional and social preconditions had ceased to exist, other genres of poetry came to a complete standstill, such as the choric epinikia for sports victories on the part of the old aristocracy,^[14] for which we have one late piece of evidence in the

[12] For "Middle Comedy," cf., e.g., R. L. Hunter, Eubulus: The Fragments (Cambridge, 1983), 4ff.

[13] Transfer of the choregia for comedy to the phylae after 329; first agonothetes attested 306 BC , cf. H.-J. Mette, Urkunden dramatischer Aufführungen in Griechenland (Berlin and New York, 1977), xvi; A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford, 1973), 23.

[14] For the social change and its consequence for the appreciation of the games and for their participants, cf., e.g., I. Weiler, Der Sport bei den Völkern der alten Welt (Darmstadt, 1981), 96f., 118f.

fragments of the song for the spectacular victory of Alcibiades in 416 BC.^[15] The period following the Peloponnesian War saw the falling into disfavor of the chorus ,^[16] in which citizens had in a variety of functions expressed their degree of identification with their community. Whereas, up until the Frogs , the chorus had, as representative of the civic body in Old Comedy, continued to sing the parabasis and other cartoon-type songs and generally to play a major role, in Ecclesiazusae it is confined to a shadow of its former self, and in Plutos it is almost completely absent. These two comedies are direct evidence for the inner connection between the crisis of poetry and the crisis of the ^[17]

From the end of the fifth century onward we also have statements by poets who express their own opinions on the crisis of their art. Among them are the famous lines from the preamble to the Persica , by Choerilus of Samos, in which he deems as happy

the man who at that time knew how to sing as servant of the Muses, before the meadow was mown. But now, after everything has been broken up and the arts have come to an end, we are so to speak the last ones remaining in the field, and look where one may it is just no longer possible to come across a newly harnessed steed.^[18]

Heroic epic has thus reduced the scale of its activities, but for this art in earlier times Choerilus cites Hesiod with and with his chariot (that of the Muses), an image much loved by Pindar and Bacchylides.^[19] Further, his words are then taken up by Callimachus and other poets of his time. But even this genre has not entirely ceased to exist, since Choerilus has introduced a new element in the deeds of historical heroes and thereby opened up for epic a new area of application that goes far beyond that of Hellenism.

One remark that has been quite rightly associated with this is the outcry in the Porphyra of Xenarchus,^[20] a poet of later Middle Comedy, that "poets are nothing but tittle-tattle; they give rise to nothing new, but each of them simply twists what he has to say in all directions." In the Poiesis of Antiphanes we also find reflections on the difficulties of achiev-

[15] "Euripides" PMG 755, 756 Page.

[16] Cf., e.g., J. Irigoin, Histoire du texte de Pindare (Paris, 1952), 12f.

[17] Cf. Gelzer, "Aristophanes 12 (Nachtrag)," RE Suppl. 12 (1970): 1536-1538.

[18] H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons, eds., Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin and New York, 1983) 317 (hereafter cited as Suppl. Hell. ).

[19] Hesiod Theogonia 100; for further references, cf. Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 317.

[20] F 7 CAF 2.47of. Kock.

ing a consistent, newly created treatment of comedy in a with tragedy, in which (he claims) everything is much simpler because what happens there is already known to the spectator in advance, from mythology.^[21]

Awareness of a turning point in poetry can therefore be established as early as the end of the fifth century, the period of the later Sophists. Given, however, that we shall not wish to count the "artistic prose" of a Gorgias or an Isocrates as Hellenistic literature, even though such prose exercised a great deal of influence on "Asianism," the end of the fifth century does not seem to me to be the right time from which to date Hellenistic poetry.^[22] At the same time, from that point onward and right through the fourth century we can observe by and by the coming into existence of the preconditions that permit that poetry to find its new identity and further to exercise a far-reaching effect, and this in spite of the harsh demands which it places upon its public.

Right from the beginning—from the Frogs of Aristophanes and Choerilus' preamble—awareness of the difficulty of creating new poetry goes hand in hand with a singularly high appreciation of the great poets of earlier times . As a symptom of the general recognition of this state of affairs it is common to draw attention to the re-presentation of ancient tragedies, which can be documented from 386 BC onwards.^[23] At the same time, it is also true that certain tragedies of Aeschylus had already, in the fifth century, been re-presented after his death.^[24] Then, in the last third of the fourth century, in the time of Lycurgus, the "canon" of the three great tragedians was officially consecrated insofar as the texts of their tragedies became definitively fixed in the notorious "state copy," the original of which is supposed to have found its way to Alexandria.^[25]

[21] F 191 CAF 2.9of. Kock.

[22] Beginning of Hellenistic poetry with the death of Euripides and Sophocles, cf. Lloyd-Jones, "Hellenistic Miscellany," 55, referring to K. J. Dover, Theocritus: Select Poems (London, 1971), lxi.

[23] Cf. Mette, Urkunden dramatischer Aufführungen , xv; 339 BC , first production of an old comedy. We do not know, however, whether the old tragedy of 386 was one of the "Three Great Tragedians," and it is improbable that the play produced in 339 was from Old Comedy. For the problems arising from his competition with the old tragedians, cf. Astydamas' epigram on the occasion of his victory in 340 BC D. L. Page, ed., Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge, 1981), 115-118, at just the time when, from 341 to 339, tragedies by Euripides were re-presented three times over; cf. Mette, Urkunden dramatischer Aufführ-ungen , 91.

[24] Cf. S. Radt, Aeschylus , vol. 3 of TrGF (Göttingen, 1985), 56-58; contra, but unconvincing, G. O. Hutchinson, Aeschylus: Septem contra Thebas (Oxford, 1985), xlff.

[25] Cf. R. Pfeiffer, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Hellenismus (Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1970), 109, 237; for Aristophanes (in the Frogs ), Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are the three great tragedians. Aristotle, however, in his Poetics , almost completely neglects Aeschylus, cf. G. Xanthakis-Karamanos, Studies in Fourth-Century Tragedy (Athens, 1980), 23, 31.

At about the same time Aristotle defines the qualifies of poetry, taking as his point of departure the works of the recognized Old Masters. According to his teleological construction, poetic genres developed from primitive, improvised beginnings to the point at which they found their "nature," that is, their completely filled-out, perfect form.^[26] The three genres that occupy the center of the stage in his treatment of the art of poetry—epic, tragedy, and comedy—reached this uppermost level with poets who were at work far before his own time: Homer, Sophocles, and Aristophanes.^[27]

What this means is that the best poetry belongs to the past and that alongside the need for recognition and exegesis of it there develops an interest in the history of poetry . There are indications of this much earlier, perhaps as early as Ion of Chios, then more obviously in Glaukos of Rhegion, who may be still in the fifth century. Aristotle then put the history of single genres on a new, scientific basis with his documentary filing system, which in the case of drama means his didaskaliai . Also, the victory lists put together by Hippias of Elis for Olympia at the end of the fifth century and by Aristotle and Callisthenes for Delphi could have been used for the dating of choral epinikia ; but whether Aristotle actually used them for this purpose is not known to us.

Another factor is that the older poetry, which had become historical (and this includes drama), is no longer seen as essentially destined for performance, but is to be read from book . Aristophanes' Frogs testifies to the reading of a tragedy of Euripides shortly after that poet's death.^[28] Enjoyment of the effect of reading tragedy is clearly ranked by Aristotle as something obvious and in immediate juxtaposition to that of a performance.^[29] What this means is nothing less than that ancient poetry has now definitively become "literature," or poetry to be read. The conclusion that literary production was as a matter of course geared more to reading than to oral performance by the author becomes evident earlier in the realm of prose than in that of poetry, for example in the books of the Ionic so-called "nature philosophers" and of Heraclitus and the medical writers. Further, this tendency is on the increase from the end

[26] Aristotle Poetica 1448b20ff.; for the theory, cf. W. Kranz, "Die Urform der attischen Tragödie und Komödie," NJbb f. d. klass. Altertum , Bd. 43, Jg. 22 (1919): 145-168.

[27] Arist. Poet . 1448a25ff. How far fifth-century tragedy had become "historical" for Aristotle is evidenced by, among other things, the fact that he views it through the dramatic technique of the fourth-century tragedians. Cf. Xanthakis-Karamanos, Fourth-Century Tragedy , 18-20.

[28] Aristophanes Ranae 52f.

[29] Arist. Poet . 1462a17f.

of the fifth century onward, and this in genres that are aimed at a wider public than the earlier ones (for example, the History of Thucydides) and above all in that genre which, as far as its original purpose is concerned, was least suited for reading in the study but aimed for the immediate effect to be gained specifically by means of oral delivery: rhetoric. By way of example it will suffice to name Isocrates, who is known to have put together all his works (with the exception of a few letters) in the form of speeches, none of which however were actually delivered. The speeches of the "logographers" are likewise in the written medium: they were produced, and later published, for persons other than their authors, and this is also true of the orators who—Demosthenes is an example—did indeed deliver their speeches but then disseminated them in the form of pamphlets. Plato took it for granted that speeches and philosophical writings can be read. We know that in intensive discussion he gives preference to oral persuasion over the written treatise for the art of speaking and for teaching;^[30] but his own philosophical writings and those of his contemporaries in fact presuppose a public with extraordinarily avid tastes in reading material.

If for the moment we choose to ignore works considered expressly as "didactic poetry"^[31] (for example, those of the "philosopher poets," Xenophanes and Parmenides and their followers), about whose original manner of delivery we have no information, then we notice that poetry aimed specifically at being read and not at being somehow performed comes only later on to be recognized and produced as such. In this connection it is important to realize that the poetry even of a downright poeta doctus such as Antimachus of Colophon—who together with his contemporary, Choerilus of Samos, is regarded as one of the early trail-blazers of Hellenistic poetry—met with no success when delivered orally in front of his fellow citizens or Lysimachus. His manner of speaking was singularly full of glosses and his scholarship ranged far beyond that of ancient epic, to the point that what he had to say remained quite incapable of being taken in on the basis of a once-only aural reception. Only the younger Plato is supposed to have formed an adequate appreciation of him, and allotted Heraclides the task (though not until after his death) of gathering his poetic writings together, namely—and this is the point—as poetry to be read. In any case it would seem that what Plato appreciated most was not so much his artistic skill as the ethos of his Thebais , because of its pedagogical implications. Later he was, as it

[30] Cf. Plato Phaedrus 274bff. and the often discussed references in K. Gaiser, "Testimonia Platonica: Quellentexte zur Schule und mündlichen Lehre Platons," in Platons ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart, 1963), 441ff.

[31] Cf. Arist. Poet . 1447a28ff.

were, rediscovered by the Hellenistic poets on account of his Lyde , which provided them with a model for a narrative catalogue poetry in the form of elegy, and just because of its learned language, which they were immediately able to use and imitate.^[32] But even he is not yet himself a Hellenistic poet in the sense of the new identity of poetry, which remained unformulated until Callimachus and his contemporaries. Nothing is known of any reflection by Antimachus on the configuration of a new poetry, and his artless narrative style, which simply listed events one after another in long stretches of chronological sequence, contradicted everything that the new poetry was trying to achieve.^[33] Because of that, Callimachus rejected his Lyde (though others had esteemed it highly) as "a fat and inelegant book," even though he himself made use of parts of it.^[34]

A precondition of this "culture of the written word" is a including knowledge of the ancient poets . Not only the orators (for example, Lycurgus in Against Leocrates ) but also Plato continually cite and refer to the ancient poets, and that in spite of Plato's doctrinaire rejection of Homer and the tragedians as "educators of the Greeks."^[35] Both Plato and Isocrates describe the education which they impart in their schools as (cf., previously, Thucydides 2.40.1);^[36] and the Athenians, who accumulate and pass judgment on everything of value, even when it comes from outside Athens, consider themselves to be the teachers of Greeks everywhere: indeed, according to Isocrates, what makes a man a Greek is not so much where he comes from but his Attic in the ^[37] Other Greeks also come to Athens, or send their sons to study there. Let us recall in this connection that in his Cyprian Orations Isocrates develops a concept for the education of princes in which he gives Nicodes the following piece of advice:

Don't imagine that you should remain ignorant of any of the much-respected poets or teachers of wisdom, but rather become a listener of the former and a pupil of the latter.^[38]

[32] Cf. B. Wyss, Antimachi Colophonii Reliquiae (Berlin, 1936; reprint, 1974), T 1-3; praefatio, xlff.; xxixff. studia Homerica.

[33] Cf. Wyss, Antimachi Colophonii Reliquiae , ixff. (Thebais ), xxiff. (Lyde ); and fragments found after Wyss's edition, Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 52-79.

[34] Cf. Antimachus T 14ff. Wyss; Callimachus F 398 Pfeiffer, Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 78; Philitas, ibid. 675 (= Schol. Flor. ad Call. F 1.9-12) and Wyss, xlviff.

[35] Pl. Respublica 595a-608b.

[36] For Isocrates' and Plato's evaluation of the poets, cf. C. Eucken, Isokrates: Seine Position in der Auseinandersetzung mit den zeitgenössischen Philosophen (Berlin and New York, 1983), 243ff.

[37] Isocrates Panegyricus (4) 46ff.

[38] Isoc. Ad Nicoclem (2) 13; for the education of princes, cf. Isoc. Antidosis (3) 69f. and W. Jaeger, Paideia (Berlin, 1947) 3:145ff.; for the Cyprian Orations , cf. Eucken, Isokrates , 213ff.

Contemporaneously there are now also in other schools not only of elementary but of higher philosophical education, in nearby Megara as in distant Cyrene. It would seem that in the course of his journeys Plato was in contact with them, as with those of the Pythagoreans in Italy, Sicily, and Thebes. Later we see men such as Heraclides giving instruction in Heraclea on the Black Sea and Aristotle in Assos and Pella, to name but a few. One example, and that one with far-reaching effects, of the way in which such an education was considered to be a prerequisite for political leaders, even outside Athens, is provided by Philip II of Macedon, who had his son and successor Alexander educated by Aristotle.^[39]

Finally, the fourth century also saw the formation of that institution which was to permit the systematic exploration of the history of poetry, as indeed of most other disciplines as well: libraries. Collections of books had indeed existed much earlier, but the fourth century sees philosophical schools founding libraries as the basis of their scientific research. Plato already seems to be relying on a collection of relevant texts for discussion in the Academy and for the elaboration of his writings, and Aristotle's comprehensive library, which was still to be used by Theophrastus, has become famous primarily because of its strange later history, which may never be fully clarified.^[40]

III

All this points the way toward some of the important preconditions for the production—and above all for the possibilities of achieving an effect—of those Hellenistic poets who were able to come out on top of the crisis that had been inflicted on poetry since the end of the fifth century. It also explains the apparent paradox as to why this relatively small number of learned poets , addressing themselves exclusively to a small intellectual elite of educated persons, were able to bring about a decisive breakthrough vis-à-vis the great number of the rest.

Ptolemy I proceeded on the basis of these preconditions when he found himself faced with the task of establishing a new empire in Egypt,

[39] Even though the influence of Aristotle's education ought not to be overrated, the very fact that he made Alexander acquainted with the Iliad is of great importance, cf. H. Flashar, "Aristoteles," in Die Philosophic der Antike , H. Flashar, ed. (Basel and Stuttgart, 1983) 3:232.

[40] Cf. 1. Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Göteborg, 1957) T 42a-d (337f.).

on colonial soil, in a foreign environment, and with it a new center. As regards culture, literature, and—our exclusive concern here—especially poetry, he addressed himself to this task with abundant energy, but acting throughout not as innovator but as one with an extremely perceptive regard both for tradition and potential, in which matters he was well advised by competent experts. He also had his son and successor educated by scholars, namely, by Philitas of Cos, who was both scholar and poet, (i.e., exponent of ancient poetry with a famous work on glosses),^[41] and by the Peripatetic Straton of Lampsacus.^[42] On the advice of Demetrius of Phaleron (pupil and friend of Theophrastus, who also wrote on Homer and other poets) Ptolemy founded the Mouseion ,^[43] a research institution modeled on the Lykeion , in the palace area of Alexandria. He also founded the famous library in the Mouseion. Its first librarian, Zenodotus of Ephesus, described as a pupil of Philitas and really the founder of Alexandrian philology, is named as the third teacher of the heir-apparent and the other children of the king; his later successors in office included several educators of princes, among them the polymath Eratosthenes, who was the first to style himself and was himself also a poet.

