Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE NEW DIRECTION IN POETRY
Then follow the poignant, wistful lines on the poet's old age. This 'testament'
Callimachus placed before the original proem to his Aetia (' Causes'), which he
had written as a young man: the Hesiodic dream of initiation by the Muses on
Helicon. Even in this personal retrospect, literary allusions abound, to Homer,
to Herodotus, to Mimnermus, so fearful of growing old, and to Euripides'
Mad Heracles, written when the tragedian was an old man, as Callimachus the
scholar would have known.
It is impossible to read much of Callimachus - his epigrams apart - without
being impressed, or depressed, by his multifarious learning; but it would be
perverse to wish that his poetry might be dissociated from his pedantry.
Callimachus was not a poet and a scholar; he was a poet, or rather could be a
poet, because he was a scholar, a ypocuuornKos, a man whose business was with
literature. The earlier literature of Greece being now collected in the great library
at Alexandria, men discovered the exquisite pleasure of writing books from
books. Now a scholar-poet could scan and compare texts, delicately modify an
admired metaphor or simile; follow an obscure variant of a myth or legend
while deftly signalling an awareness of the usual version; join an old word with
a new in a telling arrangement; choose a unique or rare word or form out of
Homer or some other poet and locate it, perhaps with polemical intent, in a
context of his own making. As, for instance, Callimachus does at the beginning
of the story of Acontius and Cydippe:
AUT6S "Epcos ISiScc^Ev "AK6VTIOV, 6-rrnine KccXrj
TJ66TO Ku6i-inTT| irons girl TrapOsvucrj,
— ou y&p 6y' ICTKE iroAuKpoToj — (Aetia 67.1—3)
Eros himself taught Acontius, when the youth was burning for the fair maid Cydippe,
the craft —for he was not clever — ...
In line 3 there is an allusion to the opening of the Odyssey: "AvSpoc uoi
Mouoa, iroACrrpo-Trov. . . 'Speak to me, Muse, of the man. . .'; -rroAuKpoTOV is
a rare variant. Earlier Greek poets supposed a sizeable group of auditors;
Callimachus and his like only a few readers, learned or almost as learned as
themselves.
That these umbratile poets were drawn to the composition of didactic poetry
is not surprising; for in such poetry they could everywhere display their
erudition and artfulness, and please diemselves with a performance diat owed
little or nothing to the subject. Hence their choice of inert or seemingly intractable
subjects. They wished to shine, not to persuade: in Nicander's Theriaca
there breathes no Lucretian fire. The exemplar of such poetry appears to
have been Aratus' Phaenomena. In one of his epigrams (27) Callimachus
hails the subtle, Hesiodic quality of Aratus' verse; so might he have hailed
his own Aetia.
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