SOURCE: "The Elegy," "The Epic," and "The Epigram," in Hellenistic Poetry, translated by Jacob Hammer and Moses Hadas, Columbia University Press, 1929, pp. 94-150, 150-257, 350-406.

[The following excerpt, drawn from his Hellenistic Poetry, presents Körte's summation of Callimachus as a writer of elegy, epic, and epigram. Examining Callimachus' work largely in the context of his biography and the social and political environment in Alexandria, Korte finds certain qualities constant in Callimachus across the genres. Korte emphasizes especially the poet's aptitude for originality and novelty, remarking that "precisely what was obscure, untouched and neglected had the greatest attraction for Callimachus." The excerpt also includes extended quotations in translation.]

THE ELEGY

Callimachus is the most significant and the most fascinating personality among the Alexandrian poets. He therefore deserves a detailed treatment.

Of his life we know, unfortunately, very little. He was born not much before 330 in the old Graeco-African city, Cyrene, which belonged after 322, with short intermissions, to the empire of the Ptolemies. His father bore the same name as the mythical founder of the city, Battus. From Battus the poet claimed descent; he therefore belonged to the old nobility of Cyrene. His grandfather, also named Callimachus, had occupied an eminent position in his native community. So the poet himself, as an old man, tells us in an imaginary epitaph for his father:

Whoever near this peaceful tomb art passing,
 Stranger! see
Callimachus's son and sire, Cyrene-born in
 me.
Both you may know. Her general, one led his
 country's host,
One sang what even Envy own'd superior. For
 such boast
There is no Nemesis: whom once the Muses
 with kind eye
Greet as their friend they ne'er discard when
 hoary hairs are nigh.
—R. G. MacGregor

In the ever recurring civil wars of Cyrene the family seems to have become impoverished. This appears from the fact that Callimachus, after a sojourn at Athens as student, lived for some time apparently in needy circumstances as a teacher of an elementary school in Eleusis, a suburb of Alexandria.

To this period, probably, we owe the majority of his charming epigrams, in which he occasionally complains of poverty, as, e.g., in the bitter lines:

I know my hands are bare of gold;
  For Heaven's sake, my dear,
Chant not the too familiar tale
 For ever in my ear.

I'm sick at heart when all day long
  I hear the bitter jest;
Of all thy qualities, my love,
 This is unloveliest.
—Walter Leaf

But greater poetic works also belong to the period during which for a paltry remuneration he taught reading and writing to the children of the suburb. A recently found papyrus presents us with hardly intelligible scraps of an elegy celebrating the athletic victories won at the games by a certain Sosibius, son of Dioscorides, who played a part at the inauguration of the cult of Serapis. The poem must be dated before 280. Its noteworthy feature is that Callimachus dared to clothe such a poem in the form of an elegy; during the classical period, Pindar and Bacchylides composed epinician odes in the pretentious strophes of choral lyric. Callimachus' epinicion is intended not to be sung but to be recited; with the Alexandrians we find again and again verses intended for song replaced by verses intended for speech, since all their poetry was then meant to be recited. About 280 also was composed the first of the six extant hymns of Callimachus, namely the Hymn to Zeus. These hymns again, unlike the older cult-songs, were intended not for choral singing but for recitation; for this reason they were composed in epic hexameters, except the fifth hymn, which is written in elegiac distichs. That the Hymn to Zeus was not destined to be delivered at a festival in honor of the gods as a ceremonial act its opening lines immediately and clearly reveal:

At Jove's high festival, what song of praise
 Shall we his suppliant adorers sing?
To whom may we our paans rather raise
 Than to himself, the great Eternal King?
 Who by his nod subdues each earth-born
 thing;
 Whose mighty laws the gods themselves
 obey?
 But whether Crete first saw the Father
 spring,
 Or on Lycaus's mount he burst on day,
My soul is much in doubt, for both that praise
 essay.