A magnificent array of such scholar-poets could be seen at work at these institutions: Callimachus and others whose names and philological achievements have been comprehensively and lovingly tabulated by Rudolf Pfeiffer; there is no need to reel off a list of them here. But what we should remember is that there had always been princes and tyrants who attracted poets to their court, even in Macedonia itself, where Ptolemy himself came from. There had also already been poets who were also scholars: we have already mentioned the well-known case of Antimachus; and libraries too had already existed elsewhere. Furthermore, not all those who wrote poetry in Alexandria were themselves , not even one of the greatest among them, Theocritus; they did not all participate in the work of these institutions.

But what must be especially emphasized is that neither in a material nor in an intellectual sense is the new poetry to be regarded as the prod-

[41] Strabo 14.675; cf. Pfeiffer, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie , 116f.

[42] For the new meaning of philosophy, about 300 BC , as ars vitae , cf. A. Dihle, "Philosophie—Fachwissenschaft—Allgemeinbildung," in Aspects de la philosophie hellénistique , edited by H. Flashar and O. Gigon, Fondation Hardt, Entretiens 32 (Geneva, 1985), 185-223 (discussion, 224-231).

[43] Pfeiffer, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie , 123f., 133, was skeptical of Demetrius' influence upon the conception of the Mouseion and the Library, whereas now it is almost universally accepted; cf., e.g., P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972) 1:315, 321; F. Wehrli, "Demetrios yon Phaleron," in Philosophie der Antike , 560, who considers it probable.

uct of these newly established institutions. Rather, it is the achievement of individual poets whom the king and his advisors tried systematically to attract to Alexandria from elsewhere, and—not always successfully—to keep there. But it is beyond dispute that this policy also had its successes. By means of the education of princes by poets and scholars of this kind, the interests of the king filtered down through several generations,^[44] reaching a zenith in the reigns of Philadelphus, Euergetes, and Philopator.

Now something on the position of poets and poetry in society: First and foremost, it did not depend on the material security of those poets who received their income from the king, but on the example that the king himself gave by the esteem in which he held them and by the bonds he established between them and his house and court. Victor Ehrenberg appropriately describes the significance of the king in the new Hellenistic empires: "The monarch alone was the embodiment of the state," and "when all is said and done the state [which had been brought into existence by conquest and was maintained through civil and military power exercised by the king] was the kings private property."^[45] And the example furnished by the king was then followed by society, as dependent on him, with the development of the new monarchies. He would gather around himself a circle of personalities whose loyalty to him was rewarded with his favor, and as "friends" of the king, these would comprise something like a new imperial nobility. Here is just one example of the esteem of these men for poets: the powerful admiral (nauarchos ) Callicrates of Samos, who played a dominant role in naval and religious policy throughout the empire during the reign of Philadelphus, had two epigrams written for him by Posidippus on the occasion of his erection of a temple to Arsinoe-Zephyritis, just as Sostratus (builder of the famous lighthouse on the island of Pharos) had done before him.^[46]

The artistic qualities of this new poetry meet the demands of , and this legitimizes the exercise of power on the part of its exponents. Literary patronage had always been a weight-bearing column of monarchical propaganda. By means of its panhellenic character, dissociated from any local function, the new poetry also satisfies the needs of a cos-

[44] The fact is explicitly recognized by, e.g., Eratosthenes: Powell, Coll. Alex . 35.13-18.

[45] V. Ehrenberg, Der Staat der Griechen , part 2: Der hellenistische Staat (Zurich, 1965), 195f.

mopolitan society that comes and goes in the new Hellenistic empires after the decline of the old city-states, or finds a new home in those empires. In addition, papyrus discoveries enable us to see that the reading of poets was also very popular among " in an alien environment far from the capital of the empire, and we also know about poems by the new poets who were already being read there in the third century, such as the Victoria Berenices by Callimachus and the Hymn to Demeter by Philicus.^[47] We have up to this point spoken only about Ptolemaic Egypt, not because there was nothing comparable elsewhere—there was!—but because Egypt serves as the best example since it is the place about which we are best informed.

It is also worthy of note that efforts to perform dramatic poetry —that is, comedies and tragedies—in the new cities of Alexandria and Ptolemaïs have not left any palpable traces behind them.^[48] What we know of the so-called tragic Pleiad is practically only names; the satire Menedemus by Lycophron belongs to Eretria, not to Alexandria; and no one would want to maintain that the excessively long enigmatic speech that comes in the Alexandra (if it really is by Lycophron) was actually intended for tragic performance. And the status of the Mimiambi of Herondas in this regard, when compared, say, with the Women at the Adonis Festival of Theocritus, is questionable, to say the least. Neither have the new cults produced any cult poetry , or at least none that ancient critics of literature found interesting.^[49] All this contrasts with New Comedy, and also with tragedy and satyr plays, performances of which were continued by force of ancient tradition, above all in Athens, but also elsewhere.^[50] The new poetry, on the contrary, is, by its very nature, poetry to be read.

IV

This leads us to the question of the newly found identity of specifically Hellenistic poetry, here to be outlined in a few sentences only, since the

[47] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 254-268 C, 676-68o, cf. 990.

[48] Cf. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:618-623 with notes.

[49] Poetry for Alexandrian cults, cf. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:615ff.; the Hymn to Demeter by Philicus (who was himself a priest of Dionysus: ibid. 652) was not a cult hymn, but a gift to the poet's fellow grammarians (Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 677), cf. Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 990; for Callimachus' religion, cf. A. W. Bulloch, "The Future of a Hellenistic Illusion: Some Observations on Callimachus and Religion," MH 41 (1984): 209-230.

[50] K. Ziegler, "Tragoedia," RE 6 A, vol. 2 (1937): 1967-1981, investigates the reasons for the almost complete loss of Hellenistic tragedy and pleads against unwarranted disregard for it.

task of a full answer to this question falls to Peter Parsons. As far as poets' self-definition is concerned we may regard as central those programmatic utterances that Callimachus comes up with in the prologue to his Aitia , in the Hymn to Apollo , in his epigrams, and occasionally elsewhere.^[51] One thing that characterizes these poets' new awareness of their art is the simple fact that they ostentatiously parade their knowledge and formulate artistic judgments on ancient poets and on their contemporaries.^[52] They can also be picked out as members of a "society of the mind" by the way in which they cite each other, implicitly correct each other, play with each other in epigrams with mutual cross-reference to one another, and thereby try to outdo each other; this is true even of those who live far apart from one another.^[53] By no means all of them composed poetry in Alexandria, or need even ever have been there. Their aesthetic curiosity and their judgments on matters of taste are directed not only to poetry but also to art (painting, sculpture, hand-crafts), and their and epigrams show that they are familiar with the art theories of their time.^[54] A key word in their evaluation of the new poetry is , which means "finesse" or "connoisseurship" but also denotes something funny, something playful in rubbing shoulders with the Old Masters. Both Leonidas of Tarentum and Callimachus use this word for their judgments on Aratus,^[55] taking as their stimulus the acrostic in Phenomena 783-787.^[56] They do not mean thereby that Aratus lacks seriousness in the business of exercising his art: on the contrary, the Phenomena is a .^[57] The use that the new poets make of their classical predecessors for the new shape they give to poetry distinguishes them diametrically from classicist . They extract what is rare, recherché, unknown, or unfamiliar from works belonging to all manner of genres, and from obscure poets (for example

[51] Cf. A. W. Bulloch, "Hellenistic Poetry," in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature , vol. 1, Greek Literature (Cambridge, 1985), 556ff., and a good survey by B. Effe, Hellenismus , vol. 4 of Die griechische Literatur in Text und Darstellung (Stuttgart, 1985) 83ff.

[52] Cf. the convenient collection by M. Gabathuler, "Hellenistische Epigramme auf Dichter" (Diss. Basel, St. Gallen, 1937).

[53] Cf. A. Ludwig, "Die Kunst der Variation im hellenistischen Liebesepigramm," in L'épigramme grecque , edited by O. Reverdin, Fondation Hardt, Entretiens 14 (Geneva, 1967), 299-334 (discussion, 335-348).

[54] Cf. Gelzer, "Mimus und Kunsttheorie bei Herondas, Mimiambus 4," in Catalepton: Festschrift B. Wyss , ed. C. Schäublin (Basel, 1985), 96-116; G. Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry (London, 1987).

[55] Cow and Page, Hellenistic Epigrams , 2573-2578, 1297-1300.

[56] The acrostic has only recently been discovered by J.-M. Jacques, "Sur un acrostiche d'Aratos," REA 62 (1960): 48-61; cf. Bulloch, "Hellenistic Poetry," 602.

[57] Callimachus, Cow and Page, Hellenistic Epigrams , 1300.

the writer of a ),^[58] and give it a new lease on life in an act of combination whose chief purpose is to surprise.^[59] The phenomenon, so aptly described by Wilhelm Kroll as the "Kreuzung der Gattungen," can arise only because for the new poets their ancient predecessors have quite lost any cultic or other social function they might once have possessed, and thus, reduced to the status of pure "Lesepoesie," stand freely available for any degree or combination of admixture.^[60]

The ancients put the beginning of this new poetic art in the work of Philitas of Cos, thus a whole generation before Callimachus. No definition of his poetry has come down to us from the poet himself, and we are left with the observation that an extraordinary degree of respect is accorded to him by Hermesianax, Callimachus, and Theocritus, and that he is quoted by Apollonius of Rhodes.^[61] In Quintilian's lists he takes second place, after Callimachus.^[62]

A question now arises. Is the withdrawal of poets from the practical exercise of their art in the community to the solitude of the scholar's study, leading to a refined, exquisite, or, in some cases, esoteric poetry of the intellect, to be understood as a failure to live up to their responsibility in the new monarchies? It is true that tendencies toward withdrawal from identification with the civic community can indeed be detected in a variety of areas during the crisis of the in the fourth century, for instance in the philosophy of Epicurus, in the withdrawal of New Comedy from the political arena to the personal and private sphere, and then in a preference for what is idyllic, homely, and picturesque in Hellenistic poetry and art; and these things run parallel to the acquisition by the intelligentsia of a vested interest in the new military monarchies. Among contemporary writers, the Pyrrhonic Skeptic Timon depicts this aspect in terms of caricature when he writes of the philologues in the Mouseion, "In Egypt of the many tribes a lot of them are fed, penned up in bookish precincts, endlessly bickering in the bird cage of the Muses." He also satirizes Ariston the Stoic as a flatterer of

[58] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 903 A; cf. A. Henrichs, "Zur Meropis: Herakles' Löwenfell und Athenes zweite Haut," ZPE 27 (1977): 69-75.

[60] W. Kroll, "Die Kreuzung der Gattungen," in Studien zum Verständnis der römischen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1924), 202-224; "Kreuzung der Gattungen" had, however, already begun in the fourth century, cf. Bulloch, Callimachus: The Fifth Hymn (Cambridge, 1985), 35f.

[61] Cf. Bulloch, "Hellenistic Poetry," 544f.; Philitas together with other forerunners, Pfeiffer, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie , 116-128.

[62] Quint. Inst. or . 10.1.58.

King Antigonus.^[63] But Timon's public is also that of our new poets, and an appreciation of his Silloi with its criticism, as put in the mouth of Xenophanes, and its refined parody of Homer depends on the same literary education on the part of his readers.^[64] In this way attempts have been made to interpret the artificiality of the new Hellenistic poetry, even in its most outstanding representatives, as an expression of the ideology of refusal.^[65]

But, as Ehrenberg rightly states,^[66] not only was the Hellenistic monarchy "faced with a real challenge by, among other things, its mission to govern large territories with a very disparate population," but also "it was at the same time prepared for this in a number of different ways"—and this preparation (an intellectual preparation) was at the hands of Athenians such as Isocrates and Demetrius of Phaleron.^[67] What the monarchy stood for was the resolution of the crisis of the old city-states.

Further, there are certain poems by two poets who themselves were from monarchical states^[68] that should be understood in this fashion. The poets in question are Theocritus and Callimachus. All we can do here is select a few examples from the realm of the "praise of princes," an area notoriously tinged by ideological prejudice. It is in fact just the praise of princes that we find abundantly represented in its vulgar forms in this mainstream poetry, at odds with the new direction of taste, and not, say, only in epic.^[69] Let us recall to mind just the paean for the reception of Demetrius Poliorcetes in Athens in 291 BC which had become notorious even in ancient times.^[70] Yet long before this Isocrates had written his encomium of Evagoras as a philosophical mirror for princes: in literary

[63] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 786, 780.

[64] This appears to apply also to the rest of his (completely lost) poetic writings.

[65] Cf. Schwinge, Künstlichkeit yon Kunst , 42, 44ff.

[66] Ehrenberg, Staat der Griechen 2:191.

[67] For philosophical preparation and justification of the Hellenistic monarchy, cf. P. Grimal, "Les éléments philosophiques dans l'idée de monarchie de Rome à la fin de la république," in Aspects de la philosophic hellénistie , 233-273 (discussion, 274-281), esp. 245ff.

[68] So were Posidippus of Pella (cf. n. 46, above), Eratosthenes of Cyrene (cf. n. 44, above) and others. For their attitude toward Hellenistic monarchs, cf., e.g., Bulloch, "Hellenistic Poetry," 556ff. (Callimachus), 570ff. (Theocritus); Effe, "Hellenismus," 48 (Theocritus), 83 and 161f. (Callimachus).

[69] Thirty-nine epic writers who wrote about historical heroes, Lloyd-Jones, "Hellenistic Miscellany," 58.

[70] Powell, Coll. Alex . 173-175; cf. Bulloch, "Hellenistic Illusion," 209ff. with n. 1; Effe, "Hellenismus," 168ff.; for further poems of this kind, cf., e.g., Hermodotus, Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, suppl. Hell ., 491, 492.

terms, as a new invention, namely the prose hymn by which he claimed to excel even Pindar.^[71] Theocritus and Callimachus present educated Greeks of their time with a portrayal of the Hellenistic monarchs as legitimate, in such a way as to insert those monarchs into the tradition of ancient heroic Greek kingship.^[72] In the Charites^[73] Theocritus not only presents his compliments to Hieron II as a guarantor of his glory, but at the same time, drawing delicately on Simonides and Pindar, he presents his own picture of the princely patron, of his summons to defend the city against the Carthaginians, and of his own conception of a poet's task, to the lauded monarch. In the Victoria Berenices Callimachus has a more conventional task to perform: praise of the queen as winner in the horse races at the Nemean Games. Of course, he reaches immediately for his Pindar and Bacchylides, as is obvious right from the beginning. All I want to concentrate upon here is the form of address he uses for the queen: he does not use the name Berenike ("bringer of victory"), which would indeed have been quite appropriate, but figurative expressions pregnant with symbolism, such as "Nymph, holy blood of the divine brother gods."^[74] Following the usage of the pharaohs, she is presented as the daughter of the sibling-marriage of her parents, and thereby also as the sister of her royal spouse, which is how she is honored by her subjects in temple inscriptions. However, Berenike was not really the daughter of these "parents," but of Magas of Cyrene and Apama. The "holy blood" is an image for this politico-cultic fiction which permitted the queen to join the ranks of the "god-kings." What could a Greek bring himself to believe regarding this "god-kingship?" Callimachus meets this conflict head-on with the term of address, , which he also uses for Hera, Hebe, and the deified Arsinoe.^[75] Homer had already used it for heroines such as Helen and Penelope.^[76] Thus, leaves a broad area open between deity and heroized humanity. This is just one example from a whole system of such modes of expression that can be detected in Callimachus.^[77] Borrowing from Homer's mythology, he has created a

[71] Isocrates, Euagoras (9) 7-11, Antidosis (15) 166; cf. Jaeger, Paideia 3:147.

