Callimachus and his critics

TLDR

Callimachus is traditionally portrayed as an ivory‑tower poet, yet evidence points to a public, festival‑centric literary culture where elegy dominated and epic was not the main focus. Cameron argues that the supposed epic school of Hellenistic war poets, central to modern scholarship, did not exist. The study illuminates the biographies and interrelations of contemporary poets and suggests that this revised understanding reshapes interpretations of Roman, especially Augustan, poetry.

Abstract

Callimachus has usually been seen as the archetypal ivory-tower poet, the epitome if not the inventor of the concept of art for art's sake, author of erudite works written to be read in book form by fellow poets and scholars. However, there is much evidence to suggest a different story: a world of civic festivals rather than books and libraries, a world in which poetry and poets played a central and public role. In the course of the argument, Cameron casts fresh light on the lives, dates, works and inter-relationships of most of the other leading poets of the age. Another axiom of modern scholarship is that the object of Callimachus's literary polemic was epic. Yet Cameron aims to show that the thriving school of epic poets celebrating the wars of Hellenistic kings that has so dominated modern study never existed. Elegy was the fashionable genre of the age and the bone of contention between Callimachus and his rivals (all fellow elegists) was the nature of elegaic narrative. A final chapter sketches some of the implications of this revised view of Callimachus and his world for the interpretation of Roman, especially Augustan, poetry.