The First Poets Read online

  Born of Alexander’s devotion to every aspect of Greek culture, the greatest Alexandria—foundedin 331 BC—was no less Egyptian. Under the Ptolemies, it grew to more than half a million souls. In this world, literature became specifically writing. The classical Greek diaspora was one thing, ethnic and even tribal in character; the Hellenic dispensation was something else. Now Greek culture was available to non-Greeks (it had been spread, after all, by the greatest Macedonian of all time), to the previously despised barbaroi. What had been an instrument of national identity for Greeks from all over the Mediterranean world, a prophylactic against the barbarians, was now open to all.

  Those Greeks who lived for the culture felt defensive, separated, aloof. To retain possession, they needed to devise protective strategies. “I hate everything public” or “common,” says Callimachus,3 perhaps because the Alexandrian public expressed a value system at odds with the culture he had acquired through the Greek language and in his studies in Athens. Poetry had to move indoors, out of the literal sun: it lived in libraries. What had been language responding to nature, history, the social world began to become language responding to prior language. The epigram came into its elegant own, honed and admirable and polite. “Great art overshadowed and checked new growth, as it is wont to do.”4 Now no great art overshadowed.

  Thus the code and the traditions that had bound the scattered Greeks into a sense of nation became an acquirable culture. The classical period ended with a Geist of Greek culture haunting Greek cities around the Mediterranean and further afield, each with its Homer, Hesiod and heritage, part of a Greece of mind and spirit and sport; by the time that Rome, with its dogged respect for Greek culture and precedent, ruled the world, Greek was a language of stale learning, a class and cultural token. An oral tradition is conservative, a developing written tradition radical; but the Hellenising and Romanising of the Greek legacy meant that poetry, which had blazed in different ways, could now flicker here and there, formal and polite.

  There was leisure, in any case, for scholars to work on the ancient texts, to put them in order and edit them. After Niniveh, Ugarit and Jerusalem, in Athens, Ephesus, Pergamum, Antioch, Damascus and Rome there were great libraries, but none so great as the Alexandrian library. It began with a collection of some 200,000 scrolls. By the time Mark Antony was courting Cleopatra, there was something in excess of 700,000 works, and the greatest gift he made her was the contents of the Pergamum library, 200,000 scrolls to be added. It is also likely that elements in his army were responsible for the fires that destroyed a substantial portion of the collection, primarily in warehouses along the river, awaiting cataloguing, though the library in a diminished form survived for a further millennium. When the Arabs took Alexandria, the library’s days were already over.

  It is uncertain in what year the Alexandrina, or the Alexandrian Museum and Library, was founded. Many scholars attribute it to the reign of Ptolemy II (Philadelphus) (283–247 BC); a few name his predecessor Ptolemy I (Soter) (from 323 BC). There is a long-standing tradition that Demetrius Phalereus (c. 354–283, 2 BC) was the actual founder. Aristotle had created a large personal library in Athens, which, as Strabo says, could “teach the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library.” The dates are not wholly convincing, but Demetrius, Theophrastus’ pupil, may have known Aristotle, and in his exile from Athens, where he had been viceroy, he was a friend of the first Ptolemy. Perhaps he was a conduit and that great library grew out of Aristotle’s personal collection.

  The museum had a central hall where scholars congregated and feasted together. Around the hall ran a handsome arcade, with recesses and seats for study. Scroll rooms were beyond, and as the library expanded, an annex was built a few streets away. At least some of the scholars who came were given bursaries and looked after by the institution.

  For its first century and a half, we can construct a rough table of director-librarians, several of whom we have encountered as compilers and editors of the work of the Greek poets. Zenodotus of Ephesus, head of the library during part of Ptolemy II’s time, published Homeric and Hesiodic texts and glossaries. His successor may have been Callimachus, who we know worked at the library, though there is no textual confirmation that he was librarian-in-chief. The father of bibliography, he devised and executed a system of cataloguing, the celebrated Pinakes, “Tables of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning Together with a List of their Writings,” which, Casson tells us, filled “no less than 120 books, five times as many as Homer’s Iliad.”5 He divided the library’s holdings into eight categories, including drama and poetry. His listings gave author, a brief biographical note, titles of books, first line(s) on each scroll, and a line-count to indicate extent. The authenticity of texts had to be verified as well, a substantial editorial task, given the variety of scribal sources and the diversity of scrolls.