[72] Cf. the significance of Achilles and the Iliad for Alexander the Great (cf. n. 39, above).

[73] Theocritus Idylls 16.

[74] Callimachus Victoria Berenices , Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 254.2.

[75] Callimachus Hy . 4.215 (Hera); F 202.73 Pfeiffer (Hebe); F 228.5 Pfeiffer (Arsinoe); cf. in addition F 66.2 Pfeiffer (Amymone); F 788 Pfeiffer (an unknown woman; Pfeiffer suggests Ariadne or Phyllis).

[76] Homer Iliad 3.130 (Helen); Homer Odyssey 4.743 (Penelope).

[77] Cf. the material collected by Gelzer, "Kallimachos und das Zeremoniell des ptolemäischen Königshauses," in Aspekte der Kultursoziologie: Festschrift M. Rassem , ed. J. Stagl (Berlin, 1982), 13-30; contra, Schwinge, Künstlichkeit, von Kunst , 49ff.

new one of his own in the apotheosis of Arsinoe after the death of this candidate for deification.^[78] But Theocritus, too, in his Encomium of Ptolemy (Ptolemy II), has his hero's father, namely Ptolemy I, enthroned in heaven in the company of his forebears Zeus and Heracles.^[79] The new cult of Arsinoe-Zephyritis is referred to by Callimachus in an epigram dealing with a young girl's dedication of a shell (the poem's narrator is actually the shell)^[80] and agaim in that intriguing poem, the Lock of Berenike , which includes a cultic aition for brides.^[81]

The new poetry's understanding of itself, appealing as it did to the education of an elite, fulfilled a genuine need. This is evident in its explosive expansion to all parts of the Greek world. We can see this first and foremost in the writers of epigrams,^[82] but also in the parallels which Alexandrian institutions had at the courts of other Hellenistic princes. We need name only the library set up by Antiochus II (Antiochus the Great) in Antioch, placed under the direction of the poet and grammarian Euphorion of Chalcis, still in the third century.

V

Once this taste, or rather style, had become established it served as a medium of writing poetry for several generations. This style had so to speak become de rigueur , even though it seems with time to have lost the attraction of novelty and the experimental boldness that it visibly possessed at least in the case of Callimachus and his contemporaries. Then how long did this direction of taste hold the field? We cannot here unambiguously establish a dearly articulated crisis such as we were able to do in the case of that which began at the end of the fifth century. This may be partly because of the extremely poor survival rate of later Hellenistic poetry, but what can be said about it has recently been masterfully wormed out of our few surviving texts by Anthony Bulloch.^[83]

As previously, no detectable break points are provided by political

[78] Callimachus F 278 Pfeiffer; cf. the similarity of the myths concerning Arsinoe's ascent to heaven, the Coma Berenices (F 110.51ff.); the imagery in Posidippus (?), Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 961; and in Theoc. Id . 17.23ff.

[79] Theoc. Id . 17.13-35; cf., e.g., Heracles as ancestor and example of kingship for Philip II in Isocrates Philippos (5) 105-118.

[80] Cow and Page, Hellenistic Epigrams , 1109-1120.

[81] Callim. 110. 79-88 (surviving only in Catullus 66, cf. Pfeiffer, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie , ad 1.); for its relationship to the cult of Arsinoe-Zephyritis, cf. O. Zwierlein, "Weihe und Entrückung der Locke der Berenike," RhM 103 (1987): 274-290.

[82] Cf. Ludwig, "Kunst der Variation," 299ff.

[83] Bulloch, "Hellenistic Poetry," 606-621.

events such as, say, the destruction of Corinth by Mummius in 146 BC or the expulsion from Alexandria of Aristarchus and the group of scholars associated with him, which Ptolemy VIII brought about in the following year.

There are really only two poetic genres out of which we can gain a certain notion of continuity and discontinuity, both of which came into their own in the Hellenistic period. These are the genres of bucolic poetry and the epigram . Of post-Theocritan bucolic we know the work of two bucolic poets, but only a very modest amont of it, and that partly with uncertain identification. Both occur in the second century: Moschus, the grammarian from Syracuse, a pupil of Aristarchus; and Bion of Phlossa, near Smyrna. The anonymous Epitaphios Bionos bewails not only the death of Bion but together with it that of , which is assumed to stand for "bucolic poetry."^[84] Is this anything more than a rather baroque compliment for the poet, of whom we unfortunately know so little? Or should we take it with the same seriousness as we do Aristophanes' statement in the Frogs that with Euripides' and Sophocles' deaths tragedy has come to an end? An indication that the genre was considered as having reached its conclusion can be seen in the undertaking by Artemidorus. of Tarsus, not much later in the first century, to bring together in a single collection the scattered , thus creating a corpus.^[85]

The position with epigrams is similar. Either at the end of the second century or else right at the beginning of the first, Meleager of Gadara put together his Garland , in which the majority of all surviving Hellenistic epigrams have come down to us. He himself continued to write poetry in the same style, albeit without much originality, and often with visible reference to the great models.^[86]

It must be pointed out that Greek poetry does not evidence a decisive move towards classicism , such as we find in art after the end of the second century, or in rhetoric and rhetorical historiography. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus such a move is associated rather with the influence of Rome,^[87] and it was Rome too that saw the creation of the great Latin classicist poetry of the Augustans.^[88] It is clear that Greeks who had

[84] [Mosch.] 3.11f.

[85] Page, Further Greek Epigrams , 113-114.

[86] See, with good examples, Ludwig, "Kunst der Variation," 314ff.; "Anerkennung des Vorbildhaften," ibid., 311.

[87] Dion. Hal. Or. vet . 3.l; for the prose, cf. F. Lasserre, "Prose grecque classicisante," Classicisine à Rome , 135-163 (discussion, 164-173); for the art, P. Zanker, "Zur Funktion und Bedeutung griechischer Skulptur in der Römerzeit," in Classicisme à Rome , 283-306 (discussion, 307-314).

[88] For the historical implications of Augustan classicism, see G. W. Bowersock, "Historical Problems in Late Republican and Augustan Classicism," Classicisme à Rome , 57-75 (discussion, 76-78), esp. 72ff., and Zanker, "Zur Funktion und Bedeutung," 290ff., 303ff.

come to Rome in the first half of the first century, such as the grammarian Tyrannion and the scholar-poet Parthenios, contributed decisively to the stimulus for this. At the same time, Greek epigrammatists in the Garland of Philip (from the Augustan period and later) also display a clear rejection of the poetry of Callimachus, of Erinna, and of the scholarship of the Alexandrian grammarians Zenodotus and Aristarchus. Examples are Antipater of Thessalonica,^[89] who was a client of L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi, and who, out of opposition to Callimachus and his school, went back to singing the praises of the ancient poets: Homer, Archilochus, Alcman, and Aeschylus.^[90] There is also Antiphanes,^[91] and finally Philip himseft,^[92] who makes fun of those poets, characterizing them as "super-Callimachuses" ^[93] On the other hand, it is Callimachus (as a poet) and Aristarchus (as a critic) whom the Romans took as their models.^[94]

It was here in Rome, the world state that had replaced the Hellenistic empires, that decisive changes were to take place in the way that poets formed an awareness or an internal image of themselves; and it is a matter of centuries—in the Roman imperial period, in fact—before Greek poets once again come to the fore. But they now do so with a distinct orientation backward in time, in both the linguistic and the literary spheres, poetae docti standing firmly in the tradition of Callimachus.

[89] Cow and Page, Garland of Philip , 185-190.

[90] Ibid., 185-190, 135-140, 141-144.

[91] Ibid., 771-776.

[92] Ibid., 3033-3040, 3041-3046; cf. Herodicus of Babylon, Page, Further Greek Epigrams , 233-238 (= Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell ., 494), whose date is, however, uncertain.

[93] Cow and Page, Garland of Philip , 3046.

[94] Horace Ars Poetica (= Epist. ad Pisones ) 450.

Identifies in Diversity

Peter Parsons

"Alexander civilized Asia," so says Plutarch, "Homer was read, and the sons of Persians and Susians and Gedrosians recited the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides."^[1] Oddly enough, we have a scattering of material on stone and papyrus to support this airy statement. Epicharmea at the Memphite Serapeum;^[2] schoolboys copying the same line of Euripides at Egyptian Thebes^[3] and Armenian Artaxata;^[4] a hymn to Apollo at Susa,^[5] a philosophic dialogue at Ai Khanturn,^[6] even (though a little later?) Greek iambics alongside the Hebrew and Aramaic of the caves of Murabba'at^[7] —in the Hellenistic age, Greek literature could stalk a world stage. It was, perhaps, a world of faster communication and more intensive circulation. Plato, in anecdote at least, had needed to send an agent to Colophon to collect the poems of Antimachus;^[8] in the third century, works of Menander and Theophrastus reached Egypt with relative speed. Athens and Rhodes were centers for a book trade;^[9] story put

[1] Plutarch Moralia 328D.

[2] E. G. Turner, "A Fragment of Epicharmus? (or 'Pseudoepicharmea'?)," WS (NF) 10 (1976): 48-60.

[3] U. Wilcken, Griechische Ostraka aus Aegypten und Nubien (Leipzig and Berlin, 1899), 1147.

[4] C. Habicht, "Über eine armenische Inschrift mit Versen des Euripides," Hermes 81 (1953): 251-256.

[5] SEG 7.14; M. P. Nilsson, Opuscula selecta , vol. 2 (Lund, 1952), 492.

[6] Claude Rapin, "Les textes littéraires grecs de la trésorerie d'Aï Khanoum," BCH 111 (1987): 232-244.

[7] P. Benoit, J. T. Milik, and R. de Vaux, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert , vol. 2, Les Grottes de Murabba'at (Oxford, 1961), 108; C. Austin, Condom Graecorum Fragmenta in papyris reperta (Berlin and New York, 1973), 360.

[8] Antimachus T 1 Wyss.

[9] Athenaeus 3B.

the holdings of the Alexandrian library at 500,000 rolls.^[10] The modernization of Greek book-hand, traceable in Egypt from the late fourth century to the mid-third, has been put down to increased production in Alexandria itself; and to judge from the few samples surviving, Ai Khanoum, Derveni, and Tebtunis shared a graphic as well as a linguistic koine . The text of Homer established by Alexandrian critics displaced all others, in Egypt and eventually in the Mediterranean world: that is a remarkable tribute to the possibilities of scholarly diffusion.

The literature created over so vast an area, in so many genres and to such vast bulk, would be difficult enough to characterize if we had it all; as it is, we make do with fragments. Drama is effectively lost, except Menander; so are the more traditionally minded poets; so is rhetorical prose and literary theory. Two of the most remarkable minds, Eratosthenes and Posidonius, appear to us only in scattered quotations. If we try to plot historical development, we have a further difficulty: so little is known of the fourth century either (we cannot, for example, prove or disprove Wilamowitz's guess that "Alexandrian" poetry continues a style already existing in the islands and Asia Minor; now that we have a possible example of such local work, the bumbling Meropis , scholars dispute whether to date it to the third century^[11] or to the sixth^[12] ).

We can try to identify the age by limiting it. Thomas Gelzer has spoken of the crises which begin and end it; what is curious is their disparity. Alexander represents a geopolitical crisis, perhaps, but not a literary one; at the end, there is a literary crisis with geopolitical overtones. Historically, the bringers-up of Droysen's baby have attached more importance to the former, and yet the historical perception of the epoch has relied heavily on the second. Writers of the Early Empire present a uniform model. Callimachus and polish, but not genius, says Ovid;^[13] the dull Aratus, the limited Theocritus, the unranked Apollonius fall off Quintilian's reading list^[14] ("Longinus" was to damn them as "faultless")^[15] Dionysius of Halicarnassus, arriving in Rome in the same year that Cleopatra fell, told his new patrons that oratory since Alexander had succumbed to Asian depravity.^[16] Linguistic Atticists

[10] E M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972) 1:328f.

[11] H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons, eds., Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin and New York, 1985) 903A (hereafter cited as Suppl. Hell. ). Latest text: A. Bernabé, Poetarum Epicorum Graecorum . . . Fragmenta , vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1987), 131.

[12] H. Lloyd-Jones, Academic Papers: Greek Epic, Lyric, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1990), 21-29.

[13] Ovid Amores 1.15.14.

[14] Quintilian Institutio oratoria 10.1.54.

[15] [Longinus] Subl . 33.5.

[16] Dionysius of Halicarnassus Vet. or . 1.

looked for the origins of verbal corruption—and found them in Hyper-ides and Menander. The "inventors" listed by Clement of Alexandria include no Hellenistic innovation except the term grammatikos ;^[17] the longer and more eccentric list of Pliny the Elder^[18] admits a few more great names—Carneades and Posidonius in philosophy, Berossus in astronomy, Antidorus in scholarship,^[19] Asclepiades of Prusa in medicine, in geometry and mechanics Archimedes, Ctesibius, and Philo. That allows for influential philosophers and for advances in science and technology, but the only new Hellenistic contribution to literature is scholarship. Small wonder that a chrestomathy of the second century^[20] lists the Alexandrian libraries alongside the inventors (all antique and mostly mythological) of military operations and armaments. Even the romantic picture of universal Hellenism could become another illustration of human restlessness.^[21]

So nineteenth-century historians set the marker with Alexander: it was then that liberty yielded to tyranny, oratory to rhetoric, art to artifice. This chimed agreeably with romantic—and racial—national-ism: the model must be the pure, unforced effusions of an athletic citizenry, not the bookish lucubrations of their successors, formalist, sycophantic, and cosmopolitan. Times change. We owe to Rudolf Pfeiffer another image of the same scheme. With Alexander begins the age of scholarship and rediscovery; after the run-down fourth century, the Renaissance; the new poets, a generation of Petrarchs, study the old poets and are inspired to a new poetry, not less valuable. We ourselves might update a little: to the cosmopolitan, experimental, and self-consciously sophisticated Paris of the 1920s. But the accumulation of evidence, and the deconstructive spirit, has recently tended to play up the continuities. The quoting and allegorizing of earlier poets goes back to the late sixth century;^[22] chronology, euhemerism, linguistic and rhetorical theory to the Sophists; in the fourth century, Antimachus mined Homer, perhaps even edited him;^[23] we see the crossing of genres in Archestratus, who combines periegesis and epic, and parodies both, in the interests of a gastronomy which keeps one eye on the Fresswelle of Middle Comedy and the other on the fads of current dietetics; and Erinna, whose poem transfuses Sapphic material into epic meter and Doric dialect. Ephorus and Ctesias began romantic history, Isocrates and Xen-

[17] Clement of Alexandria Strornateis 1.16.77.

[18] Pliny Naturalis historia 7.29.107-38.127.

[19] R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , vol. 1 (Oxford, 1968), 157.

[20] P. Oxy . 1241.

[21] Seneca Cons. Helv . 7.

[22] M. L. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (Berlin and New York, 1974), 180.

[23] N. G. Wilson, CR (NS) 19 (1969): 369.

ophon biography, the Atthidographers antiquarian history, Aristotle systematic philosophy and encyclopedic research; the Derveni papyrus shows that the line-by-line exposition of literary texts—however wrong-headed—was already practiced. If one wants an epoch, it should come with Euripides,^[24] or indeed with the Sophists; if one wants a model, the third century can stand as Baroque or Rococo to the fifth-century Renaissance.

