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This article traces the relics of Callimachean criticism in the testimonia to the work of Anaximenes of Lampsacus and Choerilus of Iasos, portrayed either as poet-sycophants or authors of bad quality poetry. It assesses the profile of Anaximenes as an epic writer and investigates the origin and dynamics of the confusion between Choerilus of Iasos and Choerilus of Samos in late Hellenistic and Imperial witnesses. It concludes that the negative judgment on Choerilus of Samos formulated by Istrus, a disciple of Callimachus, may have been wrongly transferred to Choerilus of Iasos and that it influenced later critics and writers’ perception of the latter.

This article focuses on the implications inherent to the use of the word χέλυς (‘lyre’) at line 16 of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo with regard to both the Hymn to Apollo itself and the rest of Callimachus’ Hymns. Since the most famous source, and the one in which the χέλυς plays a prominent role, is the Homeric hymn to Hermes, it makes sense to surmise that this is the text Callimachus chose as his model. In this poem, not only does Hermes invent the lyre, but he also teaches his brother Apollo how to play it. The idea of music and poetry sponsored by Hermes centers upon grace and pleasantness. This idea seems to espoused also by Callimachus, whose account of Apollo’s achievements is markedly different from that we read in the Homeric hymn to Apollo. Since the same grace and pleasantness characterize the account of other deities’ deeds throughout the Hymns, we may say that Callimachus made Hermes’ idea of poetry his own.

In his poetic work, Callimachus pushes the art of allusion to heights of refinement: the choice of an adjective in the Hecalea alone offers a fine illustration.

We try to show from a few examples of the fragmentary collection of the Aitia that Callimachus is also sensitive to sound effects (alliterations, assonances, anagrams, sound chiasms) in the composition of his poetry and that this inclination is linked to the power of names which is the base of his poetic writing.

Lyric after Pindar should be seen not as declining and petering out, but as developing in ways which radically question or play with the fundamentals of the genre (or “super-genre”). The stanza is a crucial feature of lyric up to Pindar, especially when seen textually; “modernist” expansion into huge astrophic entities (Timotheus, etc.) and “postmodern” reduction into stichic lines (Callimachus, etc.) both involve radical rethinking of the super-genre, and one is a reaction to the other. However, the most innovative postmodernists are the poets somewhat earlier than Callimachus and Theocritus (Simmias, Philicus, etc.); Callimachus and Theocritus continue their ideas with new twists and new point. And the stanza is not really dead: within Timotheus’ and Callimachus’ poems stanza-like structures are built up. The late-classical and Hellenistic development of lyric is as dynamic and thought-provoking as that of sculpture.

This paper explores the motif of novelty in Philip’s Garland and various aspects of its literary innovation vis-à-vis Meleager’s Stephanos through a close reading of Philip’s introductory poem (AP 4.2) and a series of epigrams starting with omega which are shown to have a programmatic function in marking the collection’s end.

Studies of epyllion have largely been limited to texts in dactylic hexameter. Certain elegiac poems, however, are similar to these epyllia in style and theme. Using Callimachus’ Victoria Berenices as a case study, this paper argues that these elegiac poems have a place in the conclusions and investigations of epyllion. After situating the Victoria Berenices relative to previous epinician poetry, the poem is explored in terms of its relationship to archaic elegiac predecessors that also bear resemblances to modern conceptions of epyllion. The discussion of these elegiac epyllia is then read in the context of several ancient literary critics.

Catullus’ poem 64 is a highly complex text, the interpretation of which has long divided scholarship. In the present paper I look at possible political resonances of the epyllion in its historical context. First, I propose an intertextual reading of two passages from Catullus 64 (the catalogues of mortal and divine guests that attend the wedding at Pharsalus) in the light of Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos. I argue that Catullus uses the Thessalian section of the hymn with the struggle between the river Peneios and the war-god Ares not only as a source for learned mythological and geographical details, but also as a substantial subtext for his dark vision of Thessaly as a landscape foreboding war and civil war. In a second reading, I then look back at Catullus 64 from the perspective of two later Roman poets, Virgil and Lucan, who historicize Catullus’ mythical Thessaly even more specifically in the light of the civil wars. As examples I take the epilogue to the first book of the Georgics and especially Lucan’s Thessalian excursus in the sixth book of his Bellum civile, where he reworks Catullus as well as Callimachus in order to characterize his Thessaly as a literary landscape predestined for the horrors of the civil war battle at Pharsalus.