Some say that thou, O Jove, first saw the
 morn
 On Cretan Ida's sacred mountain-side;
Others that thou in Arcady wert born:
 Declare, Almighty Father—which have lied?
 Cretans were liars ever: in their pride
Have they built up a sepulchre for thee;
 As if the King of Gods and men had died,
 And borne the lot of frail mortality.
No! thou hast ever been, and art, and aye
 shalt be.
—Fitzjames T. Price

Every Greek drinking bout commenced with a libation to Zeus. The poem is therefore intended for delivery at a symposium, and, indeed, for an educated and intellectual circle, which would be in a position to appreciate the combination of mythographical erudition, apparent naïveté and gentle irony. None of the circle, of course, believed in the gods of the people. Zeus, conceived in Stoic fashion as the embodiment of a cosmic order, may have excited religious emotion; such a feeling is echoed in the third, fourth and fifth verses. But an euhemeristic Zeus, who was born and fought battles and whose tomb, even, is shown, is for the educated purely a creation of poetic fancy, in which people are interested only for the sake of the older poets. Now, Hesiod represents Zeus as born in Crete, and this was the prevailing tradition; when, therefore, Callimachus declares that he harbors serious doubts concerning the god's birthplace and then decides in favor of Arcadia, he both surprises and charms his audience by such a turn. The decision is wittily based on the declaration of a Cretan, the mythical seer Epimenides, whose verse, "The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies," is quoted by the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to Titus; still more facetious is the candor with which father Zeus himself is first asked to reveal which of the two parties in question falsified. Then a confirmation of his immortality is granted to the god, whence it must needs follow that the tomb of Zeus, shown by the Cretans, is fraudulent. Thus one sees that the religious spirit is utterly absent from this hymn; it is, to use Lessing's expression, a product of wit but not of feeling.

The poets and their audiences were interested, to be sure, in the naïveté of the myths current among the people, but they hardly felt the devotion with which our own romanticists steeped themselves in folk-belief. Theirs was rather an aesthetic joy in the colorful profusion of lively forms. No translation can render the chief charm which the poem had for its audience, namely the perfection of its metrical form. By a whole series of carefully contrived rules, adopted more or less by all contemporary poets, Callimachus bestowed upon epic verse a refinement, suppleness and sonority hitherto unknown. As compared with the Hellenistic verses, Homer's efforts impress one as almost devoid of art; judged by Alexandrian standards, the very first verse of the Iliad contains no fewer than three mistakes!

But let us return to the Hymn to Zeus. The poet first follows the established custom of hymns to gods in relating Zeus's birth in Arcadia; he summons to his aid a rich store of geographic names which, indeed, must not be examined as to their correct application. He then reports how the divine babe was conveyed to Crete and was suckled on the hills of Ida by the she-goat Amaltheia and how the Curetes drowned the infant's cries with their noisy dances and thus protected him from the snares of his father, Cronus. Now, in accordance with the prevailing usage, the deeds of the gods should have followed, the tale of the downfall of his father, Cronus, and of his allies, the Titans, the combat with Typhon and the Giants. But of all this we hear nothing. The poet continues:

Fair was the promise of thy childhood's
 prime,
 Almighty Jove! and fairly wert thou reared:
Swift was thy march to manhood: ere thy
 time
 Thy chin was covered by the manly beard;
 Though young in age, yet wert thou so
 revered
For deeds of prowess prematurely done,
 That of thy peers or elders none appeared
To claim his birthright;—heaven was all
 shine own,
Nor dared fell Envy point her arrows at thy
 throne.

Poets of old do sometimes lack of truth;
 For Saturn's ancient kingdom, as they tell,
Into three parts was split, as if forsooth
 There were a doubtful choice 'twixt Heaven
 and Hell
 To one not fairly mad;—we know right well
That lots are cast for more equality;
 But these against proportion so rebel
That naught can equal her discrepancy;

If one must lie at all—a lie like truth for me!

