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“Eutrapelia: Humorous texts in Hellenistic poetry” provides a study of the literary humor in Hellenistic iambic poetry in the context of rapid political and cultural change in the Ancient Mediterranean of the third century BCE. This project clarifies several questions connected to the nature of humor in Hellenistic iambic poetry: how does humor function in the poetry and performance of the early Hellenistic era? In which contexts does it appear? Does it reflect the multicultural environment of Ptolemaic Egypt? How is humor connected to the recontextualization of generic conventions, both literary and performative? Does humor become an expression of transgression: political, religious, or social?To address these questions, I conduct several case studies focusing on fragments of poems by Greek writers of the third century BCE (Callimachus, Cercidas, Machon, and Herodas) that refer to the tradition of Greek iambic poetry, a poetic invective genre closely connected to comedy and ritual obscenity. In Chapter 1, I focus on the humorous representation of philosophers in Callimachus’s Iambus 1 and argue that these representations play an important role in Callimachus’s dialogue with Plato and contemporary philosophy, and, at the same time, reflect Callimachus’s ideas about the role of intellectual working in Alexandria under the royal patronage. In Chapter 2, I analyze fragments of Cercidas of Megalopolis, politician and Cynic philosopher, and argue that Cercidas employs elements of Cynic teaching to problematize the political and social issues of his community. In Chapter 3, I conduct a study of several anecdotes attributed to the comic writer Machon and argue that the targets of these anecdotes mirror Machon’s own professional fate. In Chapter 4, I analyze sexually oriented humor in Herodas’s Mimiamb 6 and argue that in this poem, Herodas promotes an idea of the female origin of iambic poetry. For each of these case studies, I address linguistic features of humor by applying methods of semantic and pragmatic analysis proposed by modern theories of humor. To analyze ethical and aesthetical values of Hellenistic humor, I draw on humor theories developed in Ancient Greek philosophy and rhetoric.“Eutrapelia: Humorous texts in Hellenistic poetry” fills a gap in the studies of Ancient Greek literary humor and challenges the prevailing image of Hellenistic poetry as produced for and consumed only by the intellectual elite of Alexandria. In this project, I offer new approaches to studies of literary humor in Greek poetry by addressing humorous texts as responding to trends in contemporary popular politics, philosophy, and culture. This project demonstrates that literary humor is major evidence that allows an examination of how poetic texts relate to a broader cultural context and what kind of audiences these texts would have reached.

I explore how Callimachus constructed knowledge as a subject-matter of poetry.Hellenistic scholars disputed about the nature of those activities aiming to acquire information about reality. I show how Callimachus' poetry, with its pervasive learnedness, focuses on processes through which knowledge is acquired, rather than displaying established facts. He invites us to compare our cognitive experience with that of his poetic personae.The introductory chapter provides a methodological framework. I mention extant lexical analyses of the topic of knowledge in Greek literature. I then include passages that describe actions whose purpose is the inquiry for knowledge: sensory perception; perusal of sources; active questioning; rational thinking.Chapter two shows that Callimachus' Hymns instill doubts about chances of apprehending divinities, while previous hymns took for granted traditional knowledge about them. The first three Hymns show that knowledge of the gods is limited to human-made objects and discourses. The last two poems show attempts at gaining apprehension of the gods by means of visuality; however, this knowledge is denied. A possibility to meet divinities is the encounter with the Ptolemaic royal couple, who were fostering a cult of themselves as divine figures.Chapter three follows the division into epideictic, dedicatory, sepulchral and amatory epigrams. Callimachus' epigrams show concern with knowledge in portraying dialogues, which aim at attaining knowledge. I first deal with poems that connect knowledge of poetic tenets with knowledge of a proper way of life, then with dedicatory epigrams that feature speaking objects. In sepulchral epigrams, poetic voices dialogue with the deceased in order to ascertain what will happen in afterlife. As in the Hymns, human knowledge is limited: one cannot know while living. Speakers in amatory epigrams, instead, proclaim first-hand experience of love. They talk about love not just as a feeling, but emphasize their knowledge thereof.Chapter four deals with the elegiac collection Aetia, where a protagonist evolves from a pupil who interrogates the Muses to a literate in a laboratory whose knowledge is independent. Knowledge is the theme of poetry and a principle of world organization. The Prologue separates those who know poetry from those who do not. In the elegy Acontius and Cydippe, the narrator asks whoever has been in love to confirm his judgment about the first night of the protagonists. Being in love equals to possessing knowledge, as in the epigrams. Knowledge is for those who already share it, and poetry strengthens a public self-awareness.In the concluding chapter, I summarize Callimachus' relationship with philosophical debates. He does not declare allegiances, but some sympathy for Academic Skepticism emerges. I analyze how Callimachus' explanations of present events with the past (so-called "aetiology") are different from historiography and other poets. Finally, evidence from modern philosophy and literary criticism demonstrates that authorial explorations of the nature of knowledge are efficacious poetic objects. While science observes reality abstracting from subjects, poetry describes the relationship individuals establish with objects. Correspondingly, Callimachus' poetry does not focus on objects but on the relationship poetic personae entertain with them.