Third-century BCE epic poetry can not be understood without taking into account that, especially with the so-called epyllion, it represents an attempt at renovating, in terms of forms and contents, a genre that more than any other is weighed down by a fixed and repetitive diction and made harsher by a circular narrative fashion, i.e. by features that originally were due to a different facies of Greek culture, that is orality. Attempts at renovating epic tradition begin already in the fourth century with Choerilus of Samos and Antimachus of Colophon. Sometimes Callimachus and Theocritus exhibit features similar to those already experimented by Antimachus; however, their use of the Homeric langue has a very different functionality. The process brings forth a lowering of the level of ‘high’ genres, where the language of poetry draws its vocabulary from prose or dialects, even if with an epic nuance, and an elevating of the so-called ‘low’ genres within the frame of the literary hierarchy, by now already standardised by the teachings of Aristotle. A general trait, covering the entire Hellenistic poetry, from Callimachus to Apollonius, concerns on the other hand both the presence of tragic σχήματα reproduced in diegetic function (the deus ex machina, the figure of the messenger, mythological narratives of digressive nature that are typical of choral sections) and the use of topic Homeric scenes, employed as typological structure refashioned and varied in view of several narrative functions. The authors of the shor poems preserved in the Corpus bucolicorum have assimilated well mechanisms and devices of narrative renovation, that represent the most relevant literary experience on the part of the major Hellenistic authors, and they reproduce them with a sophisticated rhetorical skill, sometimes exhibiting a good knowledge of archaic and classical literature. However, they appear rather cold with respect to the drive to find a new langue, one that may be evocative, estranging and imaginative, and apt to renovate poetry radically, which had been a fundamental need on the part of Callimachus and, in a different way, an engagement which Apollonius did not neglect; or rather they underestimate its relevance. Instead, they reproduce only the most superficial features of the ‘new style’ poetry, basically easier to imitate and vary.

The paper suggests that the dorism τεθμός, found in some epigraphical oracles from the sanctuary of Klaros, represents a relevant proof of the relationships between Callimachus’ oeuvre and the oracular poetry from Klaros. This conclusion is based on the scrutiny of the literary and epigraphical occurrences of τεθμός/θεσμός from the classical era up to the imperial age, with particular emphasis on the semantic evolution of the word up to the Hellenistic age. The systematic employ of this gloss cannot but derive from the importance attached to it by Callimachus in his works.

In this paper we consider first the possible points of tangent between Callimachus’ Hecale and the “res Atticae” of Euphorion (in his poems the Arai and the Mopsopia), as far as the poet of Chalcis reappropriates an interest for the Attica of Callimachus in his fragmentary poem Hecale. But we try to show also how Euphorion’ links with Callimachus ultimately prove to be quite thin in the writing of his poems, with words like κελέβη, among others, that are quoted by Callimachus in his epyllion.

This paper explores the use of archaic iambus in Callimachus’ own Iambi.Qua iambographer the Hellenistic poet places himself outside the realm of high poetry where he usually belongs and his new, “mild” iambus engages itself in a confrontation with Callimachus’ opponents that is both personal and literary.

The Delos Hymn of Callimachus presents one of antiquity’s most astonishing descriptions of personified landscape. This article addresses two aspects of Callimachus’ almost surrealistic representation. First, I look in some detail at conventions and concepts from earlier poetry that Callimachus uses and abuses to create his peculiar picture of a moving, animated landscape. I focus in particular on personifications of geographical items and on metaphorical or metonymical expressions as they are found in archaic poetry. Secondly, I ask whether we can reconstruct the effect that overturning such conventions may have had on Callimachus’ ancient readers. This entails that I will look at theories concerning visualization (enargeia) and plausibility (pithanotès) from ancient literary and rhetorical treatises known to or originating in the learned environment of Callimachus, the Alexandrian Museum of the third century BC. To get a clear focus on the problems the Delos Hymn presents, I also survey some modern critical appraisals of the poem.

Several fragmentary elegies of Callimachus’ Aitia were meant to explain the origins of a given cult or of a strange iconography whose meaning had been obscured by the passing of time. The Aitia are thus a very important source on archaic sculpture and on its reception in Hellenistic times. This paper attempts to explain how Callimachus selected the statues that he describes : his ecphraseis were apparently meant to illustrate his political and aesthetic views. For instance, he proposes an allegorical reading of the Delian Apollo by Tectaios and Angelion and of one of the cult statues of the Samian Hera ; the details that Callimachus highlights in both descriptions encourage the reader to compare these archaic representations of the gods with the new king and the new queen of Alexandria. The poet thus leads his readers to believe that the political and cultural innovations of the Ptolemaic dynasty were in fact based on well-known models provided by Greek cultural and religious artifacts of the Archaic period. In order to fulfill this tour de force, Callimachus applies to the reading of statues and of visual artifacts a set of techniques that he perhaps borrowed from the allegorical readings of the Homeric poems.

This article suggests that in the book of Iambs Callimachus has taken on Hipponax’ mask as prototype of a teacher of aesthetics, engaged in a polemic against new artistic trends and aesthetic tastes. In order to prove such an hypothesis, I try to compare it to the literary and archeological fortune of Bupalos, opponent to Hipponax (though perhaps fictional, but not only).