Whatever the beginnings, the final reaction does give us some reason for treating the period as a unit. The difficulty, clearly, is to impose any structure. We could look for a political frame: when Ptolemy VIII expelled the learned professions from Alexandria, they scattered over the ciries and islands to produce a renaissance of cultural life—so said a contemporary historian;^[25] it was perhaps the end of an epoch when Mark Antony gave the Pergamene library to Cleopatra.^[26] We could look for a geographical pattern of schools or styles. We could look for the overlapping dynamic of genres (the joke-epigram blossoms as the sentimental epigram fades) and of generations—such is Fraser's picture of Alexandria, a first generation of immigrants, with a lively interest in Egypt, a second generation which turned itself resolutely to Greece, then new generations of native Alexandrians and a general decline.^[27] But generally we look in vain.

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, rivalties, and sloganizing. Poetry and Egypt will play a disproportionate part. The dangers are clear enough, as in all attempts to write literary history: you pigeonhole individualists, subdue divergent pressures to the idea of a "period" (difficult enough when you deal with a shorter timespan and a localized literature, set off by a psychologically significant event—the death of Augustus, say, or of Louis XIV or Queen Victoria) and look for dividing lines, new beginnings, universal characteristics, and unique preoccupations, when in fact it is normally not a question of absolute novelties but of novel emphases. In Hellenistic literature such emphases are hard to catch and harder to prove, since we lack so much of what was written and so much of earlier writing. But some at least of the themes have their place also in discussions of the art, thought, and religion of the age.

[24] K. J. Dover, Theocritus: Select Poems (London, 1971), lxxi.

[25] Pfeiffer, Classical Scholarship 1:252.

[26] Plut. Antonius 58.

[27] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:552.

I. Writers and Scholars

Philosophoi was the old word for intellectual, and the Fellows of the Museum are still so called in Roman times.^[28] But new designations came into vogue: kritikos, grammatikos, philologos , the last attributed to Erastosthenes.^[29] The writer's self-respect might hinge on two things: patronage and esprit de corps . Patronage took two forms: personal and institutional. The tradition of the monarchic court was a long one; Antigonus Gonams, Ptolemy II, Antiochus III, the Pergamenes continued the line of polycrates, Hiero, and Mausolus. It is notable how crisp and unservile is the manner in which scientist addresses monarch.^[30] Poets continue to balance their gift of immortality against the patron's gift of goods;^[31] if earlier hints of indigence become positive assertions of poverty, that may simply symbolize the superiority of a slender Muse.^[32] Chrysippus addressed works to none of the kings: that could be thought a sign of arrogance.^[33] At the same time, the establishment of the Museum, of libraries and gymnasia and literary agones , provided institutional support. Ptolemy II exempted "teachers of letters" from the salt tax, and we do not know how much further the kings anticipated the systematic Roman exemption of the learned professions.^[34] More informally, a group could be seen, or could see itself, as such: Philicus addressed his Hymn to Demeter , a metrical novelty, to the grammatikoi ; Timon satirizes the bookish monks of the Museum; Callimachus brings on Hipponax to settle the scholars' quarrels.^[35] One sees early signs of the global academy. Apollonius of Perga was inspired to write the Conics by Naucrates, who visited him in Alexandria, dedicated the book to Eudemus, whom he had met in Pergamum, and asked for a copy to be sent to Philonides, whom they had both met in Ephesus.^[36] Archimedes sent theorems to Conon in Alexandria, the one man who would really appreciate them, as he writes

[28] Ibid. 2:450 n. 84 (philologoi in Strabo; philosophoi corrected to philologoi in Call. Dieg. 6.3).

[29] Pfeiffer, Classical Scholarship 1: 156ff.

[30] Apollonius of Perga Conics book 4 praef. (if Attalus is a monarch); Archimedes 2.216 Heiberg; Eratosthenes ibid. 426.

[31] A. S. F. Cow, Theocritus (Cambridge, 1952), n. on 16.30f.

[32] G. Capovilla, Callimaco (Rome, 1967) 1:202ff. (but the evidence is thin). A boast in Roman poets, at least: R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard, Commentary on Horace Odes Book II (Oxford, 1978), n. on 2.18.10; F. Cairns, Tibullus (Cambridge, 1979), 20.

[33] Diogenes Laertius 7.185.

[34] Salt tax: Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 2:870 n. 2; cf., on the Museum, 470 n. 84. Roman categories: Ann Ellis Hanson, ed., Collectanea Papyrologica: Texts Published in Honor of H. C. Youtie (Bonn, 1976) 2:441.

[35] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 677, 786. Callimachus F 191 Pfeiffer.

[36] Ap. Perg. Conica books 1 and 2, praeff.

with admiring affection.^[37] Anthologies (Meleager, Philip) and technical works are dedicated to private friends. If there is some tendency to specialize—scholarship and poetry, technical prose and artistic prose, take separate roads, a first step to distinguishing Academia and Bohemia^[38] —there is also astounding versatility: Eratosthenes is the classic example. Disciplines overlap: Aratus versified Eudoxus, Nicander Apollodorus; Apollonius Rhodius endowed Medea with a nervous systemi orators are bidden to know poetry, history, philosophy;^[39] philosophy provides the framework for scholarship and the categories of history; poets and prose writers take a larger interest in the visual arts.^[40]

II. Audiences

It was the charge of the nineteenth century that these learned professions wrote only for urban coteries. That is not wholly true. If we dip into the Egyptian rubbish dumps of the third century, we can see what circulated in the Hellenic backwoods.^[41] (Of course, very few papyri survive, and they may not be representative; the real arbiter is the Egyptian water table.) Homer heads the list; Hesiod, Archilochus, Stesichorus, Tyrtaeus; Thucydides; Sophocles and Euripides (including anthologies); Timotheus; Lysias, Alcidamas, Plato, Xenophon; Rhetorica ad Alexandrum and Diocles of Carystus; wise sayings of "Simonides" and of "Epicharmus." There are writers of the early third century: Chares, Menander, Theophrastus. More remarkable, there are contemporary poets: Philicus' Hymn to Demeter , Callimachus' Victory of Berenice . Over the next two centuries, we find more third-century authors—Cercidas and Phoenix among moralists, Callimachus again, and more epigram; Chrysippus; Sosylus and possibly Duris. Among adespota there is an unexpectedly high proportion of anthologies. Readers, it seems, like Alexandrian scholars, took more interest in verse than in prose; but it is not true, as is sometimes said, that the Hellenistic poets were ignored. Straight philosophy and rhetoric seem clear losers.

Similarly with the reading of individuals.^[42] Among Zeno's papers, in Philadelphia under Ptolemy II,^[43] we find a scrap of (perhaps tragic) lyric,

[37] Archimedes 1.4, 2.2 Heiberg.

[38] A. Dihle, Griechische Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1967), 384.

[39] E. Stemplinger, Das Plagiat in der griechischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1912), 109.

[40] See below, p. 170.

[41] Some basic material: William H. Willis, "Census of the Literary Papyri from Egypt," GRBS 9 (1968): 203-241.

[42] W. Clarysse, "Literary Papyri in Documentary 'Archives,'" Stud. Hell . 27 (1983): 43-61.

[43] P. W. Pestman, A Guide to the Zenon Archive (Leiden, 1981) 1:189.

with its music,^[44] and two epitaphs, no doubt local but of solid workmanship, on his dead hunting dog.^[45] He orders for his brother a work, it seems, of Callisthenes.^[46] A memo from Nicarchus has on its back the first line of Aeschylus' Mysians ;^[47] another correspondent drops into iambics;^[48] a schoolboy copies a jokey hexameter.^[49] At the Serapeum of Memphis, towards the middle of the second century, Ptolemy son of Glaucias was using copies of Chrysippus, and perhaps Eudoxus,^[50] as scrap paper; he and his brother copied out passages of drama and two epigrams of Posidippus; the brother copied also the Dream of Nectanebos .^[51] Similarly with school exercises and school textbooks^[52] —Homer, Euripides, New Comedy, Epigram: contemporary light verse alongside the classics. Overall, it seems paradoxical that poetry, even difficult poetry, circulated more widely than the age's colossal output of informative and diverting prose.

III. Greeks and Non-Greeks

A chrestomathy of circa 100 BC shows a fair world view:^[53] the great rivers and mountains take in Spain, Italy, Mesopotamia, and India, as well as mythical and actual Greece. The wider horizons might have added realism to Socrates' self-definition: not an Athenian, not a Greek, but a citizen of the world.^[54] The enlightened, like Eratosthenes, divided mankind into good and bad, not Greek and barbarian.^[55] But of course there are differences.

1. There are Hellenes and Hellenes. An epigrammatic admirer of Zeno apologizes for his Cypriot origins;^[56] "If I am a Syrian, so what?"

[44] TrGF 2.678.

[45] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 977.

[46] W. L. Westerman, C. W. Keyes, and H. Liebesny, Zenon Papyri , vol. 2 (New York, 1940), 60 (with M. David, B. A. van Groningen, and E. Kiessling, Berichtigungsliste der griechischen Papyrusurkunden aus Aegypten , vol. 3 [Leiden, 1958], 44).

[47] F 142 Radt.

[48] C. C. Edgar, Zenon Papyri in the University of Michigan Collection (Ann Arbor, 1931), 77; Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 2: 864 n. 429.

[49] C. C. Edgar, Zenon Papyri , Catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire, vol. 4 (Cairo, 1931), 59535.

[50] U. Wilcken, Urkunden der Ptolemäerzeit , vol. 1 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1927), 111.

[51] Ibid., 81.

[52] Philadelphia Ostraca (see E. Livrea, "La morte di Clitorio," ZPE 68 [1987]: 21-28); O. Guéraud and P. Jouguet, Un livre d'écolier du III siècle avant J.-C. (Cairo, 1938).

[53] H. Diels, Laterculi alexandrini (Berlin, 1904).

[54] J. Diggle, Euripides: Phaethon (Cambridge, 1970), n. on line 163.

[55] Strabo 1.4.9.

[56] Anthologia Palatina 7.117.

says Meleager, "The whole world is my fatherland"^[57] —the cliché (Cynic by adoption) sounds defensive. This is the snobbery which bursts out in Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Johnny-come-lately oratory from the sewers of Asia, Mysian or Phrygian or some Carian nastiness.^[58] And it may have a reality. The finest example of "Asian" rhetoric does, of course, come from Commagene. The difficulty lies in identifying local schools in an age of migration. We can point to centers: some net exporters, like Gadara, "the Athens of the Assyrians,"^[59] and Tarsus, whose citizens enjoyed an admirable education but went abroad to be finished and rarely returned;^[60] some importers, Athens, Alexandria, Pergamum, Rhodes. Some specialized: there were many philosophers in Athens, few in Alexandria; Alexandria eschewed allegory in interpreting Homer, Pergamum fostered it; Cos retained its name for medicine. But what of the Euboean culture that Wilamowitz once posited: was it taken to Pella by Persaeus, to Alexandria by Lycophron, to Pergamum by Antigonus of Carystus, to Antioch by Euphorion?
2. In another way, Greeks unite against barbarians. There was, after all, a long tradition of distrust and curiosity, now reinforced by the insecurities of a scattered élite. The literary men reacted in various ways.

(a) One could ignore the new world, as the ladies in Theocritus' Alexandria—Alexandria next to Egypt, not in it—exchanged Doric chat in streets made safe from the sinister natives.^[61] Schoolchildren in the Fayum, and near Artaxata, were in the second century still learning Macedonian months.^[62] The poets of Alexandria might as well be writing in another place; they compose hymns, but not to Sarapis.
(b) One could inquire into it. Some geographers produced new information and observation: Megasthenes' India, Agatharchides' Red Sea, much fresh and individual in Posidonius. There were historians who profited, Polybius from his stay in Rome, Apollodorus as a citizen of Parthian Artemita.^[63] There were materials translated or adapted from the native languages: the histories of Manetho and Berossus and Mago the Carthaginian,^[64] the Septuagint and (if you believe it) the voluminous writings of Zoroaster.^[65] But Greek writers did not learn the languages

[57] Anth. Pal . 7.417.

[58] Dion. Hal. Vet. or . 1.

[59] Anth. Pal . 7.417.2.

[60] Strab. 14.5.13.

[61] Theocritus 15.47.

[62] See n. 4, above; Guéraud and Jouguet, Livre d'éecolier .

[63] FGrH 779.

[64] F. Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur der Alexandrinerzeit (Leipzig, 1891-92) 1:830.

[65] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 2:436 n. 745.

themselves;^[66] the Greek imperialists made no such contribution to oriental scholarship as their successors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
(c) One could absorb and dominate it. "Alexandria educated both Greeks and barbarians," said Menecles of Barca;^[67] the civilizing mission bulks large in the Alexander legend. Sometimes the barbarians responded: in Hellenized Palestine, Ezekiel transformed the Exodus into a Greek tragedy; Theodotus transposed Samaritan battles into Homeric formulae; Philo compiled the history and marvels of Jerusalem in hexameters so loaded as to foreshadow Nonnus; and the author of "Joseph and Asenath" modeled himself on the rising Greek novella.^[68] Sometimes the Greeks responded: at the lower level, one Greek schoolboy copied the Dream of Nectanebos , another attributed the Delphic Maxims to the sage Amenothes;^[69] through magic and astrology, Eastern wisdom percolated into higher literature. But very often the effect was to subvert the Orient into the mystically picturesque. Bookkhoris was the subject of elegant elegiacs by Pancrates;^[70] here are the first stages of Ninus and Sesonchosis.^[71] Myth, utopianism, and literary reminiscence outperformed the new geographic and ethnographic observations: Greeks saw Babylon through Herodotus, not through Berossus;^[72] Euhemerus constructed a South Sea paradise in the interests of atheism, Iambulus of Stoicism. Persians were really Argives, if they descended from Perseus;^[73] Agatharchides protested in vain at such continuities of mythogeography.^[74]

IV. Literary Inheritance

Another identity was that within the Greek literary tradition: the inheritance and what to do with it.

That inheritance could now be seen in full and systematic form: I need mention only the 120 books of Callimachus' Pinakes . The distinction between the classics and the postclassical continued to harden.^[75]

[66] Ibid., 720 n. 16.

[67] FGrH 270 F 9.

[68] S. West, "Joseh and Asenath : A Neglected Greek Romance," CQ 24 (1974): 70-81.

[69] Wilcken, Urkunden der Ptolemäerzeit 1:81; Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 2:954 n. 51.

[70] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 602.

[71] G. Anderson, Ancient Fiction (London, 1984), 6-9, even finds Sumerian material in Daphnis and Chloe .

[72] Most recently, A. Kuhrt and S. Sherwin-White, Hellenism in the East (London, 1987), 33.

[73] Jacoby on FGrH 306 F 7 gives the history of this idea.

[74] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 2:774 n. 167.

[75] Pfeiffer, Classical Scholarship , 1:203.

There were canons of the best authors (three tragedians, nine lyric poets, and the like). Culture heroes stood in public places: in the Per-gamene library, Alcaeus, Herodotus, Timotheus;^[76] pilgrims to the Memphite Serapeum ran into Homer, Pindar, Protagoras, and Plato.^[77] Fictional epitaphs on dead authors became a flourishing genre.

These classics one could worship and emulate; or, by reaction, parody and undermine.

The cult of Homer flourished; Ptolemy IV's temple was only one of many, decorated with statues of the cities who claimed him; the claims multiplied to suit glamor and power—Athens, Egyptian Thebes, finally Rome. Galato painted Homer vomiting, and the other poets drawing from the pool.^[78] Some set out to overbid: Timolaus' Iliad^[79] added an extra line to each of Homer's; Sotades' Iliad transposed Homer bodily into the louche oriental rhythm of the Sotadean.^[80] There were parodies and irreverent imitations: the Egyptian Iliad dealt with sucking pig;^[81] the Battle of the Frogs and Mice , and of the Mice and the Weasel, represent more consistent parody of Homeric warfare.^[82] Hesiod had catalogued the mistresses of gods and heroes; Phanocles catalogued their boy-friends (so perhaps did the Ehoioi of Sostratus).^[83] Others opened the attack direct: on the morals of the mighty dead (Hermesianax catalogued the desperate passions of all poets and philosophers since Orpheus, the treatise the sins of great monarchs and thinkers)^[84] and on their originality (Plato took the dialogue from Alexamenus, and bought the Timaeus from the Pythagoreans—that is already fourth-century;^[85] by imperial times the plagiarisms of Sophocles fill a whole book^[86] ). Gossip became an industry: when Archippe left her lover Smicrines to

[76] M. Fränkel, Die Inschriften von Pergamon (Berlin, 1890), 198-200. It remains uncertain who were the other two honorands, Apollonius and Balacrus (G. Richter, Portraits of the Greeks [London, 1965] 2: 247).