No chance gave thee the sovranty of heaven;
 But to the deeds thy good right hand had
 done,
And thine own strength and courage, was it
 given;
 These placed thee first, still keep thee on
 thy throne.
—Fitzjames T. Price

Why does the poet here suddenly and peremptorily brush aside Homer's story that Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, the three sons of Cronus, divided by lot heaven, sea and lower world? Why is the whole matter treated so broadly? Because the poet intends to proceed from the king of the gods to the earthly king, Ptolemy Philadelphus. Like Zeus, Ptolemy was not the eldest son of his father, and it is a fine compliment to the king that the older sons of Cronus recognized of their own accord the supremacy of the youngest brother—a free invention on the part of Callimachus. The suggestion is that the elder son of Ptolemy Soter should have acted similarly, something he had in fact failed to do. More and more clearly the poem points to the earthly king. Of mankind, only kings were the especial care of Zeus; lesser persons were assigned to minor divinities: the artisans to Hephaestus, the warriors to Ares, the hunters to Artemis, the singers to Phoebus. Under Zeus's guidance kings rule over nations; upon them he bestowed wealth and power—but not in equal measure upon all; upon Ptolemy in particular abundance. And now comes the surprising conclusion, which is related in form to the ancient hymns of the rhapsodes and clearly indicates what Callimachus and his colleagues needed:

All hail, Almighty Jove! who givest to men
 All good, and wardest off each evil thing.
Oh, who can hymn thy praise? he hath not
 been,
 Nor shall he be, that poet who may sing
 In fitting strain thy praises—Father, King,
All hail! thrice hail! we pray to thee, dispense
 Virtue and wealth to us, wealth varying—
For virtue's naught, mere virtue's no defense;
Then send us virtue hand in hand with
 competence.
—Fitzjames T. Price

The earthly counterpart of the king of heaven understood how to appreciate this poem, a masterpiece of its kind, better than modern classical scholars, who for centuries deemed this esthetic titbit unpalatable. Ptolemy commissioned Callimachus to catalogue the library and thereby gave him a distinguished and secure position.

About ten years later than the Hymn to Zeus is the song in commemoration of the death of Queen Arsinod, sister and wife of Philadelphus (July, 270). Of this song we have remains in a Berlin papyrus. This poem shows a style quite different from that of the hymn. Even the meter is very peculiar. It consists of anapaestic verses with iambic endings, and a caesura observed as a rule after the third anapaest produces a certain passionately emotional effect. The language has a Doric coloring; short and almost abrupt sentences indicate the stormy agitation. There is no trace of the waggish and easy-going conversational tone, of the droll irony of the hymn; everything is serious and there is genuine pathos.

After a short invocation of the god, without whom the poet is unable to fulfill his task, he immediately plunges in medias res. The soul of the deified queen has already passed the moon and has ascended into the sphere of unchanging constellations, when a pitiful cry resounds: "Our queen is gone!" What follows is hopelessly mutilated, but then comes a magnificent scene. Philotera, a sister of Arsinoe, who died a maiden, and who was likewise deified, happens to be setting out from Henna in Sicily, where she dwelt in the retinue of Demeter, to Lemnos, the seat of Hephaestus and his spouse, Charis. Across the sea she espies the dusky clouds of the funeral pyre or of the sacrifices offered to the dead. Full of anxiety she beseeches Charis to take her stand on Athos, the highest mountain of the Thracian sea, and to discover what these volumes of smoke may mean. Charis soon reports that "the smoke comes from Libya, from thine own city; a great misfortune must have befallen. Indeed, it is not as if the lighthouse of Pharus (the mechanical wonder of the age) were wrapped in flames; but the entire folk weep and wail, they bewail the loss of thy sister. The cities of the land have arrayed them in mourning." Here the papyrus breaks off. This certainly is courtly poetry and courtly mourning. But the feeling is not a pretense, for the death of the exceptionally clever and energetic queen must have been felt as a serious misfortune, especially in the circle of Callimachus. Further, the elaborate apparatus of gods and goddesses, the mighty picture of the clouds of smoke which drift from Egypt over the Thracian sea, the lookout from the lofty watchtower of Athos are all features that are still fresh and not outworn. We have here true baroque style, the conscious exaggeration of all forms and all feelings into colossal and gigantic proportions—a tendency with which we have long been acquainted in the plastic art of this period. The effects of baroque art are, always, gradually blunted because one artist tries to outdo the other and in the course of time mighty means are employed for petty themes. But as long as baroque art is fresh, its effect is indisputably strong.

