The Lives of the Greek Poets by Mary R. Lefkowitz;

Author:Mary R. Lefkowitz; [Lefkowitz;, Mary R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Second Edition
ISBN: 9781472503084
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2012-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Hellenistic Poets

Much of the Greek poetry composed after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. has a retrospective and reflective character. Even as they created something new, poets living in the diaspora of Greek culture found ways to acknowledge the great literary legacy they had inherited.1 Included in that legacy was the tradition of creating biography, which survived and flourished throughout the Greek-speaking world. Even though the second-century B.C. author Satyrus was a native of the Black Sea town of Callatis, he was conversant with the works of the great tragedians and the comedies of Aristophanes. He also knew how earlier biographers had constructed lives for these poets; the interlocutors in his Life of Euripides consciously make use of passages in Aristophanes’ and Euripides’ own dramas. Although modern scholars have often supposed, or at least hoped, that Hellenistic biographers had access to more-accurate information and were historically more sophisticated than fourth-century biographers, the surviving evidence suggests that, like the poets of their day, biographers preserved and respected the traditions of their craft. In this way some remarkable myths were invented that have influenced later literary criticism as pervasively as the fifth-century notion that Euripides was an atheist. The most influential of these stories is the so-called quarrel between the third-century poets Callimachus of Cyrene and Apollonius of Rhodes.

Virtually all modern assessments of Apollonius’ work discuss his alleged differences with Callimachus, although no surviving text by either poet refers directly to a quarrel between them. The idea that they might have clashed derives from later interpretation, most specifically from an attempt to identify the critics to whom Callimachus refers in the prologue to his Aetia.2 Callimachus begins that poem by talking about his adversaries: “Telchines chatter at my song, ignorant men, who are no friends of the Muses, because I did not complete one uninterrupted song … about kings … or heroes in thousands of lines but instead like a child roll out a tiny tale” (fr. 1.1–5 Pf). A little later he describes how Apollo advised him to keep his Muse thin, and to “walk on untrodden paths” (23–28). The scholia to the Aetia prologue (1 p. 3 Pf) identify the Telchines as seven specific poets, but Apollonius is not on that list, and there does not appear to be room for his name on the papyrus. But according to his Suda entry, Callimachus wrote “a poem distinguished for its obscurity and abuse against a certain Ibos who was an enemy of Callimachus—this was Apollonius who wrote the Voyage of the Argo (Argonautica)” (Kappa 227 = T1.13–15 Pf). No reason for the attack is given in the Suda, but an epigram attributed to “Apollonius the grammarian” says that “Callimachus is refuse; triviality, a wooden mind; the causer (aitios) is he who wrote the Causes (Aitia), Callimachus” (13 Powell = FGE 53–54 = T 25 Pf).3 Then there is also the famous comment, “Callimachus the grammarian said a big book is like a big evil” (fr. 465 Pf), which in fact does not refer specifically to the work of Apollonius or any other particular poet.

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