[77] M. Pietrzykowski, Rzezby Greckie z Sarapeum Memfickiego (Warsaw, 1976), 145 (French summary): the identity of many of the statues is disputed. Dorothy J. Thompson, Memphis under the Ptolemies (Princeton, 1988), 116f.

[78] Aelian Varia historia 13.22.

[79] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 849. Pigres had anticipated the idea: but is S. Hornblower, Mausolus (Oxford, 1982), 30 n. 194, really right to put him in the fifth century?

[80] Powell, Coll. Alex ., 239.

[81] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 496-497.

[82] H. Schibli, "Fragments of a Weasel and Mouse War," ZPE 53 (1983): 1-25.

[83] Powell, Coll. Alex ., 106; Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 732.

[84] Powell, Coll. Alex ., 96; U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Antigonos yon Karystos (Berlin, 1881), 47.

[85] Arisrotle F 72 R (P. Oxy . 3219 F 1.8); Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 828.

[86] Stemplinger, Piagiat , 33f.

live with the aged Sophocles, Smicrines remarked "she is like an owl; they always roost on tombs"^[87] —such was the edifying and reliable information that the reader could find in Hegesander of Delphi. Hand in hand went the tendency (which we inherit) to explain an author's works from his life and to infer his life from his works (Satyrus' Life of Euripides survives as an example; Philochorus, if he himself refused to see an allusion to the death of Socrates in Euripides' Palamedes [FGrH 328 F 221], had shown a rare critical spirit). Here gossip joins hands with philosophy: the work actualizes the character.^[88]

V. Imitation and Aesthetics

In this culture, the choice of a model, or the choice of one work as a model rather than another, declares ideological identity. Thus Callimachus despises the cyclic epic, or boosts Hesiod, or prefers Mimnermus' shorter poems to his long ones.^[89] In oratory, the Rhodian school chose Hyperides, others Isocrates, others Demosthenes.^[90] The other choice must have been the mode of imitation. The Hellenistic age inherited two issues: one philosophical, the relation between representation and reality (external mimesis), the other rhetorical, the relation between stylist and stylistic model (internal mimesis); the second intersected a third, the relation between inspiration and technique. Epicurus' rejection of rhetoric, Callimachus' insistence on techne , Polybius' polemic against tragic history continue these themes. The theoretical treatments have perished. But there are two overlapping points to bear in mind, if we think that mimesis and zelos provided the conceptual base for literary controversy. (1) Hellenistic authors may have seen their models differently from us. Hegesias claimed Lysias as his model; we see no likeness, except simple-minded syntax.^[91] Scholars looked for historical allusions in Pindar and saw his myths as digressions:^[92] what does that imply for his poetic "imitators"? (2) Judgments of dead authors, at least later, show how wide a concept was "imitation." Archilochus and Stesichorus counted as zelotai of Homer, Herodotus and Plato as Homerikoi :^[93] that implies a very free choice of similarities, in vocabulary, matter, or grandeur. Some thought

[87] Athenaeus 592B.

[88] Dihle, Griechische Literaturgeschichte , 407.

[89] Callimachus Epigrammata 28, 27; F 1 Pfeiffer.

[90] Dion. Hal. Opusc . 1:308 U-R.

[91] E. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa (Stuttgart, 1958) 1:134.

[92] M. R. Lefkowitz, "The Pindar Scholia," AJPh 106 (1985): 269-282 = First Person Fictions (Oxford, 1991), 147-160.

[93] D. A. Russell, "Longinus" On the Sublime (Oxford, 1964), n. on 13.3.

Aratus a zelotes of Homer, others of Hesiod: that is a literary, not a scholarly judgment.

Certainly manner plays a central part. About 280 BC , a soldier of the garrison at Elephantine wrapped his private papers in a fine papyrus of drinking songs.^[94] One addresses Memory, mother of the Muses: , "we bring forth a newly blooming song, diversified with first-creating art." Novelty, skill, variety are themes we hear much of.

Novelty of matter . Pfeiffer has remarked that knowledgeability has a better reputation in the Hellenistic age. Earlier philosophers drew a significant contrast between knowledge and nous ; nothing is more empty than polymathy, says the satirical Timo.^[95] But Aristeas visualized men more inventive and learned than those before;^[96] Strabo saw learning as a requirement for the geographer.^[97] Aristotle already thought polymathy a great stimulus and the cause of many troubles in education. But in the second century a school on Teos was giving a prize for it, alongside reading, writing, and drawing.^[98] Writers delight to cite their sources, and argue with them. , says Callimachus, and duly cites "old Xenomedes" for a Cean story.^[99] Scholar poets show off their knowledge; the rare myth, the Homeric gloss which hints at wide reading in the source and in the commentaries. The out-of-the-way fascinates: so Apollodorus, discussing the epithets of Athena, cannot resist quoting extracts from an old poem he had come upon, not because it was relevant but because of the "peculiarity" of the story.^[100] Conversely, the Borgesian art of source-deception flourishes: Euhemerus does not expect us to believe in his Panchaic inscription,^[101] or Satyrus in the whom he cites for Euripides' death.^[102]

Novelty of form . Novelty is not an innovation; the newest song is best received, says Telemachus.^[103] Nor is it necessary. Many, perhaps most, Hellenistic authors followed the beaten track. Rhianus' Herakleia and Messeniaka continue themes and language of earlier epic;^[104] the deeds of

[94] PMG 917; Iambi et elegi graeci (West) Adespota eleg . 27. A new discussion of the poems by F. Ferrari in SCO 38 (1989): 181-227.

[95] Pfeiffer, Classical Scholarship 1:138; Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 794.

[96] Aristeas Epist . 137.

[97] Strab. 1.1.1.

[98] F 62 R; Charles Michel, Recueil d'inscriptions grecques (Paris, 1900) 913.8.

[99] F 612; 75.54.

[100] P. Köln 3.126.

[101] FGrH 63 F 3, ch. 43.3.

[102] Satyrus, Life of Euripides F 39 xx.

[103] Homer Odyssey 1.315f.; Stemplinger, Plagiat , 131.

[104] Rhianus (?): Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 923, 946.

Antiochus I or Mark Antony were celebrated as if Callimachus had never uttered.^[105] The Cyropaideia gets adapted to Alexander, Attalus, and Caesar.^[106] But "new-creating art" too displays itself in great variety.

We can begin with the pleasures of simple ingenuity. The pattern poems are well known. Castorio's Hymn to Pan has metra which can be read in any order.^[107] Acrostics make their appearance in Nicander, aria-grams in Lycophron.^[108] A papyrus of the first century offers trimeters which begin and end with the same letters (a local Egyptian composition), palindromic hexameters, hexameters which contain all the letters of the alphabet.^[109] Riddles are collected, made into epigrams, adapted to mathematics.^[110] The pleasure in virtuosity shows in lists of poetic words;^[111] it was a brother of Cassander, and founder of Uranopolis, who referred to his barber as "the mortal-shearer."^[112]Paignia is a title (of Sophisfic origin) of books of Cynic parodies, equally of epigrams or elegies by Philitas.^[113] Leptos becomes a buzzword of the poets (again, a Sophistic inheritance).^[114] In didactic verse, elegance in expressing the difficult outweighed the intellectual competence of the author: Nicander's Georgics were a long way from the soil, said Cicero;^[115] Aratus' version of Eudoxus held the field, even after Hipparchus exposed its errors. Elegance reaches structure as well as expression. In the epyllion (to use the modern term), a long central digression diversifies the main story: the speech of the crow in the Hecale , the description of the golden basket in Moschus' Europa . In the Aetia , poems were balanced in length and subject; one part perhaps united by the dialogue of the Muses, the other framed by two court pieces.^[116] In Euphorion, brief mythological riddles are linked as a string of curses; an anonymous poet proposes to tattoo his enemy, each anatomical area to have its image of some mythical sinner.^[117] Unity in variety.

[105] Ibid., 723, 230.

[106] Stemplinger, Plagiat , 274.

[107] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 310.

[108] Nicander Theriaca 345-353 (and cf. Aratus 783-787); Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 531.

[109] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 996.

[110] Ibid., 201.

[111] Ibid., 991.

[112] Heraclides Lembos ap. Athen. 98E.

[113] Powell, Coil. Alex ., 92.

[114] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 108; cf. Callimachus F 1.11 Pfeiffer.

[115] Cicero De oratore 1.69.

[116] Most recently on this problem, A. Kerkhecker, "Ein Musenanruf am Anfang der Aitia des Kallimachos," ZPE 71 (1988): 16-24.

[117] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 970. See now Marc Huys, Papyri Bruxellenses Graecae , vol. 2 (Brussels, 1991), who publishes a new fragment of the papyrus, with the preceding column of the poem, and suggests Hermesianax as author.

Another source of variety is the tension between form and content, and between content and treatment. The mixing of genres is central to the experimental literature of the age (and the easier, when social change detached a genre from its original culture or performing context). That is true at the general level (rhetoric continues to conquer history and to take over themes and diction from poetry) and at the more particular (epigram extends to mime and paradoxography,^[118] biography invades dialogue,^[119] Machon switches the chreia from philosophers to prostitutes^[120] ). We can consider formal aspects (meter and dialect) which were traditionally linked to genre, and aspects of content (myth and realism).

Among meters, the poets of the period inherited the hexameter (to which Callimachus and his followers gave an extra refinement), the elegiac, the dramatic iambus, and lyric and epodic meters. The experimenters proceeded in different ways. (1) By extension. The iambic trimeter extends to longer poems (witness the Alexandra of Lycophron, a riddle in the form of a rhesis as long as a complete tragedy) and to didactic uses; the all-conquering elegiac is now used for hymns, epinicia, love lyrics, paradoxography, and medicine.^[121] (2) By selective revival. It is a notable fact that no poet we know of imitated the song stanzas of Sappho and Alcaeus (although they continued to be sung into the Roman period): individual kola only were taken over^[122] and used stichically or in additional epodic forms. (3) By innovation. Boiscus and Philicus tell us that their extravagant meters were their own invention;^[123] how many more, we cannot tell. It is worth noting—given the general question how far such apparent experiments affect the poetic koine —that one epodic pattern known from epigrams of Callimachus and others turns up also in a contemporary inscription from distant Ithaca.^[124]

Dialect and genre had gone together. Thus, doctors of whatever city might write Ionic and utter Doric, in deference to Hippocrates;^[125] it was a revolution when Diocles of Carystus wrote in Attic. For prose in general, the fourth century had established Attic as the norm; it was eccentric of Archimedes to write his own Syracusan (an extension of the prin-

[118] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 125-129.

[119] Satyrus, Life of Euripides .

[120] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:621.

[121] F. Jacoby, Apollodors Chronik (Berlin, 1902), 61; Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 18, 690.

[122] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 1001.

[123] Ibid., 233, 677.

[124] W. Peek, Griechische Vers-Inschriften , vol. 1, Epigramme (Berlin, 1955), 102. Cf. Epigr . Gr . 874a (with M. L. West, Greek Metre [Oxford, 1982], 152); SEG 7.14 (the acrostic hymn from Susa, glyconic + pherecratean, West, Greek Metre , 141).

[125] Men. Aspis 367.

ciple that technical prose is not subject to artistic norms). But in verse, as the spoken dialects declined, literary dialect intensified. Writers imitating Hipponax wrote hyper-Ionic.^[126] Much more striking was the move out of genre: thus Callimachus' sixth Hymn combines the traditional meter of the hymn (hexameters) with the traditional dialect of choral lyric (Doric). Theocritus too combined heroic meter with material from the prose mime; to the mime his Doric might be historically appropriate—but it was a double coup if, as has been suggested recently, his Doric was actually that spoken in contemporary Alexandria.^[127]

Myth was a traditional material. You could achieve novelty by selection: the rare, the quaint, and the erotic.^[128] But you could achieve it also by treatment. Thus, Theocritus took the story of young Heracles and the snakes, told heroically in the first Nemean : diction and meter remain heroic, but the characters behave like a bourgeois household roused by a burglar. Thus Dionysius Scytobrachion took the story of the Argonauts, told in lyric by Pindar and in hexameters by Apollonius, and transmuted it into a kind of prose romance.^[129] He gave the expedition a new leader, Heracles, he changed the plot to bring in the rescue of Hesione from the monster, and he explained the fire-breathing bulls (tauroi ) as poetic fantasy for the murderous Taurians. The chivalrous warrior advancing through exotic but not fabulous territories—the Alexander image is clear enough. Thus, domestication and rationalization gave myth new dimensions.

Realism should stand at the other pole; and perhaps in mime it did so, with cartoon sketches of low life. But mime too had its literary inheritance and its transformation of genre. Theocritus draws on Sophron but casts his material in hexameters. Herodas takes a different model, Hipponax. His go-between, his pimp, his schoolmaster might be contemporary characters, but they speak scazons in archaic Ionic. His Ladies at the Temple drifts into another genre, the ekphrasis of works of art. And his Dream , in which he presents himself as a small dirt farmer, turns out to be an assertion of artistic inspiration and artistic fame; he cannot say "the pig is thirsty" without invoking a rare and portentous poeticism (, 8.2). So new realism is cast in the form of old realism; the result is simply unreal.

Let me end by looking at a few works, chosen impressionistically, which may illustrate some of the themes mentioned.

1. Among philosphers and moralists, it is the Cynics who show the most literary enterprise; this sophistication of the unwashed makes a

[126] L C. Cunningham, Herodas: Mimiambi (Oxford, 1971), 211-217.

[127] C. J. Ruijgh, "Le dorien de Théocrite," Mnemosyne , 4th ser., 37 (1984): 56-88.

[128] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 456, 964.

[129] J. S. Rusten, Dionysius Scytobrachion (Opladen, 1982), 93f.

curious contrast with the uncouth prose of the Epicureans. Crates used the typical title Paignia for a book in which parodies of Homer and Solon served to attack Stilpo and to recommend poverty.^[130] Phoenix of Colophon adopted the meter and language of Hipponax. Cercidas took over the dactyloepitrite meter, Doric dialect, and elaborate compounds of dithyramb.^[131] Menippus of Gadara—well, almost nothing is known of this most influential of authors. Anciently, he exemplified the principle of spoudaiogeloion ;^[132] by inference, he began that combination of prose and verse which, after diversifying into comic fiction,^[133] returned to philosophy in Boethius. He came from Gadara, overlooking the Sea of Galilee (it was also to produce Meleager and Philodemus), only recently in the Greek orbit;^[134] does that foreignness explain his originality?

2. Apollodorus of Athens worked with Aristarchus in Alexandria, left in the diaspora, dedicated his Chronika to Attalus II, and eventually returned to Athens.^[135] He worked conventionally on Homer, notably a commentary on the Catalog of Ships ; and on Comedy—Sophron, Epicharmus, and the courtesans of Athens (Aristophanes of Byzantium had catalogued 135; Apollodorus' list was longer). Less conventional was his treatise On the Gods , which related the gods' functions to their epithets, gathered from a wide reading of recondite literature.^[136] Less conventional still was the Chronika , four books covering 1040 years, from the fall of Troy to his own time. The foundation was Eratosthenes' chronology, with archons in place of Olympiads; philosophy and poetry came into it, as well as politics and history. Verse is the medium: not the didactic hexameter, but normal Koine Greek expressed in a loose comic iambic.^[137] There is some precedent in the Chreiai of philosophers and the naughty anecdotage of Machon; and the form caught on, for geography, astronomy, medicine, and grammar.^[138] The meter was chosen, an imitator said, for clarity and memorability.^[139] What sort of audience had Apollodorus in mind for this combination of bald fact and chatty form, as monstrous in its way as Lycophron's Alexandra?

