SOURCE: An introduction to The "Argonautika," by Apollonius Rhodius, translated by Peter Green, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 1-13.

[In the following excerpt, Green reviews the known facts about the life of Apollonius and places in context his quarrel with Callimachus concerning the epic.]

I

The author of the Argonautika is a remarkably elusive character. We do not know exactly when he was born, or the date of his death. At least three cities—Alexandria, Naukratis, and, inevitably, Rhodes—were claimed in antiquity, and continue to be argued for today, as his birthplace. Our main sources for his life are not only late, but contain a number of arresting discrepancies. Did he turn to poetry early or late in life? He was royal tutor to one of the Ptolemies—but which one? He was head of the Alexandrian Library—but directly before and after whom? Why is there arguably no direct surviving evidence from his own day for the notorious literary quarrel it is claimed (by the Souda, …) he had with his near-contemporary Kallimachos?¹ How, chronologically speaking, is his retreat or exile to Rhodes to be related to his appointment as librarian and tutor? Under which Ptolemy was his floruit? The evidence is such that scholars have put his birth as early as 300 and as late as 265, and his death anywhere between 235 and 190.²

The central problem occasioning such disagreement is not so much the lack of testimony (above all of early testimony) as the awkward fact that our few late surviving witnesses on occasion so flatly contradict one another (though some of the disagreements, as we shall see, turn out to be more apparent than real). I therefore set them out here. The Lives were transmitted with the MSS of the Argonautika; scholarly efforts to trace them back (e.g., to a first-century B.C. critic called Theon), while praiseworthy, do not offer enlightenment or remove any difficulties. The same applies to the two entries from the Souda, a late-tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia.

(i) Life A:

"Apollonios, the author of the Argonautika, was by birth an Alexandrian, of the Ptolemaïs tribe, and the son of Silleus (or, according to some, Illeus). He lived during the reign of the Ptolemies, and was a student… of Kallimachos. At fïrst he was an assistant to …³ his own master, Kallimachos; but in the end … he turned to the writing of poems. It is said that while still a youth … he gave a reading of the Argonautika and was unfavorably received. Overcome by the opprobrium of the public and the sneers and abuse of his fellow-poets, he left his native land and took off to Rhodes. It was here that he polished and corrected his text,⁴ going on to give readings of it which won him the highest renown—the reason why in his poems he calls himself 'the Rhodian', He enjoyed a brilliant teaching career there, winning Rhodian citizenship and other honors."⁵

"During the reign of the Ptolemies" is the reading of most MSS, generally dismissed as, in Hunter's words, "too obvious to need saying."⁶ If so, one wonders, why was it said? In fact, when we seek a specific identity for "the Ptolemies", plural, the answer at once presents itself: they are, and can only be, Ptolemy II Philadelphos and his sister-wife Arsinoe, the first and by far the most famous of the dynasty's incestuous royal couples, known as the "Sibling Gods," … and regularly portrayed together on both gold and silver coinage (Green 1993, 145-46, with fig. 57). It is also often argued that the account of his youthful literary performance is inconsistent with what precedes it—that is, that he turned to poetry "late"; but such flagrant self-contradiction within the space of two sentences is unlikely even for a late scholiast. The Greek surely means no more than that he began as Kallimachos's scholarly assistant (in the Library?), afterwards branching off on his own as a poet (Delage 1930, 22-25). The ambiguity of sunön is worth noting: it can imply anything from casual acquaintanceship to cohabitation and sexual intercourse.⁷

(ii) Life B:

"Apollonios the poet was an Alexandrian by birth, his father being Silleus or Illeus, his mother Rhodé. He studied with Kallimachos, who was then a grammatikós [teacher, scholar] in Alexandria, and after composing these poems [sc., the Argonautika] gave a public reading of them. The result, to his embarrassment, was a complete failure, as a result of which he took up residence in Rhodes. There he was active in public affairs and lectured on rhetoric [cf. nn. 3 and 5]. Hence the readiness of some to call him a Rhodian. It was there, then, that he resided while he polished his poems. Afterwards he gave a hugely successful public reading—so much so that he was adjudged worthy … of Rhodian citizenship and high honors. Some sources state that he returned to Alexandria and gave another public reading there, which brought him to the very pinnacle of success, to the point where he was found worthy … of the Museum's Libraries, and was buried alongside Kallimachos himself."⁸

