Brill’s Companion to

Callimachus. Brill’s
companions in classical
studies
Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Luigi Lehnus, Susan
Stephens, Brill's Companion to Callimachus. Brill's
companions in classical studies. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011.
xviii, 708. ISBN 9789004156739. $261.00.
Review by
James J. Clauss, University of Washington. [email protected]

[The Table of Contents is listed at the end of the review.]

Non possum reticere. Thus began Catullus’ poem of uninhibited praise

and gratitude for a most appreciated benefaction (68b). Though un-
Callimachean, I will aspire to such enthusiasm (sans verbosity given
the imposed word limit) in lauding the recent collection of essays
invited, organized, and edited by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Luigi
Lehnus and Susan Stephens. Despite the fact that that the number of
my decades is not few, I shall nonetheless take the time to stray from
the common path and mix personal and scholarly, as the Battiad
himself might approve.

In the fall of 1976 when I entered the graduate program at the

University of California at Berkeley, Callimachus for most was little
more than a passing esoteric reference in commentaries, especially on
late Republican and Augustan poets. As luck would have it, Anthony
Bulloch showed up at the same time and inaugurated his professorial
career at Berkeley with an exciting graduate seminar on this learned
footnote, a class even attended by other Berkeley professors to the fear
and trembling of the students. Our textbooks included the two Loebs
of Callimachus1 and Rudolph Pfeiffer’s History of Classical
Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic
age.2 Pfeiffer’s two-volume commentary on Callimachus was
available for consultation,3 but this intense and epoch-making work, as
well as Bulloch’s fascinating report on a critical forthcoming
publication regarding the Victoria Berenices, were difficult to
comprehend for those of us puzzling over these lacunose and rarefied
texts for the first time.4 There were few publications, and reader-
friendly ones at that, in the 1970s to help struggling graduate students,
let alone august professors, gain even a basic understanding of the rich
and complex Callimachean terrain that was waiting to be discovered
by the masses, or at least by the four score or so scholars who would
come to brave the fragmentary and then marginal.

All of this began to change in the 1980s as scholarly energy and

attention on both sides of the Atlantic came to view the Hellenistic era
as a period worth studying on its own and not as a link between
Classical Greece and the literary coming of Rome. Universities now
regularly host international conferences, and professional
organizations include panels, dedicated to the Hellenistic world in
general and individual authors, including Callimachus, Apollonius,
Theocritus, and even Lycophron ( mirabile dictu). As a measure of the
volume of work being done on the Hellenistic world, its literature and
its influence on later peoples, Martine Cuypers, who manages an
impressive on-line bibliography, notes that she added around 400 new
items between July 2010 and January 2011. What is more, graduate
students writing on Hellenistic topics no longer have to despair (fully,
at any rate) at being ignored on the job market, something that I
encountered with a dissertation on Apollonius; I was fortunate to have
acquired my current position in 1984 as a Roman historian.

Within the context of an ever growing interest in things

Hellenistic, Brill’s Companion to Callimachus reflects not merely an
increasingly growing trend, but constitutes a watershed moment in
Callimachean studies that provides a splendid history of work on the
author to date, examination of the central and many of the ancillary
issues that his texts raise, a look at his influence on later Greek and
Roman authors, a convenient (though costly) place for students and
scholars interested in learning about all of this, and as such a central
staging area for future work. The editors divided up the collection of
essays into five parts. Because each of the articles begins with a
summary of their content—a very nice touch, I should add—I will
mostly forgo a critique of content, impossible for a review of this size,
and focus on an overview of the papers, their organization, and an
impression of the collection as a whole.

“The Material Author,” which follows a helpful introduction by Susan

Stephens, includes seven papers that look primarily at the history of
the recovery of the fragmentary texts through papyri, commentaries,
summaries and citations (Lehnus, Massimilla, Harder, Falivene,
Pontani), with one paper focused on Callimachus’ scholarly works
(Krevans) and another on the poet’s various linguistic registers
(Parsons); each of the last two situates the poet comfortably within his
time on the basis of scholarship and language. As I read each paper in
this section, I marveled at the lucidity of presentation and wished over
and over that such a resource were available years ago when I
struggled to make sense of Loebs that were already dated only eight
years after their publication and an ageless commentary teeming with
references to authors I had not yet encountered.

The papers in “Social Contexts” examine Callimachus’ relationship

with Ptolemaic geopolitics (Asper), kings and kingship (Barbantani),
Alexandrian queens (Prioux), the Ptolemaic court in general (Weber),
the manifestation of the divine in cult, statues and epiphanies
(Hunter), and contemporary religious practices as compared with
sacred regulations (Petrovic). All of the papers build on work of the
past decades in which Callimachean poetry has been shown to engage
and comment on the pan-Hellenic and bi-cultural worlds of
Alexandria and the rulers who tried to negotiate the many and
complex relations.

As we move into the next three parts, the diversity of the poet’s work
becomes more manifest in the heterogeneity of the papers and their (at
first) seemingly less cohesive juxtaposition, which accounts for why
my summaries are longer. In fact, the papers accurately reflect the
wide-ranging interests and publications of one of the worlds
greatest docti poetae and hang together with considerable charm.
In “Sources and Models,” the papers focus on the different ways in
which Callimachus echoes earlier works and trends in literature and
scholarship. For instance, the New Music of the late fifth century
anticipated many Callimachean gestures, including semantic
instability, genre crossing, and polyeideia (Prauscello). Callimachus
further engaged a variety of conversations involving contemporary
literary theory (Romano) and his relationship with the Muses reflects
the then current association of the Muses with the various areas of
learning epitomized by the Museion (Morrison). The writings of the
Atthidographers features in the long list of local chronicles that
Callimachus consulted (Benedetto). Regarding popular literature, the
presence of fables in Archaic lyric, Hellenistic philosophy, and Near
Eastern traditions made them an appropriate subject for the poet’s
interdisciplinary and bicultural literature (Scodel); the inclusion of
proverbial and popular expressions also reveal a more personal side to
Callimachus that contrasts with the esoteric author revealed in much
of his writing (Lelli), a contrast that lies at the heart of the first essay
of the next section.