I begin this thesis by overviewing the papyri and testimonia for Callimachus’ dream in Aetia. Callimachus relates that in this dream, he was transported to Mount Helicon and encountered the Muses, who granted him a poetic initiation in the manner of Hesiod’s Theogony. The first chapter looks back to the potential sources from which Callimachus drew for his dream, finding that lyric and philosophical sources provide the closest parallels. My research also indicates that there is no unambiguous source preceding Callimachus in which a poet describes, in their own poem, their poetic initiation as having occurred in a dream. The reason for this innovation is found in Callimachus’ desire to be a new Hesiod: the dream allows him access to the Muses on Helicon while grounded in his Alexandrian context. Moreover, the dream allows him to be both a young and old man in his poem, both the old man of in Telchinas and the youth “with his beard just sprouting” in his somnium. In this way he is able to navigate the competing pressures of poetic senescence and juvenescence found in the ancient traditions surrounding Hesiod. The second chapter raises some problems that remain unanswered. Hesiod does not portray his poetic initiation as having occurred in a dream, and it does not appear that Callimachus must utilize an oneiric Dichterweihe since he does not use a dream for his poetic instruction by Apollo in fr. 1. I therefore suggest that Callimachus’ desire to be a Novus Hesiodus does not in itself fully explain his choice of a dream to portray his poetic initiation. To find further insights, I contextualize Aetia within contemporary Alexandrian discourse on dreams. The Ptolemies, including Ptolemy II who reigned for most of Callimachus’ career, spent many resources on temples associated with incubation, and Demotic texts indicate that the Ptolemies asserted access to the gods through dreams. I suggest that Posidippus 36, in which Arsinoe II appears as Isis-Aphrodite to a devotee in a dream, is a parallel to Arsinoe’s appearance as a tenth Muse in Callimachus’ dream. Another motivation for Callimachus’ somnium, therefore, is to pay homage to his Ptolemaic patrons by deifying the queen and including her among those providing him the inspiration for the poem.In my concluding section, I bridge the gap between Callimachus’ desire to be a new Hesiod on one hand, and his motivation to advance Ptolemaic propaganda on the other. I return to the urtext, Hesiod’s Theogony, and outline how the relationships between poets, lords, and gods in Hesiod are closely paralleled and adapted in Callimachus’ poem. Callimachus praises his rulers as part of an exchange in the patron-client relationship, but I emphasize that he does so also because Hesiod himself praises his rulers. Moreover, while his dream deified Arsinoe, Callimachus also positions himself as the semi-divine Hesiodus Redivivus, hearkening back to Hesiod’s aude thespis. His Ptolemaic ideology is not merely Ptolemaic: ultimately, he manipulates the propaganda to bolster his own poetic persona.