We see, then, that both Lives are fundamentally in agreement on the facts and, equally important, the sequence of events in Apollonios's career, though B adds the important information concerning his return to Alexandria and his success there. To "be found worthy of the Libraries clearly means appointment as librarian, or perhaps in the first instance as a Museum scholar, not, as has sometimes—rather fancifully—been suggested, the admission of his works to the Library's holdings, for which inclusiveness, not merit, was the criterion.⁹ The close relationship with Kallimachos, whose own career is firmly pegged to the decades 280-50, and with Theokritos, who seems to have written mostly before 270, would point us firmly in the direction of Ptolemy II's reign—the Golden Age of Hellenistic poetry—even without Life A's reference (as I maintain) to the Sibling Gods.

(iii) P. Oxy. 1241, col. ii (Grenfell and Hunt, pt. 10: 99 ff.):

"[Apollo]nios, son of Silleus, an Alexandrian, called the Rhodian, a student [or perhaps 'acquaintance' …] of Kallimachos: he also [was? …] the [t(eacher): word almost wholly illegible, …] of the [fi]rst king. He was succeeded by Eratosthenes, after whom came Aristophanes of Byzantion and Aristarchos. Next was Apollonios of Alexandria, known as the Classifier …, and after him Aristarchos son of Aristarchos, an Alexandrian, but originally from Samothraké, who [was] the tutor of Philopator's children."

This text is an extract from some sort of chrestomathy or handbook (second century A.D.), listing, in chronological order, some of the chief librarians in Alexandria. The column immediately preceding it is lost, but must have named the first appointee, whom we know from the Souda … to have been Zenódotos, Homeric scholar, epic poet, and tutor to Ptolemy I's children. Ptolemy II was born in 308: thus if we place Zenódotos's appointment c. 295, we shall not be far out. But who succeeded him? Some scholars would like to believe it was Kallimachos,¹⁰ presumably on the principle of academic merit reaping its just reward; but the almost unanimous silence of our ancient sources is not encouraging,¹¹ and it should also not be forgotten that the librarian was a crown appointment.¹² Perhaps not coincidentally, both Zenódotos and Apollonios were epic poets and Homeric scholars: this may well reflect Ptolemy II's own preferences. The likelihood of Apollonios having been appointed as Zenódotos's direct successor is very great. Unfortunately, it is not certain beyond all doubt: both chronologically and based on P. Oxy. 1241, there is room for Kallimachos's tenure between the two.¹³ On the other hand, Apollonios must, on chronological grounds, have been tutor to Ptolemy III rather than Ptolemy I, and scholars have therefore agreed that "first" … was a slip, perhaps through misreading a slovenly hand, for "third".… After Apollonios the sequence makes complete sense (though Aristarchos is mentioned twice: I suspect that the scribe had the Samian as well as the Samothrakian in mind) and can be accepted.

(iv) The Souda (… no. 3419, Adler, 1: 307):

"Apollonios, an Alexandrian, writer of epic poems; spent some time on Rhodes; son of Silleus; a student of Kallimachos; contemporary with Eratosthenes, Euphorion, and Timarchos, in the reign of Ptolemy known as The Benefactor [Euergetes], and Eratosthenes' successor in the Directorship … of the Library in Alexandria."

This encyclopedia entry differs sharply in two (clearly related) aspects from our other testimonia: it dates Apollonios firmly in the reign of Ptolemy III and later (Euphorion was appointed librarian in Antioch by Antiochos the Great at some point after 223), and makes him Eratosthenes' successor, rather than predecessor, as chief librarian. The obvious explanation, provided by (iii) above, is that the author of this entry confused our Apollonios with Apollonios the Classifier. Some, however, prefer, for whatever reason,¹⁴ to accept the Souda's dating, against all our other evidence, and to place Apollonios's librarianship after that of Eratosthenes.¹⁵ Such a choice cannot be sustained, and most recent scholarship rejects it.¹⁶ Dating apart, nothing in the Souda entry contradicts our other sources.