3. Lastly, back to Callimachus and to the latest work to be added to

[130] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 347.

[131] West, Greek Metre , 139f.

[132] J. F. Kindstrand, Bion of Borysthenes (Uppsala, 1976), 47f.

[133] Petronius Satyricon; P. Oxy . 42.3010; M. W. Haslam, in Papyri . . . edited . . . in honour of Eric Gardner Turner (London, 1981), 8.

[134] Emil Schürer, rev. G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Black, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ , vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1979), 132-136.

[135] Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:471, 2:683f. FGrH 244.

[136] Rusten, Dionysius Scytobrachion , 30ff.

[137] Jacoby, Apollodors Chronik , 67-69.

[138] Ibid., 70.

[139] Pseudo-Scymnus, FGrH 244 T 2.34-35.

his oeuvre, the elegy on the victory of Queen Berenice at the Nemean Games.^[140] The shape is simple: a proem; the myth, at length, the story of Heracles and the Nemean lion and the foundation of the Games; and, presumably, an epilogue. Now, the poem calls itself an Epinician; the first line combines words from Pindar's fourth Nemean with motifs from two other poems; the general structure—a long narrative broken off by the poet himself—recalls the fourth Pythian , also written for a Cyrenean monarch. The thematic structure—myth as aetion of the games and their prize—looks both to Olympian III (where Heracles founds the Olympic Games and imports the olive crown) and to Bacchylides XIII (where Heracles subdues the lion, and a bystander, no doubt Athena, foretells the founding of the Games). Callimachus, we know, "arranged" the poems of Pindar and Bacchylides.^[141] Pindaric, then; but in the wrong meter, elegiacs. The proem tells how the good news came from the land of Danaus and 10 to the land of Helen and Proteus—Egypt firmly placed as a mythical appendix of Argos. The myth begins. Heracles speaks: he narrates the history of his bow and his family, Argive by origin, then comments on the state of the countryside, where only brambles and wild pears grow from the drystone walls. The other party turns out to be Molorchus, an old peasant; he explains how the ravages of the Nemean lion have left the fields deserted and barren; to add to his misfortunes, there is also an invasion of mice. The mice are duly described and the traps set for them. Heracles goes on his way, slays the lion; Athena stands by and predicts that one day the Greeks will hold games on this very spot; Heracles returns to Molorchus, crowned with wild parsley; and so to Argos. Now, Heracles is grand myth; where Callimachus found (or did he invent?) Molorchus, we do not know; but certainly the old man occupies half the poem as we have it. There are two sets of contrasts: between the young hero and the old rustic, and between the simple peasant and the language which invests him. The vine trunks are unpruned, he says—"trunks" is a Cypriot gloss; his wife takes down the bacon with a forked pole—"pole" is a Homeric rarity.^[142] Both contrasts are played up in the long bravura passage on the mousetraps. A plague of mice did figure in an obscure local myth, but they add quasi-realistically to the elegant sketch of rural squalor, and Molorchus' hunting of them deliberately parallels the lion hunt of Heracles (sintai , they are called, like lions in Homer; the tails with which they dip the oil from the lamps are

[140] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 254-269. On the Mousetrap: E. Livrea, "Der Liller Kallimachos und die Mausefallen," ZPE 34 (1979): 37-42; idem, "Polittico Callimacheo," ZPE 40 (1980): 21-26.

[141] F 450; Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 293.

[142] Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 257.25, 259.2.

alkaiai , properly of a lion's tail).^[143] This rococo confection, then, combines it all: court panegyric, domesticated heroism, ironic contrast, far-fetched myth, old Greek etiology—all in a homage to Pindar which studiously avoids his meter, his seriousness, and (except for a word or two here or there) his language. Callimachus' relation to Pindar is indeed one paradigm of the Hellenistic transformation of the past; ^[144] might characterize the new poetry as a whole. Not to travel on Homer's well-worn wagon road, to pluck the fine flower of poetry^[145] —these are Pindaric images which recur in the prologue of the Aetia and in the epilogue of the Hymn to Apollo : the knowing reader is transported in ideology as well as in details to that remote and sumptuous world. And what reader was that? Molorchus made a deep impression on later poets (though, so far as I know, none at all in art); yet the very papyrus which preserves the text, copied within a generation of the poet's death, carries a prose paraphrase between the lines: not all readers were knowing readers.

So much for impressions. I end with some questions.

1. Crisis and response . If the Hellenistic age began with a crisis, of what sort was it? Novelty, philotimia , the overreaching of predecessors, is a recurring theme in Greek civilization: what was different this time? One can say, certainly, that reaction to the fourth century explains much: philosophy against Plato, rhetoric against Demosthenes and Isocrates (one group aims at pseudonaiveté after Lysias, the other at grandiose conceit after the Sophists), poetry reaching back over an age of prose and democracy to an age of aristocratic mannerism. But no doubt that is too simple. Continuities are clear; I suspect that rhetorical theory, and rhetorical education, as developed in the fourth century, played a much more determining part in the new literature than we can now perceive. And in all this, how relevant was the geopolitical crisis? More monarchs means more money; that is a practical view. The psychologist's view might be different: the bibelot poetry and folkloristic antiquarianism, the combinatorial amiabilities of New Comedy, the rectilinear cities, universal histories, systematic philosophies, and encyclopedic textbooks show the Hellenistic Greeks variously denying or dominating the unease of widened horizons: the key to the age is cultural agoraphobia.

2. Ideology and identities . Polarities define identities: Hellenic/barbarian, miniaturist/megalomaniac, experimental/traditional, pragmatic/ tragic, universal/local, versatile/specialist; piety/rationalism, inspiration/ technique, pleasure/instruction. To define systematic ideologies is much

[143] Ibid., 259.29, 23.

[144] Pindar Pyth . 9.7.

[145] Pae . 7b.11f., Isthm . 7.18f.

harder. Certainly there were philosophies, which spoke of the nature of history or the value of poetry; it is not clear whether they were as universally influential as (it seems) in the Roman period. But were there also aesthetics? In practice, some poets pursued the brief, the rare, the polished, the obscure. Was that a "Callimachean program," or just a slogan asserting a taste? When Callimachus and Polybius both recommend rivals to be brief and selective,^[146] does it signify? is a buzzword of poets, a technical term of rhetoric; describes a Stoic virtue, applies to the elements of fire and air. Did contemporaries feel these as part of a single value system? Beyond literature, how great an analogy with the visual arts was felt, or should be perceived? Do the epigram and the terracotta show a single zeitgeist? Hellenistic poets like to describe works of art, but their own work seems to have no effect on iconography; we have the Pergamene altar, but no contemporary poet is known to have written a Gigantomachy: does that signify? A writer should be eclectic, just as Zeuxis used five different models for his Helen: does this passing remark of Cicero^[147] derive from a developed theory of mimesis? Certainly, if one wanted a pocket description of Callimachus' work, one would take his own description of the toys brought by Athena to the infant Artemis^[148] —. Is it fanciful to think that both poetry and rhetorical prose develop visual qualities: , static elaboration, the frozen moment?

I have no answers.

[146] Callimachus F 1; Polybius 12.251.6-9.

[147] Cic. De inventione 1.

[148] F 202.27.

Response

Albert Henrichs

The combined expertise of Professors Gelzer and Parsons ranges over a wide area of Greek literature from the classical to the imperial period. Gelzer's work covers the classical antecedents as well as the later imitators of Hellenistic poetry from Aristophanes to Musaeus, and his interest in ancient literary criticism and in the concept of classicism reveals a theoretical bent that has also shaped his approach to the present topic. Parsons, as one of the most eminent contemporary papyrologists, is an "artificer of fact."^[1] His edition of the Lille Callimachus and collaboration in the Supplementum Hellenisticum have provided us with magnificent research tools that open up new and difficult areas of Hellenistic poetry. With their different backgrounds and interests, Gelzer and Parsons make a provocative team, ready to approach the tantalizing topic of "Identity and Crisis in Hellenistic Literature" from opposite directions. Gelzer can be described as the theoretician and Parsons as the practitioner in the definition and exploration of both terms, "identity" and "crisis"; they have resorted here to a practical division of labor that leaves Parsons with the task of establishing identities and Gelzer with that of diagnosing the crisis. Their combined effort thus reconsiders the entire entity conventionally known as "Hellenistic literature"—an entity so firmly established that the organizers of this conference had every fight to take it for granted. In the end, after extensive scrutiny, the entity stands essentially intact, but not without a poignant reminder that many common assumptions about the period and its literature remain controversial, and that major tasks lie ahead. Above all, there is room for a new

[1] H. C. Youtie, "The Papyrologist: Artificer of Fact," GRBS 4 (1963): 19-32 (reprinted in Scriptiunculae [Amsterdam, 1973-75] 1:9-23).

and comprehensive history of Hellenistic literature which treats prose in the same depth as poetry and confronts the fundamental issues of periodization, continuity, and literary identity raised by Gelzer and Parsons.^[2]

Both scholars accept in principle the standard modem chronological framework, according to which the Hellenistic period lasted from the death of Alexander the Great to the Battle of Actium, or from 323 to 31 BC.^[3] Furthermore, they both assume a long period of transition which lasted for the better part of the fourth century and produced the characteristics we call "Hellenistic."^[4] Apart from these shared assumptions, the two papers differ widely in range and perspective. Whereas Parsons covers the entire timespan from the reign of Ptolemy I to the Augustan era, with minute attention to consistent features and attitudes that lie beneath the diversity and the quick pace of literary production, Gelzer

[2] F. Susemihl's admirable if dated Geschichte der griechischen Literatur in der Alexandrinerzeit , 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1891-92), remains the only comprehensive account. Neither volume 2.l of W. Schmid and O. Stählin's Geschichte der griechischen Literatur , 6th ed. (Munich, 1920), nor the treatment of Hellenistic poetry and, on a much smaller scale, prose in volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Classical Literature (Cambridge, 1985) is designed to replace it.

[4] This too represents the common view, as formulated, for instance, by G. Krahmer, "Stilphasen der hellenistischen Plastik," MDAI(R) 38/39 (1923/24): 138-184, at 139: "Das IV. Jahrhundert stellt sich mir his zu seinem Ende als eine langsame Entwicklung dar, was in dieser Arbeit nur leicht gestreift werden kann. Etwas Neues, Andersartiges, eine neue Epoche scheint mir erst die Statue des Polyeuktos, der Demosthenes, zu bringen, zu der natürlich auch Übergänge führen. Darum sei mir für diese Untersuchung aus praktischen Gründen . . . gestattet, mit dem Worte Hellenismus die Alexanderzeit und die Frühzeit der Diadochen, also die Zeit his ungefähr zum Jahre 300 v. C., nicht einzubegreifen."

concentrates on the interplay of continuity and change that links the literature of the late classical period with the new cultural and poetic impetus centered in Alexandria. By setting prominent Alexandrian poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus against the background of the literary tradition that preceded and followed them, he searches for significant breaks in continuity, which he defines as "crises," at the beginning and end of the Hellenistic period. It is this gradual emergence of the Hellenistic out of the classical, and the eventual formation of a new classicism, that occupies most of Gelzer's attention. Parsons, though far from unaware of the problem of demarcation and transition, leaves their discussion to Gelzer and jumps in medias res , into the classification of individual authors and generic traits that make Hellenistic literature an entity in its own right. In addition to poetry, Parsons also includes the numerous genres of Hellenistic prose in his wide-ranging survey, while Gelzer confines himself to poetry.

In the first part of my response, I will discuss Gelzer's notion of the literary crisis and, more briefly, Parson's analysis of authorial identities, on their own terms, that is, separately from each other. Separating the crisis from the identities has the advantage of maximizing the best strengths of both scholars. At the same time, however, the separate treatment leaves us with a series of poetic crises that occurred at the extreme periphery of Hellenistic poetry without affecting the core of that poetry or the identities of its poets; conversely, the separation of the concept of literary identity from that of literary crisis, taken in its broadest sense, raises the uncomfortable prospect of authorial identities that are intrinsically clear-cut, well defined, and unproblematic.

The idea of crisis in literary studies is a multiple one. It can involve the shaping of a literary character or the establishment of the identity of an author, or it can reflect the vicissitudes of ancient or modern criticism. Each of these perspectives suggests ways of making relevant connections that link the twin concepts of identity and crisis and bring them into sharper focus. In my concluding sections, I propose to move in that direction by exploring two crises of criticism. I shall first turn to Menander and his controversial literary identity, which seems to elude classification-Hellenistic or classical? A classic or an unending set of variations on predictable literary themes? The way we answer these questions has as much to do with the individual scholarly identities of Menander's modern critics and with the conceptual categories they bring to their task as with Menander himself. Then, in the final section, I shall evoke a revealing incident in the history of ancient criticism and Hellenistic literature, when Apollodorus of Athens, a scholar as well as a poet, discovered an anonymous epic poem, the Meropis , and tried to define the literary identity of its author by looking at its plot. Heracles, the central

figure in the poem, is shown in a moment of extreme crisis. The manner in which the epic hero handles the crisis he confronts should tell us something about the quality of the poet and his place in literary history. Yet critics are sharply divided over the date and ambience of the Meropis ; in this instance, at least, the crisis of the hero has turned into another crisis of criticism.

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.

II. The Case of Menander: a Crisis of Identity?

Menander poses intriguing questions of period, canon, and reception. His name stands for the genre of New Comedy, a designation which separates him sharply from the earlier and more "classical" poets of Old and Middle Comedy.^[18] Yet the genre which he represents and the dramatic tradition in which he stands link Menander intimately with the final stage of classical Athens and its literature. Born of Attic parents in 342/1, he was still a toddler and unaware of the momentous course of events when Greece lost its independence to Philip of Macedon. In 323, the year in which Alexander died, Menander reported at age eighteen for military duty as a classmate of Epicurus, whose postclassical cast of

[17] Apollodorus FGrH 244 F 112 = Menander F 323 Körte. Apollodorus is also the source of Philodemus De piet . p. 42 G. = Menander F 841 Körte.

[18] See below, n. 26.

mind is all too conspicuous. One has only to think of Epicurus' indifference to public affairs, his rejection of rhetoric, the gracelessness of his technical prose, and his antimythical and antitragic separation of gods and men. Menander's first play dates from around 321; his last production falls in the initial decade of the third century, at the height of the reign of the first Ptolemy, who may have tried in vain to attract the playwright to Alexandria.

In biographical as well as literary terms, Menander is a truly transitional figure who straddles the fence, no matter where we decide to draw the line that separates the late classical from the early Hellenistic period. His milieu is that of the Athenian city-state, but his outlook is cosmopolitan and his humanity universal; he writes verse that often reads like prose; his idiom is Attic, but every now and then his vocabulary and syntax foreshadow later Hellenistic usage; some of his less conventional characters, never before seen on the dramatic stage, were typical fourth-century figures who could look forward to a bright future in the Hellenistic world. I am thinking in particular of the pairs of young lovers who successfully overcome obstacles and cross social boundaries in their pursuit of personal happiness, of the mercenary soldier who fights in distant lands, and of the goddess Tyche who claims that she is holding everybody's fortune in her hands.^[19]

It is much easier to assess Menander's importance for European literature as a whole than to determine his place in the history of Greek letters. The problems that face us in Menander are intimately connected with the identity of the Hellenistic period, conceived as a coherent literary phenomenon. Historians of Greek literature either include him under the Hellenistic rubric or treat him as a classical author who almost missed the boat.^[20] Eric W. Handley has recently called Menander "a poet of the Hellenistic Age," but, more often than not, New Comedy is ex-

[19] In the Aspis Menander introduces Tyche as the prologue speaker and Kleostratos as a soldier of fortune who returns to Greece with rich spoils from battlegrounds in Asia Minor. Tyche's stage epiphany (97-148) epitomizes her prominent role in New Comedy (e.g., Philemon F 9, 125 Kassel/Austin; Menander F 295, 417, 467f., 637 Körte) and inaugurates her ubiquitous presence in the Hellenistic and Roman world. Cf. Wilamowitz, Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos (Berlin, 1924) 1: 76f.; idem, Der Glaube der Hellenen (Berlin, 1931-32) 2:298-309; M. P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion , (Munich, 1967-74) 2:200-210; F. W. Hamdorf, Griechische Kultpersonifikationen der vorhellenistischen Zeit (Mainz, 1964), 37-39; H. Lloyd-Jones, GRBS 12 (1971): 194f. (reprinted in his Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and Miscellanea [Oxford, 1990], 24).