The rejuvenation of once-adult figures in Hellenistic poetry is unique. This transformation is especially apparent in Callimachus, where it functions both as a metapoetic and a political strategy. In rejuvenating gods and other figures of the tradition, Callimachus is able to rewrite or reinvent the tradition, all while working in the court of the first three Ptolemies, who themselves were in the process of legitimizing their new, Greek reign in Egypt. Thus, Callimachus’ first four hymns, which include explicit and implicit references to the Ptolemies and various political events, focus on the birth and successful coming-of-age of the gods, while the final two hymns contain opposing, complementary inset narratives of mythic youths. In the fifth hymn, Bath of Pallas, Teiresias, the old seer of tragedy becomes a youth and in the sixth hymn, the Hymn to Demeter, Erysichthon, a father both before (in Hesiod) and after (in Ovid) Callimachus, is now a childless young man. This dissertation focuses primarily on the sixth hymn. Whereas the first five hymns include successful birth and maturation tales, the six hymn is distinct for narrating just the opposite. Within a frame celebrating a ritual of Demeter is the tale of Erysichthon, who, together with his man-giants, barges into the goddess’ sacred grove and attempts to chop down a tree. Disguised as the priestess Nicippe, Demeter is unsuccessful in changing Erysichthon’s evil behavior, and so, punishes the youth with insatiable hunger and thirst. From his entrance to the end of the narrative, Erysichthon regresses from man (φῶτα, 45) to child (παῖς, 56), and finally, to infant (βρέφος, 100). In this final stage, distraught at the financial consequences of his son’s ravening hunger, Erysichthon’s father wishes that Apollo had stricken down his βρέφος (96-110). Rather than pimping out his daughter for food (as in Hesiod and Ovid), Erysichthon lands at the crossroads, where he begs for filthy cast-offs from the feast (115). Although this dissertation will likely be restructured in future iterations, at present, it largely follows the progression of the narrative as Callimachus himself unfolds it (rather than e.g. by genre). I take mainly a socio-cultural approach to Erysichthon’s regression and examine each step through the lens of rites of passage. I begin with hunting, with which Callimachus is most clearly concerned in the Hymn to Artemis and especially the partner hymn of the Hymn to Demeter, Bath of Pallas, where the motif is a well-researched, clear example of a successful transition into adulthood through the marginal ground of the hunt. This is the foundation for my discussion of the negative inversion of this trajectory in the Hymn to Demeter, where I examine Erysichthon as failed “hunter” by exploring Callimachus’ allusions and manipulation of the literary tradition in two key passages: Erysichthon’s boar hunt and the lioness simile. The transition of Erysichthon from human to animal and the related, simultaneous regression from youth to infant occurs during the hunt, and it is from this perspective that I analyze Erysichthon’s destructive appetite. I argue that through his all-consuming hunger and thirst, Erysichthon slips into childhood or infancy, which the Greeks viewed negatively and regularly aligned with animals. The last chapter thus focuses on Erysichthon’s final metaphorical transition into brephos, a weighty term—for which, see the appendix, where I lay out the use and significance of all pre-Callimachean attestations—applied to both animals and newborns and most frequently, the child exposed at birth. In this final chapter (VII), I consider the implications of exposure and the related motif of abortion, and in doing so, suggest a new reading for the end of Callimachus’ Erysichthon narrative and the hymns as a collection.

This dissertation investigates the role of theological discourse in the making of the mortal divine in early Ptolemaic Alexandria by exploring the ways in which literary transcripts—particularly the text of Callimachus—complicate our understanding of the development of early Hellenistic ruler cult. This study makes two major contributions. First, I argue that we can recover part of this conversation about, and contestation over, the nature of the transition from mortal to divine by looking to high intellectual culture in Alexandria. Focusing on Callimachus as emblematic of that culture, I show how his text becomes a site of discursive convergence related to the mortal divine, and how we can excavate it to uncover different voices in contestation and engaged in various discursive modes, including Athenian critique, competitive wisdom or the agonistics of sophia, and the rhetoric of belief. Ultimately, it is argued that the sources discussed in this study represent the mortal divine as inhabiting an ontologically and culturally fraught space between gods and men. Second, in considering the interface between literary agendas and political and religious agendas, I offer a different way of thinking about the high degree of allusivity in this paradigmatic Hellenistic poet. Instead of treating Callimachus’ allusive techniques as merely a demonstration of learnedness and pure literary play, I analyze this high allusivity as embedded in a larger world of contemporary talk and discuss how it opens up a space for theological discourse to happen. In doing so, I draw loosely on the work of James C. Scott on “public” vs. “hidden transcripts” and Julia Kristeva on intertextuality.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how the travels of mind and the continuing change of places throughout the Greek world - from the North to the South and from the East to the West - in a selected corpus of poems in Callimachus’ Aitia, the Hymns and the epigrams create the picture of a poetry which mirrored the concerns and interests of the Ptolemaic dynasty in the first half of the 3nd century BC. More specifically, the examination of the geographical references in the poems which have been selected and analyzed in the present paper, indicates that Callimachus’ poetry promoted in a discreet way the political aspirations of the Ptolemies on three different levels. In the first chapter of this paper, a number of poems have been presented in which the relocation of gods, people or objects from the northern parts of the Greek world to the South likely signifies the transition of power from the old Greek world to Ptolemaic Egypt. In this context, it has also been examined how Callimachus constructed in his poetry the topography of Cyrene and Alexandria, the political and cultural center of the new powerful Hellenistic kingdom in the Southern Mediterranean. In the subsequent chapter, the focus shifts to poems where the imaginary, continuous transportation of the reader to places which were part of the Greek cultural memory assisted the Ptolemies to cultivate the idea of Panhellenism among the imported Greek community in Egypt in order to unite them under a shared identity. In this way, Callimachus’ poetry supported the Ptolemies’ goal to present themselves as legitimate rulers of all the Greeks in Egypt as well as to help the Greek community feel less alienated in this foreign environment they were brought to inhabit. In this context, it has also been investigated how the Callimachean poetry - which was intended for the Greek people who were in the process of coming to an accommodation with the traditions and the culture of the native Egyptian population - functioned as a tool for the Ptolemaic kings to bridge these two cultures. The last chapter focuses on a small group of poems which included places outside Egypt which were at the center of the Ptolemies’ intentions, thus presenting the political aspirations of the Ptolemaic kings outside their territory.