The biographical notice that can be constructed on the basis of these witnesses, and reinforced with circumstantial literary and historical testimony, differs somewhat from currently accepted scholarly versions of Apollonios's life.¹⁷ The main premiss of these is that the central episode related by the Lives, Apollonios's youthful literary setback, and his sojourn on Rhodes as a consequence of this, as well as his quarrel with Kallimachos, must be viewed as a fiction. I see no need for such an assumption. Nor do I feel the need to refute some other claims made about him that have no basis whatsoever in the evidence—for example, that his departure to Rhodes took place late in life, or that he was exiled. Here, then, is my reconstruction of his life and career (for the four sources discussed above, I use the abbreviations LI, L2, P, and S).¹⁸

Apollonios, the son of Silleus and Rhodè (LI, L2, P, S), an epic poet (S) and author of the Argonautika (L1), was an Alexandrian by birth, of the Ptolemaïs tribe (L1), and thus the first native-born Alexandrian poet. (His family may have moved to Alexandria from Naukratis.) Since he flourished under Ptolemy II Philadelphos (L1) and was a student of Kallimachos (L1, L2, P, S), who was born c. 310, his own birth can be placed somewhere between 305 and 290. The earlier range seems much more probable, especially if his relationship with Kallimachos began when the latter, not yet Ptolemy II's protégé, was still a grammatikós (L2; S, s.v. Kallimakhos) in the Alexandrian suburb of Eleusis—that is, before 285. Thus Apollonios's early, unfortunate, public reading (L1, L2) will have taken place—if the term "youth" be interpreted in its strict sense—when he was between eighteen and twenty: that is, at some point in the period 285-280, and (interestingly enough) while he was still attached, as student or assistant (L1), to Kallimachos. It was after this, late in the day (surely that opse, in context, has to be ironic?), that he determined to make his prime activity poetry rather than criticism (L1) and removed himself to Rhodes (L1, L2, S) in order to do so.

Why Rhodes? No one has bothered with this question, except (by implication) through the mistaken claim (Lefkowitz, 12-13) that, against all the evidence, Rhodes was in fact his birthplace. I have elsewhere (Green 1993, 203-4) suggested that the independence of that proud maritime republic perhaps offered an atmosphere more sympathetic to epic, not least an epic largely bound up with the sea, than did Ptolemaic Alexandria.¹⁹ Since then an excellent article has been published pointing out what a deep and personal knowledge the Argonautika reveals of navigation, maritime life, shipbuilding, and nautical expertise in general—expertise surely gained, in the first instance, on Rhodes.²⁰ How long did he remain there? To become genuinely knowledgeable about seafaring, as well as to engage in public life, pursue a distinguished teaching career, complete his revised Argonautika—fragments of a prior draft of book 1 survive embedded in the scholia²¹—and achieve a position of international literary eminence would all take considerable time. This indeed would seem to have been the case. The terminus ante quem for his return to Alexandria would have to be the inception of his tutorial duties with the young Ptolemy III Euergétes, who cannot have been more than fifteen at the time, and may have been as young as twelve. Euergétes was born at some point between 288 (the year of his father's marriage to Arsinoë I) and 275.²² We are therefore looking at a date not earlier than 273 and possibly as late as 260. If Apollonios emigrated to Rhodes in the period 285-80, he would have spent a minimum of thirteen years there, and more probably about twenty. He could thus easily have been forty—a perfectly acceptable age for such honors—at the time of his triumphant return (L2), and appointment by Ptolemy II as royal tutor (P) and chief librarian (P; S?): I would suggest a date around 265.

There followed a long period of uneventful success and productiveness. It would have been in these years that Apollonios wrote foundation poems on the origins of Alexandria and Naukratis, and an aetiological poem entitled Kanobos, just as during his Rhodian residence, he had similarly composed works about Kaunos, Knidos, and Rhodes itself.²³ He was equally busy in his capacity as a Museum scholar, with critical works on Homer (including a monograph attacking his predecessor Zenódotos), Hesiod, and Archilochos.²⁴ It is possible that he also began a second revised edition of at least part of the Argonautika, which got no further than book 1, and that it was the existence of this revision which occasioned references to the "previous edition" … by the scholiasts.²⁵

On his accession early in 246, Ptolemy III Euergétes summoned Eratosthenes from Athens to take over the office of chief librarian.²⁶ There was no question of his old tutor being dismissed, let alone exiled: Apollonios had served with distinction for twenty years, was now in his sixties, and had earned an honorable retirement. If there is any truth in the tradition (L2) that after he died (probably at some point in the 230's), he was buried beside Kallimachos, that suggests, not (as has been romantically inferred) a reconciliation between the two men, but rather the existence of a special burial site or private cemetery for distinguished members of the Museum community.²⁷