That Callimachus pursues in this poem a course so different from that of the Hymn to Zeus must not be interpreted as desertion of his artistic principles. The bold impetus of the baroque style and the ingenious conversational tone with its popular touches were alike new; they were alike remote from the beaten track of an aging classicism. It was such novelty that was our poet's chief concern. Nothing is so objectionable to him as the faded and outworn. This sentiment he expressed most clearly in an epigram which is hardly translatable:

I detest the cyclic poem, I delight not in the
  way
That carries hither, thither all the traffic of the
  day;
I loathe a hackneyed beauty, and never will I
 drink
At the public drinking-fount; from all banality
  I shrink.
—Walter Leaf

To a somewhat earlier date appears to belong the most voluminous accomplishment of the poet, on which his renown with posterity chiefly rests—the four books of Aitia (Origins). In this work, also composed in elegiac distichs, he treats the origins of all possible festivals, games, ceremonial usages, customs, also the foundations of cities and sanctuaries. It was a selected array of legends and myths, for the most part very remote, which the poet made with great erudition and then presented in an attractive poetical form. The subject matter belonged in great measure to the province which we nowadays call folklore; precisely what was obscure, untouched and neglected had the greatest attraction for Callimachus.

Famous in antiquity was the prooemium, which the Roman poets Ennius and Propertius imitated. In a dream the poet envisions himself translated to Helicon, Hesiod's mount of the Muses; the Muses give him a draught from the spring Hippocrene and prescribe his theme. In the extant epilogue to the entire poem he makes Zeus grant him definite assurance that he had successfully followed in the path of Hesiod. This relationship with Hesiod, twice referred to by Callimachus, is surprising; Hesiod is an epic poet, while in the Aitia we have elegiac verse. It is plainly seen that the verse form is of little consequence to the Alexandrian; he can narrate an epic theme even in elegiac distichs, just as he employed in the majority of his hymns the hexameter and only once the distich. His selection of Hesiod, not of Homer, for his godfather, so to speak, is to be explained, first, by the fact that Callimachus' choice of theme causes the lack of an unified action; and, secondly, by the oft expressed preference of the Hellenists for the Boeotian poet: his contact with nature and his more prominent personality were especially congenial to them.

For the clear conception which we are able to form at present of Callimachus' narrative manner in the Aitia we are again indebted to a series of newly discovered papyri. Of these, two from Oxyrhynchus make the greatest contribution. One papyrus sheet stood apparently at the beginning of a book and neatly shows how the poet, in an easy conversational tone, introduces his theme to the reader. As we know from another source, he spoke of a wealthy merchant, Pollis, an Athenian who settled in Alexandria and who even on the banks of the Nile celebrated Athenian festivals:

Nor did the morn of the Broaching of the Jars pass unheeded, nor that whereon the Pitchers of Orestes bring a white day for slaves. And when he kept the yearly festival of Icarius' child, thy day, Erigone, lady most sorrowful for Attic women, he invited to a banquet his familiars, and among them a stranger who was newly visiting Egypt, whither he had come on some private business. An Ician he was by birth, and I shared one couch with him—not by appointment, but not false is the saw of Homer that God ever brings like to like; for he, too, abhorred the wide-mouthed Thracian draught of wine and liked a little cup. To him I said, as the beaker was going round for the third time, when I had learnt his name and lineage: "Verily this is a true saying, that wine wants not only its portion of water but also its portion of talk. So—for talk is not handed round in ladles, nor shalt thou have to ask for it, looking to the haughty brows of the cup-bearers, on a day when the free man fawns upon the slave—let us, Theogenes, put talk in the cup to mend the tedious draught; and what my heart yearns to hear from thee, do thou tell me in answer to my question. Wherefore is it the tradition of thy country to worship Peleus, king of the Myrmidons? What has Thessaly to do with Icos? And why with a leek and … loaf does a girl … at the procession in honour of the hero?"

—A. W. Mair

A few similarly mutilated questions follow. Then the deep sigh with which the Ician begins his reply is still distinguishable:

"Thrice blessed, verily thou art happy as few are, if thou hast a life that is ignorant of sea-faring. But my life is more at home among the waves than is the sea-gull."

