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.