II

When considering Apollonios's place in Hellenistic literature, it is impossible to ignore the tradition, whether true or fictional, of his alleged quarrel with Kallimachos, since this lurks at the heart of several much-debated problems: appointments and working conditions in the Library and the Museum; the nature of third-century epic, the interpretation of Kallimachean aesthetic principles, and the relationship of the Argonautika to both; finally, the precise meaning and scope of the tradition hostile to Kallimachos, as testified to by passages in that poet's works such as lines 105-14 of the Hymn to Apollo, or the partly fragmentary preface (1-38) of the Aitia attacking the "Telchines"—malevolent mythical dwarfs here standing in for literary opponents. This is not the place to attack such problems in detail; but anyone who wishes to read the Argonautika with a reasonable degree of understanding should at least be able to appreciate the social and aesthetic context in which it came to be written. Even if we regard a personal vendetta between two distinguished officers of the Alexandrian Library as unproven (though hardly, bearing modern academe in mind, intrinsically improbable), are the respective literary positions of Apollonios and Kallimachos such that hostility, even if nonexistent in fact, could easily be presumed in theory?

It is fashionable nowadays to assert "that both quarrel and controversy are entirely modern inventions."²⁸ Like many such assertions, this one is not true. Though the Souda is regularly trawled for useful (i.e., supportive) evidence, but briskly dismissed as late and untrustworthy when it records testimony at odds with the theory du jour, the entry on Kallimachos (its format suggesting derivation from Hesychios of Miletos) contains the following comment on one title in a list of Kallimachos's works: "Ibis, a poem of deliberate obscurity and abusiveness, directed against a certain Ibis, who had become Kallimachos's enemy: this person was Apollonios, the author of the Argonautika."²⁹ The reason for the hostility is not stated, but there is at least a strong chance of its having been literary. We might have guessed that such feuds were common in the Museum, and a famous squib by Timon of Phleious confirms it: "In the polyglot land of Egypt, many now find pasturage as endowed scribblers, endlessly quarreling in the Muses' birdcage."³⁰ Kallimachos himself, imitating Hipponax, urged scholars not to be mutually jealous.³¹ But with "free meals, high salaries, no taxes to pay, very pleasant surroundings, good lodgings and servants", there was, as Pfeiffer remarks,³² "plenty of opportunity for quarrelling with one another." Leisure, combined with the arbitrary uncertainties of royal patronage, must have made backbiting and paranoia endemic.

Despite the enormous amount of scholarship generated by this topic—Kallimachos is, after all, just about the ideal scholar-poet to most classicists, a subtly flattering Mirror for Academe—direct testimony for what he actually disliked in Hellenistic literature is limited. There are three main items of evidence, which, taken together, offer a fairly consistent picture. Two of them—the preface to the Aitia and the conclusion of the Hymn to Apollo—have been mentioned above. The third is a six-line epigram (28 [30] Pf.) on the theme of distaste for what is "base, common, or popular." There are a few other hints (e.g., the last line of Epigr. 8 [10] Pf. wittily closes with a six-syllable word … meaning "brevity"), but these three texts form the basis for all argument.

"All that's commonplace makes me sick".. is the central message of the epigram: this includes—fact merging into literary metaphor—indiscriminate lovers, public fountains, overpopulated highways, and, a point to which I shall return in a moment, "cyclic" poetry. Popularity, in short (a perennial academic tenet, this), is suspect. The avoidance of well-trodden roads is a theme that recurs in the preface to the Aitia (25-28), in the form of advice from Apollo. Also, the poet should chirp like the cicada, not bray like the ass (29-32); poems should not be measured by their length (15-18). Jealous dwarfs (1-2, cf. 17), no friends of the Muses, mutter … against Kallimachos because he has not written one sustained epic, many thousands of lines in length, about kings or heroes (3-5), but instead turns out short poems, like a child (5-6), and is a man of few lines. … The cryptic postscript (105-14) to Hymn II has personified Envy … whispering in Apollo's ear (106): "I do not admire that poet whose utterance lacks the sweep and range of the sea."³⁴ To which Apollo replies, with a swift contemptuous kick …, that a river such as the Euphrates may have a vast current …, but also carries down a mass of silt and refuse; whereas Demeter's priestesses bring her, not just any water, but only (111-12) that "thin trickle, the ultimate distillation …, pure and undefiled, that rises from the sacred spring".