[20] Kassel, Abgratzung des Hellenismus , 16f.: "Eine wirkliche Crux der Periodisierung ist dagegen die Neue Attische Komödie. [Examples for both classifications follow.] Hier bleibt offenbar einiges zu klären, was mit dem literarhistorischen Problem des jeweils größeren oder geringeren Gewichts der Zugehörigkeit zu Zeitalter und Gattungstradition zu tun hat."

cluded from treatments of Hellenistic poetry, a designation that has become virtually synonymous with Alexandrian poetry.^[21] In some ways, it is true, the two poetic traditions lie worlds apart: Menander's plays entertained local Athenian theatergoers, whereas the Alexandrian poets had an audience in. mind whose taste was more exclusive and whose background was more panhellenic. No wonder that Menander tends to suffer by comparison with them. The former Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, who edited Menander's Dyskolos shortly after its first publication in 1959 and who did much for our understanding of the more recent plays, once said that he would not hesitate to exchange a hundred lines of Menander for one line of Callimachus.^[22] Like attracts like—by combining wit with learning, Callimachus naturally appeals to learned critics who share his virtues. Menander's best strengths lie elsewhere, in his character drawing and humane touch, qualities which were perhaps more at home in Athens than in Alexandria—Callimachus emulates them in the Hekale , the most Attic of his poems.

Menander continues to divide students of Greek literature. In their passing comments on him, Gelzer and Parsons seem to disagree on his place in Hellenistic poetry. Parsons mentions Menander as the sole surviving representative of Hellenistic drama and as an example of rapid communication between Athens and Alexandria under the first Ptolemies—the plays of Menander "reached Egypt with relative speed.^[23]

[21] Handley in Cambridge History of Classical Literature 1:423. Wilamowitz, "Die griechische Literatur des Altertums," in Die griechische und lateinische Literatur und Sprathe , 3d ed., Die Kultur der Gegenwart 1.7 (Leipzig and Berlin, 1912), first published in 1905, treated Menander under the rubric "Hellenistic Period (320-30 BC )"; two decades later, however, he considered him too "remote from the new spirit" of Alexandria for inclusion in his Hellenistische Dichtung (l:168). In his Griechisthe Literaturgesechichte of 1967 (2d ed., Munich, 1991), Albrecht Dihle discussed Menander and Philemon as Hellenistic drama-fists. By contrast, the author of the most recent book on Hellenistic poetry follows the example of Wilamowitz and excludes Menander; for G. O. Hutchinson, Menander is neither classical nor Hellenistic—he belongs in a postclassical twilight zone, and his comedies "do not assist us greatly" (Hellenistic Poetry [Oxford, 1988], 10).

[22] Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones made this remark more than twenty years ago under the fresh impression of a papyrus fragment of Callimachus newly discovered in the collection of the University of Michigan and subsequently induded, with a significant new reading, by him and Peter Parsons in their Supplementum Hellenisticum as no. 250. His comments on three of Menander's best plays suggest that he would part with some lines more readily than with others: GRBS 7 (1966): 131-157 (Sikyonios ); GRBS 12 (1971): 175-195 (Aspis ); and YClS 22 (1972): 119-144 (Samia ) (reprinted in Greek Comedy , 7-25, 31-76). He eloquently defends "the great poets of the third century" against modern critics of Alexandrianism in his "Hellenistic Miscellany," SIFC 77 (1984): 52-72 (reprinted in Greek Comedy , 231-249).

[23] The earliest known text of Menander, the Sikyonios papyrus, was penned in Egypt within a generation or two of the poet's death. If this is what Parsons means by "relative speed," the pace of dissemination was yet too fast for the skills of that particular scribe—his copy abounds with serious mistakes (see the critical apparatus of R. Kassel's standard edition: Menandri Sicyonius , Kleine Texte 185 [Berlin, 1965]).

The reception of Menander outside Attica and in the Hellenistic world is indeed a crucial aspect of his literary identity, which hovers intriguingly between his dual role as the last heir of Attic comedy and the trail-blazer of a new form of European comedy. Like Parsons, Gelzer recognizes Menander's importance, but he does not recognize him as a Hellenistic poet. As defined by Gelzer, Hellenistic poetry is the exclusive domain of the "new poets" of Alexandria, who created "the new poetry."

Novelty is a crucial element in Gelzer's definition; oddly enough, he excludes from Hellenistic poetry the Menander along with the rest of New Comedy.^[24] Three of Gelzer's four witnesses for the "crisis of poetry," Aristophanes, Antiphanes, and Xenarchus, were poets of Old and Middle Comedy who routinely bragged about their "new" poetic strategies, .^[25] Yet their innovations hardly changed the nature of the genre; it was rather Menander whom the Alexandrians themselves recognized as the true innovator. Compared to his predecessors, Menander represents indeed a "new" and more refined form of comedy.^[26] But if one compares him, as Gelzer implicitly does, with the poetae noui of the Alexandrian and neoteric canon—poets who came after him and whose repertoire included every conceivable genre except drama—he looks inevitably like a poet from an earlier age. Novelty is a relative quality in poets, as well as an elusive criterion in literary studies. Whether a poet is considered innovative or not depends not only on the "originality" of his work, but also on the expectations of his audience and the judgment of his critics.

[25] See above, n. 9.

Modern critics are free to choose the perspective that suits their agenda. Gelzer justifies his choice by insisting on the difference between poetry composed for performance and poetry composed for reading. The genuine Hellenistic poets, he argues, belonged to a "culture of the written word" and wrote with a reading public in mind, whereas Menander's plays were intended for performance before a live audience.^[27] But not every scholar is prepared to deny Menander a place in Hellenistic literature on these grounds as long as the relevance of such criteria as performance, recitation, and reading aloud or silently is open to discussion.^[28] The classification of Menander by period is likely to remain controversial, precisely because he exemplifies the transition. There is a growing awareness, however, that his art, if not Alexandrian, is nevertheless "Hellenistic."^[29]

The problematic nature of the criteria invoked to fit Menander into one period or another brings up a second question: the literary and poetic issues raised by our attempts to define his poetry, and how these issues in turn are vitally affected by our understanding of Hellenistic aesthetics. For a proper appreciation of Menander's art it hardly matters whether he is labeled classical or Hellenistic as long as it is understood that his plays contain features which fit both descriptions. The overall continuity of the dramatic form, which connects Menander with Euripides and the drama of the fourth century, must carry the same weight in the literary classification of his plays as his various innovations in dra-

[27] Here too Gelzer echoes Wilamowitz, who defined Hellenistic poetry as "Rezitati-onspoesie, die zur Lesepoesie wird" (Hellenistische Dichtung 1:149, cf. 52). But unlike Wilamowitz, Gelzer makes no allowance for recitation.

[28] Gelzer acknowledges that dramatic poetry continued to flourish on a reduced scale during the Hellenistic period. Much of the best nondramatic Alexandrian poetry was in all probability also intended for initial recitation to small groups of fellow poets, patrons, or friends before it was circulated in written form; this was true as well for the many less familiar types of poetry—cultic, lyric, mimetic—that were performed before very mixed audiences throughout the Hellenistic period. Callimachus' first Iambus envisages a Hipponax redivivus dictating one of his fables to an assemblage of Alexandrian scholars (F 191 Pfeiffer)—a sarcastic fiction, no doubt, but one that has all the more bite if it was inspired by actual poetry readings in Alexandria. Cf. B. Gentill, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century (Baltimore and London, 1988), 169-176 (on patronage, recitation, and performance in the postclassical period); and A. W. Bulloch, Callimachus: The Fifth Hymn , Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 26 (Cambridge, 1986), 8 ("dearly written for recitation before an educated audience associated with the royal court at Alexandria"). D. Obbink, "Hymn, Cult, Genre" (forthcoming), recognizes "performance" as an essential feature of hymnic poetry, including the extant corpus of Hellenistic hymns; performance can entail ritual enactment (as in various cult hymns) or literary evocation (as in Callimachus Hymns 5 and 6).

[29] I take it to be symptomatic that Gehrke opens his recent survey of Hellenistic literature with Menander (Geschichte des Hellenismus ).

matic technique, narrative structure, or character drawing. What is more important, but also closely linked to the question of the period to which Menander belongs, is his quality as a playwright.

Menander's deceptive simplicity, moralizing stance, and predictable plots have not been universally admired. Modern literary criticism of Menander began on a decidedly negative note around 1800, when Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel pronounced their verdict; this was a century before the sands of Egypt released his first plays. According to the Schlegel brothers, the tragedies of Euripides are filled with telltale signs of literary and cultural decline which foreshadow the "mixed and derivative" genre of New Comedy and set the stage for Menander, who is urbane and philosophically inclined but whose plots and characters are "monotonous."^[30] In more recent times, one of Menander's harshest detractors, a historian of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic period, described him as "the dreariest desert in literature."^[31]

Even his most sympathetic readers are less than lavish with praise. Wilamowitz, still Menander's most brilliant interpreter, admired the "uniformity and purity" of his style but castigated the provincialism of the social milieu from which his characters are drawn.^[32] His target was not so much Menander per se as the Athenian society depicted in his

[30] F. yon Schlegel, Studien des klassischen Altertums , Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 1 (Paderborn, 1979), esp. 12, 14f., 33, 60-68. A. W. yon Schlegel touched upon Euripides, New Comedy, and Menander in his Berlin lectures of 1802/1803, published by Jacob Minor as Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst (Heilbronn, 1884) 2:105 ("mixed and derivative") and 358; his more detailed comments can be found in the Vienna lectures of 1808: "Vorlesungen üer dramatische Kunst und Literatur, Erster Tell," in Kritische Schriften und Briefe , E. Lohner, ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1962-67) 5:100-110, 115-130, 156-168. The Schlegel brothers disagreed on the period of Greek literature to which Menander belonged. Whereas Friedrich Schlegel regarded the poets of New Comedy as the representatives of the last and "weakest" stage of Attic literature, his brother assigned them to the Hellenistic period, which he described as "learned and artificial"; cf. Kassel, Abgrenzung des Hellenismus , 16f. Both Schlegels dearly considered New Comedy second-rate, but like Winckelmann before him, Friedrich Schlegel appreciated the best qualities of Menander insofar as they could be gleaned from the scarce fragments or from his Roman imitators.

[31] W. W. Tarn and G. T. Griffith, Hellenistic Civilization , 3d ed. (London, 1952), 273.

plays—its "provincial confinement," the "dreariness and frivolity" of the "Athenian philistines" with their "narrow conventions" and "misery of life."^[33] He treated the characters of Menander as real-life Athenians and took them severely to task for their lack of higher motivation: "The entire genre is diminished by the fact that the life so faithfully mirrored by Menander was so narrow and philistine and the people so totally deprived of ideas, solely attentive to the pursuit of common pleasures in their youth, and of common profit in their old age."^[34] But literary realism is not the same thing as historical reality, and the notion that the plays of Menander constitute a mirror image of Athenian society during the last quarter of the fourth century is no longer tenable. The new plays have given us a better idea of what Aristophanes of Byzantium might have had in mind when he said that Menander "imitated life."^[35] The breastfeeding that takes place offstage in the Samia (265ff.) and the discovery of the decomposed corpse along with the battered shield reported in the Aspis (68ff.) are fine examples of a realism capable of generating enormous dramatic momentum that keeps the action going until the various confusions are resolved. The soldier believed to have died on the battlefield eventually returns home alive (Aspis 491ff.), and the wet nurse who has been mistaken for the baby's mother is replaced by the true mother in a mirror scene that sets the record straight and prepares the happy resolution and closure (Samia 535ff.).

Does Menander rank as a classic? Given his tremendous influence on Roman comedy, not to mention tile subtle Menandrean echoes in Catullus, he surely ranked as a classic in antiquity.^[36] But such value judgments

[33] Wilamowitz, Kleine Schriften 1:229, 269.

[34] Wilamowitz, "Griechische Literatur des Altertums," 196. His verdict was inspired by Theodor Mommsen's biting condemnation of New Comedy (Römische Geschichte , 9th ed. [Berlin, 1902-4] 1:889ff.); cf. R. Kassel, "Wilarnowitz über griechische und römische Komödie," ZPE 45 (1982): 271-300, esp. 294.

[35] Syrianos In Hermog . 2.23 Rabe = Menander test. 32 Körte = Aristoph. Byz. test. 7 Slater; cf. Nesselrath, Mittlere Komödie , 181 n.92. On Menander's realism see E. W. Handley, The Dyskolos of Menander (London, 1965), 12-14, who reminds us that reading Menander as if his plays were a mirror of real life amounts to the documentary fallacy ("his plays are plays and not documentary records"). Despite the caution urged by Handley, the traditional literal reading of Aristophanes' dictum looms large in G. Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry: A Literature and Its Audience (London and Sydney, 1987), 11of., 145, 149: Menander was preoccupied with "the representation of everyday life" and "portrayed the lives of people in Aristotle's 'average citizen' category" (cf. Aristotle, Poetica 1448a4ff.). Zanker ultimately echoes Wilamowitz (see Menander, Das Schiedsgericht [Berlin, 1925], 164; "Griechische Literatur des Altertums," as quoted in the text above at n. 34).

[36] See E. W. Handley's inaugural lecture, Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (London, 1968), which opened a new era in the study of Roman comedy by comparing for the first time scenes from Plautus with their Greek original; E. Fantham, "Roman Experience of Menander in the Late Republic and Early Empire," TAPhA 114 (1984): 299-309; R. E Thomas, "Menander and Catullus 8," RhM 127 (1984): 308-316.

are never cast in stone; they tend to change, not only over time but also from person to person. Literary taste, personal preference, and special pleading play as important a role in these matters today as they did in antiquity. In the eyes of Aristophanes of Byzantium, Menander ranked second only to Homer; by contrast, the Atticists of the imperial period preferred the purity of Attic diction in the comedies of Aristophanes to the alleged "anomalies" of Menander's Greek.^[37] His name disappeared from the ancient canon of school authors at some time in late antiquity, but the reasons for his declining fortunes remain obscure.^[38] His plays were no longer copied after the seventh century; Byzantium ignored him. Beginning in 1898, successive papyrus finds have put the criticism of the poet and his art on a new foundation. The modern revaluation of Menander which they inaugurated is still in progress. His enhanced status is reflected in the number of new editions, commentaries, and monographs that have appeared in recent years. He is also one of the few Greek authors with less than impeccable classical credentials included in many graduate reading lists. After more than a millennium of inaccessibility, misappreciation, and mixed reviews Menander appears to have finally rejoined the exclusive circle of "canonical" authors.

In important respects, the distinctive quality of Menander is hardly in doubt—his name is permanently attached to Athenian drama, New Comedy, and five-act plays in which domestic conflicts dominate. We cannot, however, easily assign him a niche in periodizing schemes of literary history; the crisis of his Hellenistic identity is likely to remain.

III. The Identity of the Poet and the Crisis of the Hero: Apollodorus and the Meropis

The name of Apollodorus of Athens (ca. 180-110 BC) occurs repeatedly in Parsons' pages, both as the author of a chronographic compendium of Greek political and cultural history written in iambics and as the collector and interpreter of divine epithets in a prose work ambitiously en-rifled "On the Gods" . A substantial new fragment of that

[37] Aristophanes of Byzantium as quoted in IG 14.1183 (= Menander test. 61c Körte); Phrynichos Ekloge 394 and 401 Fischer (= Menander test. 46 and F 357 Körte). Cf. Wilamowitz, Kleine Schriften 1:254, 328-331; idem, Schiedsgericht , 156-160; D. Del Corno, Menandro: Le commedie (Milan, 1966) 1:70f., 81-85.