This dissertation locates three moments in the history of the ancient reception of the Greek astronomical poem, the Phaenomena, written by Aratus of Soloe in the third century BC. I argue that Aratus achieves his appeal and authority by reinforcing the precision of his scientific material with the stylistic precision of his poetry. Several intellectual communities engage at length with his poem, which enjoyed a wide, learned readership on account of its polyvalent appeal to scientific, literary, and philosophical communities. In the first chapter I introduce the dissertation by demonstrating that Aratus' fusion of prosaic science and archaic poetry is marked in the poem itself, and that Aratus invites his readers to meditate on the merit of poetics in scientific discourse. In the second chapter I argue that the Phaenomena's reputation for poetic precision and vividness among his third century audience lends him authority as a technical, scientific writer. In the third chapter I argue that the second century BC astronomer and commentator Hipparchus of Nicaea responds to a tradition of scientific commentary that assents to Aratus as an authoritative source. Hipparchus criticizes the readership of Aratus by seeking precise means to read, interpret, and then check the astronomical claims of the Phaenomena. In the fourth chapter I argue that the Latin translations of Cicero and Germanicus Caesar from the first centuries BC and AD continue the Hellenistic Greek reception of the Phaenomena. Cicero promotes the vividness of Aratus' poetic style, while Germanicus accommodates the scientific corrections of Hipparchus all while insisting on the Phaenomena's poetic form. The dissertation concludes that Aratus' reputation for vividness and precision as a poet secured him a prominent place in astronomical literature for centuries to come.

This dissertation is an examination of the Gigantomachy as a metaliterary marker, a way of discussing poetic style and a poet's place in literary history. The term Gigantomachy is used here to stand for a complex of myths in which a giant figure battles the Olympians; it therefore includes not only the battle of the gods and Giants, but also that of the gods and Titans, Typhon, and Otos and Ephialtes. Long understood as a political metaphor expressing the triumph of order over chaos, I contend that the Gigantomachy also stands for the epic tradition and writing in the grand style (genus grande). The enormity of the subject matter lends itself to a heavy, even bombastic style of writing; as a result, Gigantomachy is a frequent subject of epic parody. I put forth a new understanding of how parody functions, arguing that it operates not as a means of ridiculing a particular author or genre, but rather as a tool for manipulating a predecessor text from within. Through parody, a poet is able to gain mastery over his literary pedigree and change the reception of his own text as a late or dependent work. This dialogue with epic is closely tied to Callimacheanism, the preference for writing small scale, carefully crafted, highly learned poetry rather than lengthy epic. Through analysis of allusions to Gigantomachy, I demonstrate how the tropes and techniques of Callimacheanism begin long before Callimachus, with Hesiod, and continue to shift and change through the poetry of Pindar, Callimachus himself, Propertius, and Ovid.

This dissertation was submitted for the Ph.D. in the Department of Classical Studies of the University of Michigan. It is the first major study to describe the relationship between Callimachus and Pindar, although the importance of this topic has long been recognized. This dissertation considers Pindaric allusions in the context of an overall reading of the hymns to Apollo and Artemis; it examines the influence of myth, narrative structure, verbal reminiscences, and literary-critical terminology in the development of Callimachus' own poetic voice. Special attention is paid to structural features common to the two poets. The work also discusses the relationship between the two poets in connection with broader issues of Callimachean scholarship, including the ideology of kingship, the role of epic, and the response of Callimachus to different versions of the same myth in Pindar and other authors, especially Homer, the Homeric Hymns, and Hesiod. It is of interest to persons studying archaic Greek lyric, papyrology, and Hellenistic literature, and utilizes both philological methods and modern critical theory. The introduction addresses the meaning of literary allusion for both Pindar and Callimachus and gives examples from the Victoria Berenices as an explication of methodology. Chapter Two discusses the development of the Cyrene myth in Callimachus' Hymn to Apollo in relation to Pindar's Pythians IV, V, and IX. Chapter Three deals with the influence of the structure of Pindar's epinician odes on the Hymn to Apollo, with special emphasis on each poet's use of temporal and logical relationships in the narration of myth. Chapter Four examines the concepts of $\Phi\Theta$o$\nu$o$\zeta$, water, and honey as literary-critical concepts within the context of their structural positions in works of both authors. The fifth chapter applies the results of the preceding chapters to Callimachus' Hymn to Artemis. There is a short conclusion.