The general message, despite some teasing obscurities of detail that have occasioned endless debate, is clear enough. Kallimachos is advocating three fundamental qualities in poetry: brevity, originality, and refinement, whether of style, language, or form. The criticisms against him (not so different from some still current today) are for not having produced a "major" or "substantial" work. His answer is that bulk inevitably includes dross and (the donkey's bray applies here) vulgarity of utterance. The real problem in the context of our present discussion is how far any of this could be directed against epic poetry in general and Apollonios in particular. "The cyclic poem" … of Epigr. 28 [30] 1 might be thought specific enough, but it has often been pointed out that… "cyclic" or "epic", also carries the secondary literary senses of "commonplace", "conventional", even "platitudinous". This, it is argued, given the context, must be the meaning here. But Kallimachos (as the same scholars are eager to remind us) had an exquisite ear for the mot juste, and it is inconceivable that he could have set up such a striking verbal ambiguity by accident. The message, conveyed with pregnant brevity, is: epic = cliché. It is also historical (kings) or mythical (heroes) epic, thousands of lines long (5,835 in the Argonautika), that Kallimachos is reproached by the "Telchines" for not writing (Aitia 3-5).

This judgment would have remained comparatively simple had it not been for the existence of the Florentine scholia.³⁵ To expect Kallimachos himself to have named the "Telchines" is simpliste; but the scholia identify several of them, including Asklepiades and Poseidippos, Samian literary and erotic epigrammatists who wrote between 290 and 270 (i.e., in the golden years of Alexandrian poetry), and Praxiphanes of Mytilene, a Peripatetic critic contemporary with them. It was these men, the scholia claim, who criticized Kallimachos for not writing longer, more substantial work; and as it happens, a couple of epigrams in the Palatine Anthology (AP 9.63, 12.168), point to a text that the first two praised and might therefore have offered as a desirable model: the Lyde of Antimachos (fl. c. 400), a narrative elegy lamenting the loss of the poet's mistress. The scholia also state that Kallimachos preferred the shorter poems of Mimnermos (late seventh century) and Philetas of Kos (the scholar-poet who was tutor to both Zenódotos and Ptolemy II) to those of more diffuse … writers (not named, but possibly including Antimachos). We also know (fr. 460^* Pf.) that Kallimachos was acquainted with Praxiphanes and wrote a pamphlet against him.

All this is perfectly plausible and sheds a little fitful light on the kind of critical debate (if not actual infighting) that went on between Museum scholars and the rest of the Alexandrian literary coterie. The problem of course is that nowhere in the Florentine scholia or related material is there any specific mention of Hellenistic epic, let alone of Apollonios. The genres discussed are elegy and epigram. Far more has been made of this argumentum ex silentio than it deserves. If Kallimachos preferred (as he clearly did) to write short rather than long poems, it was not only in the field of elegy that this preference would have applied, though he may well have picked that genre at the beginning of the Aitia to counter the specific charges of Asklepiades and his friends.

There is also the evidence of the Hekalé to consider.³⁶ This hexameter epyllion of perhaps between 1,000 and 1,500 lines (Hollis, app. 2, 337-40), describing Theseus's victory over the Bull of Marathon, and his entertainment en route to Marathon in the hut of the old lady who provides the poem with its title, Kalli-machos wrote (we are told by a scholiast on Hymn II) in response to those who derided his inability to compose a lengthy work.³⁷ There seems no compelling reason to doubt such a statement. Hollis (3-4) dates the poem to around 270, which is plausible enough; but, as almost always with poems of this period, absolute or even close chronology is out of reach, since the criteria remain hopelessly subjective.³⁸ From the numerous surviving fragments,³⁹ it becomes apparent that to attain even this length (no more than one book of the Argonautika), Kallimachos resorted to a whole series of individual anecdotes and aitia concerning both protagonists, and indeed other mythical figures (e.g., Erichthonios and the daughters of Kekrops, fr. 70 Hollis = 260 Pf.). In several respects, then—its hexameter form, its narrative exposition and development of myth, its use of aetiological material—Hékalé reads like a reluctant attempt to emulate Hellenistic epic: reluctant partly because it still falls short in the matter of length, but also, more important (it is often argued), because Kallimachos lived in an age for which the heroic ethos was dead, so that any attempt to resuscitate epic would inevitably have seemed unreal, artificial, a mere exercise in nostalgia.