[38] Cf. Wilamowitz, Kleine Schriften 1:247 n. 1; idem, Schiedsgericht , 171 (where he dates the disappearance of Menander in the time of the iconoclastic controversies); A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford, 1973), 2 n. 5; P. E. Easter-ling in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature 1:39.

work came to light on a Cologne papyrus. Published in 1976, it has received considerable attention.^[39] The fragment is part of Apollodorus' extensive treatment of the epithets of Athena. Embedded in his discussion is a series of quotations from a hexametrical poem called Meropis , which gave an epic account of Heracles' Coan adventures. In his introduction to these excerpts, Apollodorus recalls how he discovered this unknown epic and what his first reaction was:

I came upon a piece of poetry^[40] bearing the title Meropis , with no indication of who composed it.

After a summary of the poem's narrative, he continues:

The poem looked post-Homeric to me. I excerpted (?) it because of the peculiarity of the story.^[41]

Apollodorus' comments are a rare specimen of Hellenistic scholarly prose; what is more, they are paradigmatic of the constraints as well as the opportunities that defined Alexandrian scholarship. He had discov-

ered a new poem, perhaps in the library at Alexandria or Pergamum, whose mythical material fascinated him. But when he tried to place the poet and his work in the history of Greek epic, he ran into difficulties. His papyrus gave the title but not the author, who was anonymous, like most of the other poets of early epic—, and in the same vein .^[42] Undeterred, Apollodorus yielded to his two most basic philological instincts—his sense of curiosity and his desire to preserve this find for posterity. He excerpted it, thus assuring its survival into the next century, when Philodemus would quote the Meropis from Apollodorus, and ultimately into modern times.^[43]

The Meropis is not a good poem, but are its shortcomings those of archaic, classical, or Hellenistic poetry? Apollodorus' own dating criterion was crude but functional. Is the poem Homeric or post-Homeric? he asked.^[44] The poem is certainly nowhere near Homer in tone, or texture, as Apollodorus saw. His modern heirs can't do much better, but the terms of the question have changed. In the current debate over the Meropis , scholars ask themselves whether the poem is Hellenistic or pre-Hellenistic. By addressing the identity of the Meropis in these terms we admit ignorance of much of the history of Greek epic in the archaic and classical period; at the same time, we recognize the special status of the Hellenistic age and its literature, including the rich and varied corpus of Hellenistic epic.

Parsons and Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones justified the inclusion of the Meropis in their Supplementum Hellenisticum by assigning it a date in the fourth or third century. To account for the poem's complete lack of Al-

[42] For these and similar fides see Henrichs, "Ein Meropiszitat in Philodems De Pietate," Cronache Ercolanesi 7 (1977): 124f.; Bernabé, Poetarum epicorum Graecorum , on Titanomachia test. 2, F 1, 4; Phoronis F 1, 3, 5; Naupaktia F 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11; Meropis F 6.

[43] Apart from Apollodorus, Philodemus in De pietate is the only ancient witness for the existence of the Meropis . Gelzer cites the Meropis , without commenting on its date, as a characteristic instance of the tendency of the "new poets" of Alexandria to rediscover "obscure poets" and to give them "a new lease on life." It is surprising to see Apollodorus included among the "new poets"; the iambic verse of his Chronika was modeled on Menander and New Comedy, a genre which Gelzer does not consider Hellenistic (see above, section 1).

exandrian finesse, we would have to assume that its author did not live on Cos, as his interest in the island's mythology might suggest, but in one of the remotest cultural backwaters of the Hellenistic world. In addition, he must have taken so little pride in his work that he wished to remain anonymous. All of this is very unlikely. One also wonders how an obscure provincial poem that lacked antiquity would ever have come to Apollodorus' attention. Not surprisingly, the Meropis would be the only specimen of this kind that survived. In a separate article, Lloyd-Jones therefore took a different view and argued for a date in the sixth century. He points to the un-Hellenistic awkwardness of much of the Homeric imitation found in the Meropis and compares its "lumbering and pedestrian narrative" with the "flatness and dullness" of the "sub-Homeric style" found in the fragments of the Cypria and the Phoronis .^[45] This is indeed the poetic ambience in which the Meropis seems to belong; both its narrative structure and its diction suggest very strongly that its author should be regarded as an epic poet of the late archaic rather than the Hellenistic period.

Already Apollodorus noticed the peculiar narrative () of the Meropis , which centers on a Coan adventure of Heracles that almost cost him his life.^[46] The hero confronts a monstrous aborigine, Asteros, who turns out to be invulnerable. Three times Heracles aims his arrows at Asteros, and each time the arrow bounces off Asteros' impenetrable skin "as if from an unbending rock." As the crisis reaches its climax, "a bitter anguish seized Heracles." He is saved from certain death by the sudden appearance of Athena. She descends accompanied by roars of thunder, and makes her epiphany:

And (Asteros) would have killed Heracles, if Athena had not
thundered mightily as she descended through the clouds.
Striking her delicate flesh with her palm she appeared before
lordly Heracles. And he, raging with his breath,
noticed and recognized the goddess.

After the recognition Athena instructs Heracles to retreat, but her speech is not preserved. As soon as the hero is out of harm's way, she

[45] Lloyd-Jones, "The Meropis ," 149 = 28. Bernabé too assigns the poem to the sixth century.

[46] On the Coan myth of Heracles, including the flaying of Asteros by Athena, see Koenen and Merkelbach, Collectanea Papyrologica , 16-26.

turns to Asteros and impales him with her spear ("immortal casts are not like mortal casts"). At once "the dark gloom of death sets upon his eyes," and he expires. The episode ends with Athena raying Asteros' body, anointing the hide with nectar (or ambrosia), and wrapping it around her as a protective armor. Rather oddly, she leaves the scene with the skinned corpse of Heracles' enemy—hands, feet, and all—dangling around her body.^[47]

Even more peculiar than the poem's narrative is its diction. The poet of the Meropis can tell a conventional story, however haltingly, but when he tries to depict the emotions of Heracles and Athena, he settles for vacuous cliches which stay on the surface of his characters and fail to reveal their inner dimension. Athena inexplicably "strikes her delicate flesh" as she comes to Heracles' rescue.^[48] In comparable moments of imminent danger, three Homeric heroes, Achilles, Patroclus, and Odysseus, slap their thighs to express grief or tension (Iliad 15.397 = Odyssey 13.198: ; Il . 16.125: ); Metaneira too "strikes both her thighs" because she is beside herself with fear when she finds out that Demeter has been hiding her son in the fire (Hymn. Hom. Dem . 245f.: ).^[49] Invariably we are told how the impulsive behavior reflects the hero's or heroine's feelings. By contrast, the Meropis leaves us wondering why a goddess powerful enough to succeed where Heracles fails is so upset in the first place. Is Athena beating her thighs because she fears for Heracles' life? Or does she rather knock her breast the way Odysseus "knocked his breast" (Od . 2o.17: ) to reassure himself before he addressed his heart? The emotional intensity of Athena's

epiphany is evident, but its effect is seriously undermined by the inadequacy of the motivation.

Nor does the Meropis give an adequate idea of Heracles' condition. Heracles is unquestionably in dire straits. His state of mind at the moment Athena makes her epiphany is described in two words, , which recall Homeric formulas of the type (Il . 21.234, 23.230) and (Od . 12.400, 408, 426). Compared with Homer's word pairs, the collocation of and is highly incongruous. Powerful agents such as or are needed to generate the destructive fury conveyed by the verb . But the breath of Heracles does not have the same power as the wind or the waves. On the contrary, the standard epic use of suggests a seriously diminished strength; in Homer and are clear symptoms of physical exhaustion, injury, or imminent death.^[50] Is Heracles breathing hard only because he is fighting Asteros, or is he literally at his last gasp? A Heracles whose strength or resolve has been weakened would be consistent with his predicament, but the inherent force of seems to require the opposite scenario, namely that Heracles is going strong and panting with rage.^[51] Unlike Homer, Pindar, and Apollonius of Rhodes, the poet of the Meropis does not understand that the semantic fields of and are virtually incompatible. Once again he has created an ambiguity which undercuts the coherence of one of his central characters.

Both diction and narrative suggest that this poem that so intrigued Apollodorus is not in its various inadequacies Hellenistic but rather archaic. Even an extremely provincial poet writing in the late fourth or early third century would have been more conscious of Homeric diction, and more consciously derivative, than the poet who composed the Meropis .^[52] On the other hand, the structure of a Hellenistic epic would differ profoundly from Homer in ways entirely foreign to this poem. This impression is confirmed if we briefly compare Heracles' crisis in the Meropis with another crisis, one that marks the turning point in the voyage

[52] Lloyd-Jones, "The Meropis ," 1`49 = 28.

home of the Argonauts as Apollonius of Rhodes depicts it. Some of the differences have to do with the vastly different abilities of the two poets; still, such a comparison will sharpen our eye for the distinctive qualities of a decidedly Alexandrian articulation of the heroic crisis by the foremost epic poet of the Hellenistic period.

The Jason of the Argonautica represents a new type of epic hero, defined more by his weaknesses than his strengths. Self-doubts, despondency, and a general incapacity to act decisively—his —are among his most conspicuous traits. When he rises to the occasion, he succeeds because others supply the qualities he lacks; when he fails, he does not succumb to the superior strength of an external enemy, like the Heracles of the Meropis , but is paralyzed by his inner complexities and eclipsed by the very forces that enable him to accomplish his task. Yet it is precisely from his numerous fallings that Apollonius' Jason derives his unique character and persuasive power as a literary figure.^[53]

Nowhere is Jason's lack of leadership more serious, and his paradoxical role as the reluctant catalyst of heroic endeavor more obvious, than when the Argo lies becalmed in the shoals of the Syrtis and the Argonauts find themselves stranded in the Libyan desertr—the longest and most desperate crisis in the entire epic (Argonautica 4.1223-1392). Once they recognize the desolation that surrounds them, Jason and his crew are overcome by anguish—(4.1245). Variations of the same formula mark the height of the heroic crisis and the imminence of divine intervention in the Iliad (Il . 1188: ) as well as in the Meropis (F 2.4f. Bernabé: ). In both episodes, Athena's epiphany follows within a few lines. In the Argonautica , however, the crisis as well as the of the heroes is prolonged, magnified, and internalized for more than sixty lines until it becomes a symbolic death (4.1245-1304). First, the Argonauts wander aimlessly along the beach like ghosts; then, at nightfall, they tearfully embrace one another, veil their heads, and lie down in the sand each in a separate place, ready to die; throughout the night Medea's Colchian maidservants perform the ritual lament, while Jason remains secluded and speechless. Only when the heroes have lost all hope does the long-delayed epiphany finally take place. But instead

[53] Recent attempts to define the paradox of Jason's heroism differ widely, but coincide in a reading that recognizes Jason's various "flaws" as the uniform source of his new heroic vitality; see G. Lawall, "Apollonius' Argonautica : Jason as Anti-Hero," YClS 19 (1966): 119- 169; C. R. Beye, Epic and Romance in the Argonautica of Apollonius (Carbondale, 1982), 77-99 (Jason as love hero); R. L. Hunter, "'Short on Heroics': Jason in the Argonautica," CQ 38 (1988): 436-453 (on Apollonius' recasting of less than heroic features of the Homeric hero and, more surprisingly, of ephebic initiation).

of Athena or Hera, the two Olympian protectresses of the Argonauts, a triad of local divinities, the Heroines of Libya , appear to Jason in his seclusion and predict a safe return to Greece.^[54]

Without exception, the epiphany scenes in the Argonautica drastically rewrite the scenario of divine self-revelation that has formed the conventional conclusion to a heroic crisis since Homer. In Apollonius, the major Olympian gods remain either silent or invisible. Apollo appears twice but does not speak; Athena's intervention at the Clashing Rocks is seen and described by the poet as narrator, but the heroes cannot see their goddess; and finally, on the return voyage, Hera leaps down from heaven only to emit one inarticulate shout that directs the Argonauts back onto the correct course.^[55] Unlike the Olympian gods, the enigmatic Libyan Maidens, who are described as by Apollonius (4.1322), do speak in an articulate voice that is also prophetic. But their revelation takes the form of a riddle, which the Argonauts must solve if they want to return home; by contrast, the instructions which the Homeric Achilles and the Heracles of the Meropis receive from Athena are self-explanatory and unambiguous.

Even at the very conclusion of the crisis, Apollonius introduces another un-Homeric complication by turning the heroic crisis into a battle of wits that reveals Peleus and not Jason as the hero of the moment. Once again Jason becomes here an ambivalent hero who combines heroic and unheroic qualities—on the one hand, his inability to solve the riddle briefly intensifies the crisis; on the other hand, he alone among the Argonauts is visited by the Libyan Maidens and receives their revelation.

The heroes of Apollonius, Jason in particular, live in a world different from that of Heracles and Athena in the Meropis . They face different problems, the gods reveal themselves differently, and the nature of the heroic crisis itself is different. I have tried to suggest some reasons why the differences are so great as to make it virtually certain that the Meropis , the poem that caught the attention of Apollodorus and divides modern critics, does not belong in a Hellenistic ambience. Apollonius' Jason

[54] The most interesting and detailed study of Jason's encounter with these goddesses is N. E. Andrews, "The Poetics of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes: A Process of Reorientation. The Libyan Maidens" (PhD diss. Harvard, 1989).

[55] Athena: Ap. Rhod. Argon . 2.537-538, 598-603; Apollo: 2.669-684, 4.1694-1718 (cf. Callimachus, Lloyd-Jones and Parsons, Suppl. Hell . 250-251 and F 18 Pfeiffer); Hera: 4.640-644. The unconventional absence of communication between Olympian gods and mortals in Apollonius has been noticed by L. Klein, "Die Göttertechnik in den Argonautika des Apollonios Rhodios," Philologus 86 (1931): 18-51, 215-257, esp. 236, 253; and more poignantly by H. Fraenkel, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Munich, 1968), 539 n. 172.

is a Hellenistic hero. He too will continue to raise controversy because as a literary figure he is himself the product of a controversial and crisis-prone period, but the controversy is of a very different nature.

Karl Reinhardt has shown that the concept of the hero in literature, which prominently includes the heroic crisis, is itself prone to crisis. In periods of profound cultural change, the heroic ideal is accepted reluctantly or not at all, and the literary hero changes his identity or is even in danger of losing it. Reinhardt referred to the deconstruction of the hero in the first half of the twentieth century poiguantly and paradoxically as "die Krise des Helden." In the conclusion of his essay, he hinted that the best solution to the crisis involving the hero might be to come to terms with the crisis in the hero himself.^[56] In the context of Greek poetry, Reinhardt associated the crisis of the hero particularly with the end of the fifth century and with Euripides; we can, it seems to me, profitably extend the concept of the hero's crisis not only to Apollonius of Rhodes but to other Hellenistic poets and genres as well^[57]

[56] K. Reinhardt, "Die Krise des Helden" in Tradition und Geist: Gesammelts Essays zur Dichtung , C. Becker, ed. (Göttingen, 1960), 420-427 (reprinted in Die Krise des Helden und andere Beiträge zur Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte [Munich, 1962], 107-114), at 427 = 114: "Das beste Mittel, um die Krise um den Helden zu überwinden, wäre, wie ich glaube, die Krise im Helden selber." In a subsequent essay, Reinhardt applied the concept of the heroic crisis in both its literary and its cultural sense to Euripides in "Die Sinneskrise bei Euripides," Tradition und Geist , 227-256.

[57] I am grateful to professor Anthony W. Bulloch, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, and Professor Richard Thomas for various improvements.