  Having assembled the works of a writer, established the texts, purged them of interpolations and tidied them up, scribes got to work on making new, authoritative editions and preparing separate treatises on them. The major authors were organised into lists according to type, class and genre, and the lists or canones became the tyrannical canonical texts of the legitimate and authorised. Thus a great literature was preserved and stabilised or, as one critic says, “petrified”; there were inevitable errors and omissions. Voltaire in Temple du goût (1732) invented “God’s Library,” a kind of hell for the Muses in which they must spend the rest of their days like Didymuses revising and condensing the recognised classics: there is no room on the shelves for anything new.6

  After Callimachus came his one-time pupil Eratosthenes of Cyrene, an intellectual pentathlete. He calculated with astonishing accuracy, some declare to within 200 miles, the circumference of the earth. He drew the first lines of latitude and longitude on the imagined globe. As well as being a mathematician and geographer, he wrote poems and treatises on literature, theatre, actors and costumes, travel, history and much else. He was followed by the legendary editor and scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium (195–180), who published an edition of Aristophanes the dramatist and drew up a list of the best Greek writers. The CanonAlexandrinus comprises work by about 180 poets, fifty philosophers, fifty historians, and thirty-five orators.

  Aristarchus of Samothrace came into his own in the middle of the second century BC, the last recorded director of the Alexandrina with standing as a major scholar. The greatest critic among the Alexandrian scholars, he was perhaps the best scholar in antiquity.7 He wrote commentaries on Homer and was alive to the topography and archaeology of the poems. He is remembered primarily from the Epitome of Didymus, another substantial grammarian and critic who flourished around 30 BC.

  The Alexandrina was an irresistible magnet to writers and scholars. Every significant intellectual was likely to have studied or taught there, or both: Euclid, Archimedes, Theocritus … Athens remained famous, but its cultural authority had removed to Egypt.

  When Hellenic poetry began to appear, no tradition was discarded but new impulses were at work. With Antimachus of Colophon and Philetas of Cos (teacher of Theocritus, of the librarian Zenodotus, and of Ptolemy II) things began to take a new direction. A grammarian and poet, Philetas composed poems of carnal love to his lady Battis (or Bittis) which appealed to Propertius, who preferred his poems to those of Callimachus, and to Ovid before him. He was so thin, it is said, that he had to ballast himself with leaden weights in his footwear so as not to be blown over by the wind. Callimachus called for a “lean” poetry; here was a perilously lean poet. He studied the dialect of Megara and worked on a vocabulary explaining the sense of hard and unusual words with such assiduity that he wore out his frail life prematurely. Time has winnowed away most of his work.

  Time has dealt less terminally, but still cruelly, with Antimachus. Some two hundred fragments and attestations to him survive, nothing very long or memorable. He may have been the opposite of Philetas, profligate and expansive. Quintilian in Principles of Oratory declared that we must prai
se his strength, his seriousness, and “a style remote from the commonplace.” Scholars agreed that “he lacks feeling, sweetness, structuring, artfulness, and so displays the difference between a second and a good second.”8 His name came to be synonymous with long-windedness. After his wife, Lydè, died, he wrote a famous elegy, retailing the tragedies of mythological and legendary figures and consoling himself with their larger miseries and discomforts. This exercise he pursued over leagues of language. His recent editors believe this was not a portmanteau poem able to accommodate a variety of tragical narratives but a continuous dirge.

  Proclus declared that when we find in a poet’s work ostentatious perfection of technique we can be sure that the verse will bristle with “calculated effect and bombast, deploying metaphorical language all over the place, like Antimachus.” This ostentatious technical accomplishment is one of the less fortunate elements in the new Hellenic tradition. Callimachus himself is not entirely innocent of it, though he despised its excess in others: over-ornamentation and metrical harshness were the chief transgressions that a poet could commit against the Muses. Still, Antimachus had his place in the transformation of elegy and of mythological poetry on an epic scale, especially his Thebaid. Little else survives of Alexandrian elegy. We have no shards of Alexandrian drama either, though the names of more than sixty dramatists survive.