External social and historical realities make this view so overwhelmingly plausible that we tend to forget one uncomfortable fact: neither Kallimachos nor his presumptive opponents say anything about it. That does not necessarily mean it was untrue. The evidence so far assembled suggests that the tradition of literary dissension was in fact genuine as between short poems (personal, aetiological) and long ones (heroic, mythical), but that the real differences were taken to be literary and stylistic rather than social. This, in turn, also does not necessarily mean that an unrecognized (and probably unconscious) social component did not play a large part in the "quarrel". We also have to consider, bearing in mind his apparent absence from the ranks of the "Telchines" as delineated by the Florentine scholia, how closely we can identify Apollonios himself with the anti-Kallimachean faction, and thus ratify or challenge the notion of a fundamental literary feud between these two eminent scholar-poets of the Museum faculty.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that if Kallimachos included epic (the "cyclic poem" in its basic sense) among the types of long poem to which he objected, then Apollonios, as by far the most distinguished living exponent of the genre, must inevitably have figured as one of the targets of his scorn. The tradition of Kallimachos having composed a derisive poem attacking Apollonios under the name Ibis thus makes perfectly good sense.⁴⁰ Did his victim strike back? It would seem so. We possess an epigram ascribed to Apoll-onios,⁴¹ composed in the form of two mock encyclopedia entries: "KALLIMACHOS: Trash, cheap joke, blockhead. Original Sin: Writing Kallimachos's Origins."⁴² Despite inevitable attempts to dismiss this tell-tale squib as a late effort to confirm a fiction, I am inclined to regard it as genuine. The balance thus shifts a little further still in favor of a personal feud. That the two men would have been at odds over the viability of epic poetry seems certain. …

Notes

¹ Arguably, because the authenticity of the epigram attacking Kallimachos attributed to Ap. (AP 11.275) has been denied, on what seem to me inadequate grounds, by most modern scholars: see, e.g., Vian 1974, xvii, with nn. 1-2, and Green 1993, 783 nn. 3-4.

² The problem is neatly set out by Vian 1974, vii-xiii, who lists no fewer than three basic schemata developed by modern scholars for Apollonios's life and career, none of them without serious objections. At the same time, I should point out that the schema I find most plausible does in fact correspond very nearly to his first system, as worked out by Delage 1930b—a thorough and basically sensible study, largely ignored by contemporary scholars (Hunter 1989, 3 n. 11, omits it from his list of biographical studies, and it is missing from Blum's otherwise exhaustive bibliography).

³ Or perhaps "lived with": see Blum, 128 and 164 n. 38, where he points out, with examples, that the verb suneīnai "was used for younger scholars who remained after the completion of their studies with their teachers as their assistants." (The word has other suggestive meanings: see my discussion below, together with n. 7.) He also emphasizes, what the Lives bear out, but has sometimes been denied, e.g., by Handel 1962, 436, that it was Kallimachos as scholar rather than poet under whom Ap. studied: this is of importance when we consider accounts of his activities on Rhodes.

⁴ Cameron, 217, states that "the Lives are agreed that it was in Alexandria that Apollonius wrote the Argonautica." Cf. the evidence of Life B below.

⁵ Cameron, 214, argues that we have here a confusion between our Apollonios and a later Apollonios from Alabanda (c. 120 B.C.), a sophist who ran a school of rhetoric in Rhodes. This is indeed not impossible. But the argument adduced in favor of it (and used a fortiori apropos of Life B's claim that Ap. "was active in public affairs and lectured on rhetoric"), i.e., that while such behavior was natural for the later sophist, it was "absurd for the poet," cannot be taken seriously. Ap. was at least as much scholar as poet (on this, see n. 3 above): no clear lines were drawn between literature and rhetoric; and since when have poets necessarily abstained from public affairs?

⁶ Hunter 1989, 1 n. 3. He, and most literary scholars, accept Wendel's emendation … "in the reign of the third Ptolemy [Euergétes]," agreeing with one MS (H) and, as we shall see, with P. Oxy. 1241.

⁷ The temptation to speculate on an early affair between teacher and pupil that went disastrously wrong, thus adding fuel to literary and academic flames, is considerable, not least when one considers Kallimachos's homoerotic epigrams—which, incidentally, were one reason why Wilamowitz argued that because of his proclivities, Kallimachos could not possibly have been made a royal tutor: "Erzieher eines Knaben durfte dieser Epigrammatiker wirklich nicht werden" (Hel-lenistische Dichtung [Berlin, 1924], 1: 166). However, the relevant sentence in Life A makes it fairly clear that what was in question was some kind of professional or educational relationship.

