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.