  The work of three poets of the period does exist in substantial quantity. They come close upon one another’s heels and together they describe a diverse tradition. Callimachus of Cyrene, Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus of Syracuse could hardly be more different. The first, a charming enigma, is the most compelling for those readers who love Modernism. Ironically, several of his major works survived the Dark Ages substantially whole: it was only in the Middle Ages, around 1204, that they were damaged and erased.9

  A big book, Callimachus declared famously, is a big evil: méga biblíon, méga kakó méga kakón indeed n. For a long time critics took this to be the opening salvo in Callimachus’ putative battle with his onetime student Apollonius, whose life as a poet was given over to composing vast, mercilessly detailed poems, of which the Argonautica is the single more or less intact survivor. Big book, big evil. Or big mess? Whether or not Callimachus was the chief librarian, he was a librarian at the museum. One task that fell to librarians or their minions was re-shelving scrolls. This entailed, first, making sure that the scrolls were rewound: thoughtless scholars returned some halfway or completely un-rewound, or twisted on their reels.

  Papyrus rolls could be seriously long—five yards verged on the unmanageable; sixteen, twenty-one, twenty-four and others over thirty yards in length existed: méga kakón indeed. At the British Museum the Great Harris Papyrus, the longest known, runs to over forty yards. The scribe worked in horizontal columns against the width of the papyrus. The scholiasts speak of Thucydides and of Homer being written on one long roll, Thucydides in 378 columns, nearly 100 yards long. A role of over 110 yards, longer than a football pitch, was said to exist in Constantinople. A roll of 140 feet would accommodate the Iliad, a rather shorter one the Odyssey.10 Losing one’s place or wanting to refer back doesn’t bear thinking about. A modern poet-librarian, Philip Larkin, echoing Callimachus, declared, “Books are a load of crap,” and he didn’t even have the labour of re-winding them.

  Most Greek rolls did not exceed thirty-five feet, and when rolled tight their circumference was about 2.5 inches, their width about ten inches. They could easily be held in one hand, though they were often too large to fit even in a capacious pocket. The weight must have meant that it was easier to spread them out on a surface than hold them long on the knee or up before the eyes, though readers portrayed on Greek pottery or in statuary generally hold the scroll effortlessly before them.

  Callimachus came to the library by indirection. He was from Cyrene in what is today Libya. This independent Greek city had been conquered in 322 BC and added to the satrapy of Egypt under Ptolemy I. Three years before Callimachus was born, in 313 BC, it revolted against Egypt. By the time the poet was two years old, it had been forcibly re-annexed. Thereafter there were revolts, but these were settled by marriages rather than by protracted wars. There were thus close, well-established connections between Cyrene and Greece, but also newer links between Cyrene and Egypt, its big neighbour to the east.

  Most of what we know of Callimachus’ life is found in the Suda. “Callimachus, son of Battus and Mesatma, of Cyrene, grammarian, pupil of Her mocrates of Iasos, the grammarian,11 married the daughter of Euphrates of Syracuse.” This is the real Callimachus. Beware of imitations and relations. The Suda continues, “His sister’s son was Callimachus the Younger, who wrote an epic, On Islands.”12 Why would his nephew have become an epic poet if he was himself hostile to epic? Sure there was bad blood in that family.

  The Suda records that our Callimachus was prolific in every verse form and also in prose, author of “eight hundred books.” If he lived to be seventy, and started when he was twenty, this averages out at thirty books a year or just under three per month. It all depends on what is meant by a book and how much life he enjoyed outside the library.

  He spent his maturity, and received preferment, under Ptolemy Philadelphus. Before that, he taught grammar at Eleusis, a suburb of Alexandria, which suggests he had come from Cyrene to seek, rather than lose, his fortune. Not that his family was necessarily poor. He claimed that he was descended from the Battus who was Cyrene’s founder; his grandfather was an active military man; and the boy was sent to Athens to study, alongside Aratus, his near contemporary, under the tutelage of Praxiphanes of Mytilene, a peripatetic philosopher who wrote essays on history, poetry and much else. Callimachus may later have written directly against Praxiphanes, though none of that work survives, only an attestation that in it he praised Aratus as a learned man and a good poet. If he had trouble with his teacher, it was perhaps to be expected that Apollonius would have trouble with him.