⁸ Cameron, 215, nevertheless states flatly that "the Lives do not bring Apollonius back to Alexandria … he leaves Alexandria as a youth and spends the rest of his life in Rhodes" [sic], though he does at least concede Life B's reference to Ap.'s burial beside Kallimachos.

⁹ The "merit of inclusion" theory (see, e.g., Blum, 128-29) is most commonly justified by a reference to Pfeiffer, 141-42 and excursus 284-85; but Pfeiffer's uncharacteristically weak argument rests on nothing better than comparative usage in Eusebius (see esp. Hist. eccles. 3.9.2) and carries no real weight.

¹⁰ Most recently, and in most detail, Blum, 112-13 (cf. 127, 132-33, 168 n. 73).

¹¹ The "Latin Tzetzes" (on which see Fraser, 2a: 474 n. 107, 488 n. 189) refers to Kallimachos as aulicus regius bibliothecarius, but this seems to be an unintelligent guess compounded by mistranslation.

¹² A modern parallel may be instructive here. In 1936, Stanley Baldwin, then prime minister of Great Britain, asked Gilbert Murray whom he would like to see as his successor as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford—a chair in theory filled by royal fiat. Murray named E. R. Dodds, who was promptly appointed. On the resultant sustained outrage among Oxford classicists, see Dodds's autobiography, Missing Persons (Oxford, 1977), ch. 8, esp. 124-26. It is safe to say that, left to themselves, the Oxford faculty would never in a thousand years have elected Dodds—who nevertheless went on to prove himself one of the greatest scholars ever to grace his distinguished office.

¹³ "Now that the Oxyrhynchus list has proved that he was never chief librarian …," Cameron (11) briskly dogmatizes; but of course it does nothing of the sort. This is only the first of many similar firm assertions in his book that turn out to be unsupported (and often, as in this case, moonshine). Fraser, 1: 330-31, is far more circumspect.

¹⁴ A late date for Apollonios is, of course, a godsend for scholars specializing in Quellenforschung: set him in the 270's and, as the record makes clear, no one can agree, among Kallimachos, Theokritos, and Apollonios in particular, as to who influenced whom. Shift him down into the 230's and the problem no longer exists.

¹⁵ See Mooney 1-12; Blum 128-29.

¹⁶ E.g., Hunter 1989; and now Cameron, 218, though after rejecting its chronology, he can still argue that "it is the Suda-entry that preserves the vestiges of ancient tradition," chiefly, it would seem, on the basis of its source, assumed to be "the sixth-century biographical dictionary of Hesychius of Miletus" (216)—not a work calculated to elicit universal respect: see Blum's detailed analysis, 202-10—and the fact that it describes Ap. as an epic poet.

¹⁷ See Herter 1942b, 1944-55, 1973; Eichgrün, passim, esp. 15-68, 163-71; Handel 1962; Hunter 1989, 1-12; Blum, 128-33; Cameron, 214-19. I forbear from subjecting the reader to a long, and ultimately pointless, discussion of all the theories advanced in these texts.

¹⁸ In the main this reconstruction follows that in Green 1993, 203 ff., but has been modified in some particulars as the result of valid criticism.

¹⁹ Cameron (263), in the course of dismissing my earlier account (confident dogma again) as "perhaps the most extravagant embellishment of the traditional story yet published," cites the suggestion about Rhodes as the acme of this extravagance, but without bothering to offer any explanation as to why.

²⁰ Joanna Rostropowicz, "The Argonautica by Apollonios of Rhodes as a Nautical Epos: Remarks on the Realities of Navigation," Eos 88 (1990): 107-17.

²¹ For further discussion of this, … see … n. 25. It remains quite uncertain (despite a good deal of dogmatic scholarly argument) whether the changes, which are detailed but minor, indicate Ap.'s original draft, a later MS circulated among friends (see Hunter 1989, 5-6, with nn. 21-22), or work on a late and incomplete revision of what had by then become the standard text. The six passages from the proekdosis referred to in the scholia to bk. I are at lines 285-86, 516-23, 543, 726-27 (?), 788-89, and 801-13. There is also one isolated instance in bk. 2, at lines 963-64 (not signaled as such by the scholiast), where two lines quoted differ substantially from our traditional text; but none in bks. 3 or 4.