—A. W. Mair

Here we have an altogether realistic scene from the personal life of the poet. For the knowledge of the cults and ritual usages of the small island Icos which he intends to relate he is not indebted to divine inspiration; he had the cults recounted to him at a banquet, by a merchant of Icos. This banquet, which is surely imaginary, is described with easy-going garrulity and gives the poet an opportunity to insert a few highly erudite remarks about Attic festivals, which, for a modern reader at least, call for commentary.

The first two days of the oldest Attic Dionysuis festival, the Anthesteria, were called Pithoigia or the Broaching of Jars, and Choes, Pitchers or Jugs; on these two days the slaves were permitted to carouse and feast with the free men. The aetiological legend connected Orestes with the establishment of the Feast of Pitchers. The Attic king Demophon was supposed to have received Orestes hospitably, although he was still polluted by matricide, and, in order to protect his citizens from pollution, to have ordered, in addition to the closing of the sanctuaries, a pitcher of wine to be set before every Athenian. The next-mentioned festival, that of Erigone, is the Aiora, the Swing Festival. According to the legendary form followed here, Erigone is the daughter of Icarius. To him Dionysus had given the vine, but Icarius was killed by intoxicated peasants to whom he had offered the first wine. After a long search, his daughter found his body and hanged herself on the tree under which the body lay. Dying she utters a curse, praying that the daughters of the Athenians shall suffer a similar death, and a suicide epidemic breaks out among the Athenian maidens. Thence she receives the appellation, "lady most sorrowful for Attic women." By order of the Delphic god, the Athenians atone for their offense by the introduction of the Swing Festival: on ropes fastened to trees the Athenian maidens swing to and fro in imitation of the corpse of Erigone stirred by the wind, and they accompany their swinging with the chant of a ritual song.

A similar transition to leisurely narrative from terse allusion intelligible only to scholars is found also in the longest papyrus fragment of the Aitia, which begins in the midst of the story of Acontius and Cydippe. It is a happy chance that from Ovid's Heroides and from the letter of the late, affected epistle-writer Aristaenetus the story of Acontius' love for Cydippe and the saga of the race of the Acontiadae, a distinguished family of Ceos, were already more fully known to us than is any other part of the Aitia. The handsome youth Acontius catches sight in the temple of Delian Artemis of the charming Naxian maiden Cydippe and falls madly in love with her. In order to win the maiden of another race he contrives a peculiar expedient: he scratches on a beautiful "Cydonian apple" (i.e., the quince) the words: "I swear by Artemis to marry Acontius." This fruit he let fall in the maiden's path; she took it up and in amazement read the inscribed words. Unsuspectingly she uttered aloud, "I swear by Artemis to marry Acontius," and thus unwittingly and unintentionally bound herself by this oath in the sanctuary of the goddess. She returns to Naxos and conceals the event from her parents. Soon afterwards her father decides to give her in marriage to a Naxian youth; the wedding is being prepared, but on the day of the ceremony the bride falls ill. After her recovery the date for the wedding is set for the second time, but again the maiden is seized by an obstinate fever; the same thing is repeated for the third time. The alarmed father goes to consult the Delphic Apollo, who reveals to him that his daughter is bound by the oath uttered in the sanctuary of Artemis and may marry none other than Acontius of Ceos. Now Acontius is fetched to Naxos; the two lovers celebrate their wedding and become progenitors of a flourishing Cean family. I have set the whole narrative forth in advance because it is quite difficult to follow the thread of this simple tale as related in the account of Callimachus. The extant portion begins with the preparation for the first wedding, namely with the mention of the very strange Naxian nuptial custom, the origin of which is only hinted at:

And already the maid had been bedded with the boy, even as ritual ordered that the bride should sleep her prenuptial sleep with a male child both whose parents were alive. Yea, for they say that once on a time Hera—thou dog, thou dog, refrain, my shameless soul! thou wouldst sing of that which is not lawful to tell. It is a good thing for thee that thou hast not seen the rites of the dread goddess: else wouldst thou have uttered their story too. Surely much knowledge is a grievous thing for him who controls not his tongue: verily this is a child with a knife.