“Personae” begins with Callimachus’ representation of himself as a

child which underscores the sense of curiosity, wonder and
imagination that fuels an inexhaustible desire for sophisticated and
learned knowledge across disciplines (Cozzoli). In fact, a multiplicity
of voices can be observed throughout Callimachus’ poetry, such as
that of literary critic, organizer of a cult, editor, encomiast, a god, or
earlier poets, such as Hesiod, the tragic poets, and Hipponax (Fantuzzi
and Cusset). Other “personae” include a wide variety of characters:
mythical and heroic, common and aristocratic, ancient and modern,
Olympic victors and a Roman stereotype, an apt menagerie for a
multicultural metropolis (Durbec). The section concludes by revisiting
the issue of Callimachus as child, but from a Lacanian and not
Freudian-Bloomian model: the poet’s conflict with his critics is said to
represent instead a disappointed and ambitious mother’s insistence
that he create an adult-sized poem (Payne).

“Callimachus’ Afterlife” completes the collection. The lack of a paper

on Callimachus in Rome would be impossible to imagine and
Barchiesi (not surprisingly) delivers: to wit, Callimachus represented a
highly visible target not to be reproduced but absorbed and
transformed by central Roman authors. De Stefani and Magnelli offer
a detailed account of the “evolution of Callimacheanism,” focusing on
how writers responded to the poet from the Hellenistic to the
Byzantine eras and noting the various trends in his reception, from
close imitation to oppositio in imitando. Speaking of which, the
penultimate paper in the collection provides a lively history of
scholarly grappling with allusion and intertextuality from Pasquali to
Giangrande, Conte and beyond (Citroni). Acosta-Hughes brings the
collection to a satisfying conclusion with an epilogue in which he
defines Callimachus as the first modern poet because of his self-
consciousness and awareness of earlier verse, comparing him with
Cavafy and looking at his poem “In the Month of Athyr” in particular.
The parallels between the latter and the The Tomb of Simonides (fr. 64
Pf. = 163 M.) are remarkable and convincing. While some might take
issue with the identity of the first modern writer, the paper raises an
important question and one that is most appropriate as we reflect on
the sum of the parts of this successful book: to what extent does
Callimachus’ literary contribution instantiate something revolutionary
or classical, modern or ancient in outlook? Food for further thought.

Reading, let alone reviewing, a “companion” of 708 pages might seem

daunting, especially when the topic is as demanding as Callimachus.
But Acosta-Hughes, Lehnus, and Stephens have managed to assemble
a collection of essays that not only advances Callimachean studies
significantly, but, even more amazingly, is a delight to read from start
to finish. I will be returning to all of these papers in the years ahead
because one read does not suffice, given the detail, and because
sometimes a μέγα βιβλίον can actually be a μέγα καλόν.

Table of Contents
Susan Stephens, “Introduction”
The Material Author
1. Luigi Lehnus, “Callimachus rediscovered in papyri”
2. Giulio Massimilla, “The Aetia through papyri”
3. Annette Harder, “Callimachus as fragment”
4. Maria Rosaria Falivene, “The Diegeseis papyrus : archaeological
context, format, and contents”
5. Filippomaria Pontani, “Callimachus cited”
6. Nita Krevans, “Callimachus’ philology”
7. Peter Parsons, “Callimachus and his koinai ”
Social Contexts
8. Markus Asper, “Dimensions of power : Callimachean geopoetics
and the Ptolemaic Empire”
9. Silvia Barbantani, “Callimachus on kings and kingship”
10. Évelyne Prioux, “Callimachus’ queens”
11. Gregor Weber, “Poet and court”
12. Richard Hunter, “The gods of Callimachus”
13. Ivana Petrovic, “Callimachus and contemporary religion:
the Hymn to Apollo
Sources and Models
14. Lucia Prauscello, “Digging up the musical past: Callimachus and
the new music
15. Allen J. Romano, “Callimachus and contemporary criticism”
16. Andrew Morrison, “Callimachus’ muses”
17. Giovanni Benedetto, Callimachus and atthidographers
18. Ruth Scodel, Callimachus and fable
19. Emanuele Lelli, Proverbs and popular sayings in Callimachus
Personae
20. Adele-Teresa Cozzoli, “The poet as a child”
21. Marco Fantuzzi, “Speaking with authority: polyphony in
Callimachus’ Hymns”
22. Christophe Cusset, “Other poetic voices in Callimachus”
23. Yannick Durbec, “Individual figures in Callimachus”
24. Mark Payne, “Iambic theatre: the childhood of Callimachus
revisited”
Callimachus’ Afterlife
25. Alessandro Barchiesi, “Roman Callimachus”
26. Claudio De Stefani and Enrico Magnelli, “Callimachus and later
Greek poetry”
27. Mario Citroni, “ Arte allusiva : Pasquali and onward”
28. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, “Epilogue”

Notes

1. C. A. Trypanis (ed.), Callimachus: Aetia, Iambi, Hecale and Other

Fragments, Cambridge, Mass., 1968; A. W. Mair and G. R.
Mair, Callimachus: Hymns and Epigrams; Lycophron; Aratus,
Cambridge, Mass., 1969.

2. Oxford, 1968.

3. Callimachus, Oxford, 1949-53.

4. P. Parsons, “Callimachus’ Victoria Berenices,” ZPE 25 (1977) 1-

50.

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