²² This is another terminus ad quem, since by 274-73, Arsinoë II, Ptolemy's full sister, was, as we know from the Pithom stele, already regnant queen: Fraser, 2a: 367 n. 228.

²³ Pfeiffer, 144; Hunter 1989, 9-12; Cameron, 215, who comments: "the series of Egyptian poems lends no support to the claim of an early departure from Alexandria." Indeed, they do not, being written after his return; and since Ap. very probably never left Alexandria again, this is hardly surprising. Cameron adds: "These were mistakes only possible in a later age that knew only the Argonautica." Well, yes, as things turned out, but not quite the age of which Cameron was thinking when he wrote those words.

²⁴ Pfeiffer, 145-48.

²⁵ This kind of explanation may perhaps better satisfy those who remain convinced that the proekdosis and the text in our possession do not differ substantially enough for the original draft to be in question: see, e.g., Herter 1973, 22, and Cameron, 217, with further references. However, it remains a moot question whether major alterations (e.g., the general "Kallimachizing" of the text with aitia, etc.) would show up in such short extracts; and the revision on Rhodes would surely also include the kind of close verbal corrections we find in citations from the proekdosis.

²⁶ See the Souda … (no. 2898).…

²⁷ It is not impossible that Ap. returned to Rhodes after his retirement; but the evidence is lacking, and my earlier statement to this effect (Green 1993, 204) was too confidently expressed.

²⁸ Cameron, 264, whose own mega biblion is a compendium of just about every piece of scholarly dogma on Kallimachos and Apollonios developed over the past two decades. To call it trendy would be meiosis.

²⁹ The Souda … (no. 227). … The last-ditch suggestion (see, e.g., Hutchinson, 86-87) that the parenthesis can be dismissed as an interpolation is that and nothing more.

³⁰ Cited by Athen. 1.22d, with a comment confirming that Timon was indeed aiming at the Museum in these lines. Timon also seems to have had a low opinion of scholarly ingenuity (probably in this case referring to Zenódotos): when Aratos asked him where he could get a reliable text of Homer, Timon told him to go for an old-style copy, and not one of the contemporary "corrected" texts: Diog. Laert. 9.113.

³¹ Cf. Kall. fr. 191 Pf., dieg. 6.2 ff.

³² Pfeiffer, 97.…

³⁴ The Greek is straightforward and does not need correction.… On the heavy weather scholars have made of it (the metaphor seems to be particularly hard for them to swallow), see, e.g., Smiley, 284-86.

³⁵ For the standard edition of these scholia, see R. Pfeiffer, Callimachus (Oxford, 1949-53), 1: 1-3, Ait. fr. 1.

³⁶ See Hollis; cf. Kall. Hek. frs. 230-377 Pf. (1: 226-303).

³⁷ Schol. Kall. H. ii 106: "In these lines [i.e., the exchange between Envy and Apollo: see above] he attacks those who mocked his inability to write a big poem—the reason why he was forced to write the Hekalé."

³⁸ There is, for example, no absolutely compelling reason (certainly not the scholiast: confusing Ptolemies became a popular Graeco-Roman sport) to identify the king apostrophized at Hymn II line 26 as Ptolemy III Euergetds rather than Ptolemy II Philadelphos, and in historical terms Philadelphos is more likely. Similarly with the prologue to the Aitia: this famous passage is so regularly described as "a product of [Kallimachos's] old age" (Hollis, 4) that we forget the complete lack of solid rather than speculative testimony underpinning such a verdict.

³⁹ Also the Digest … x. 18 (Hollis, 65), together with the narrative of the myth Ploutarchos (relying on Philochoros) retails at Thes. 14.

⁴⁰ For an analysis of the various disobliging meanings behind the symbolic pseudonym of the ibis—foul feeder, scavenger, purger of filth, sacred monster, corrupting influence—see Green 1993, 201-2.

⁴¹AP 11.275 = Kall. test. 25 Pf.; D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge, 1981), 53-54; cf. Pfeiffer, 143. None of the arguments against authenticity (cf. Green 1993, 783 n. 3, with further evidence) strikes me as compelling, and the suspicion grows that scholars are determined to find this epigram spurious simply because it tends to confirm the personal nature of any dissension between Apollonios and Kallimachos.

⁴² The pun … is hard to reproduc e in English.… The lemmatist specifically attributes this squib to "the Rhodian".…