  From Athens, he could not resist the pull of Alexandria and was willing to start as a meagre grammarian. He was introduced into the court of Ptolemy and enjoyed royal patronage until he died, between 240 and 235 BC.

  The Suda lists his works in detail. First come poems which do not survive. They may in fact have been assimilated into, or existed as subsections of, his major sequence, the Aetia (Aitia). They include “The Coming of Io,” “Semele,” “Glaucus” and so on. The missing plays follow—satiric, tragic, comic; the lyrics, “Ibis,” prose works including the Pinakes, and more general works: a “Table of Glosses and Compositions of Democritus,” “Foundations of Islands and Cities and Changes of Name,” “On Strange and Marvellous Things in the Peloponnese and Italy,” “On the Rivers of the World” and so on. The Suda fails to name what is of most urgent interest to us, the poems that in one form or another have passed through the sieve of time: Aetia, Hecale, “On Games,” “Galatea,” the Iambi, epigrams, hymns, the Locks of Berenice and much else. Most of them (apart from six hymns and sixty epigrams) exist in fragments only.

  Several times in the poems the poet-speaker or singer presents himself as embattled. Apollo has instructed him: keep your Muses lean and avoid the common way. He follows his divine master’s injunctions, preferring to un-scroll an intense, focussed little poem rather than roll out an endless carpet. Pound’s Propertius declares, “There is no high road to the Muses.”

  He chides Plato for praising Antimachus’ elegy Lydè, calling it “fat writing, unthrilling” in an epigram.13 Posidippus and Asclepiades had produced epigrams praising Lydè. They became the enemy. The scholia names others: two Dionysiuses, Asclepiades, Posidippus, Praxiphanes and a couple of syllables, the orator “yrippus,” who survives as a mere half-name, like a severed worm. Yet among all the enemies, Apollonius is not listed. All the same, an epigram doubtfully attributed to Apollonius calls Callimachus “rubbish, laughable, a head of wood,” adding that his first sin was composing the Aetia.14

  Mary Lefkowitz, shrewd and cautious, reminds us
that much ancient biography is fiction, the kind which senses a conflict may have existed and then seeks parties (even if the dates don’t work) and stages a battle. When a poet depicts a conflict and a triumph, it may be a device for asserting superiority or victory in a contest, intellectual or artistic, a kind of self-referential epinicean poem, but such victories can be figurative as well. There is a gap between factual and didactic biography, between literal and characteristic truth. In Callimachus’ “Hymn to Apollo,” Apollo answers Envy that a poet who is a river carries rubbish; the bee-poet brings purest water or nectar to Demeter (lines 105–113). Lefkowitz objects that the scholia seek to attach a human identity to the figure of Envy. Callimachus, in Apollo’s company, assumes the stance of a victor snapped at by losers. His burning argument seems to be that Homer is Homer, and that those who imitate Homer sell him short and at the same time drown in his waters, while a poet who flows like a pure spring (Homer being the source of all rivers and springs)15 is truer to the great original and to himself. The small hymn, Callimachus’ poem seems to say, gets closer to the source, the flow of Homeric Hymns (no one doubted that they were by Homer), than the Euphrates effluent of other (unnamed) poets.

  Apollonius was assumed to have come into conflict with Callimachus, but apart from the doubtful epigram only a biographical tradition sustains the story. Apollonius was a student, or mathetes, of Callimachus and the teacher may have been party to the rejection of the Argonautica when Apollonius tried to read or publish it in Alexandria, and therefore in part responsible for Apollonius’ subsequent self-imposed exile at Rhodes (if that is indeed what it was). In his later years he revised the poem, or started again from scratch, returned to Alexandria, and was welcomed. He was found worthy of inclusion in the museum and library, a reference not to the acceptance of the work but of the man as a chief librarian—that sort of inclusion—and (no end of restitution) he was finally buried beside Callimachus. How they are spending eternity together is not recorded.