In the morning the oxen were to tear their hearts in the water, seeing before them the keen blade. But in the afternoon an evil paleness seized her: seized her the disease which we banish to the goats of the wild and which we falsely call the holy disease. And then that ill sickness wasted the girl even to the gates of death. A second time the couches were spread: a second time the maid was sick for seven months with a quartan fever. A third time they bethought them again of marriage: a third time a deadly chill settled on Cydippe. A fourth time her father abode it no more but set off to Delphian Phoebus, who in the night spake and said. "A grievous oath by Artemis thwarts thy child's marriage. For my sister was not vexing Lygdamis, neither in Amyclae's shrine was she weaving rushes, nor in the river Parthenius was she washing her stains after the hunt: nay, she was at home in Delos when thy child sware that she would have Acontius, none other, for her bridegroom. But if thou wilt take me for thy adviser, thou wilt fulfil all the oath of thy daughter even as she announced. For I say that Acontius shall be no mingling of lead with silver, but of electrum with shining gold. Thou, the father of the bride, art sprung from Codrus: the Cean bridegroom springs from the priests of Zeus Aristaeus the Lord of Moisture: priests whose business it is upon the mountain-tops to assuage stern Maera when she rises and to entreat from Zeus the wind whereby many a quail is entangled in the linen mesh." So spake the god. And her father went back to Naxos and questioned the maiden herself; and she revealed to him the whole matter. And she was well again. For the rest, Acontius, it will be her business to go with thee to her own Dionysias.

So faith was kept with the goddess, and her fellows straightway sang their comrade's marriage hymn, deferred no longer. Then I deem, Acontius, that for that night, wherein thou didst touch her maiden girdle, thou wouldst not have accepted either the ankle of Iphicles who ran upon the corn-ears nor the possession of Midas of Celaenae. And my verdict would be attested by all who are not ignorant of the stern god. And from that marriage a great name was destined to arise. For, O Cean, your clan, the Acontiadae, still dwell, numerous and honoured, at lulis. And this thy passion we heard from old Xenomedes, who once enshrined all the island in a mythological history.…

—A. W. Mair

Here I break off. The story of Acontius and Cydippe comes to an end. But the mention of Xenomedes, a local historian of Ceos of about the Periclean age, affords the poet opportunity to give, in the space of twenty-two lines, a bird's-eye view of the whole earlier history of the island of Ceos, until the establishment of its four cities, just as Xenomedes had composed it. This appended catalogue, which of course is inserted only to enumerate other Cean Aitia, namely the foundation of certain cities, is without poetic charm, and hardly suitable for translation into modern verse if only because of the perplexing abundance of proper names; I count about thirty in these few lines. But what a mass of erudite material is forced into the story of Acontius and Cydippe! We have at the very beginning a mention of the peculiar Naxian custom that the bride must spend her prenuptial night with a boy both of whose parents are alive, and who is therefore especially suitable for ritual purposes. It is not a question of that prenuptial intercourse which Immermann describes in his Oberhof as a rustic custom; for the boy is not the bridegroom, but perhaps the human representative of a god to whom, at some early period, the right to the virginity of all maidens of the island was conceded. Such symbolic nuptials with a divinity are not unusual elsewhere in Greek religion; each year at Athens during the Anthesteria, the "king's wife," the Basilinna, was married to Dionysus. The aetiological legend to which Callimachus barely alludes is of much later origin than this ritual custom, which, certainly, is very ancient. We know it from the Homeric scholia, and it has left a trace in the Iliad itself: Zeus and Hera were united before the celebration of their sacred marriage.

But this is not the only piece of folklore with which the poet regales us. In passing he touches upon a custom of transferring to wild goats the so-called holy disease, i.e., epilepsy, just as Christ banished the spirits of those possessed into Gadarene swine. Again, the prophecy of Apollo affords the poet the opportunity of elucidating the origin of the name Parthenius as "virgin-river"; it bears this name because the maiden goddess Artemis is wont to bathe in its stream after the hunt. The lineage of Acontius is traced to a peculiar cult of Zeus Aristaeus of Ceos, whose priests were obliged to obtain by entreaty the blowing of the Etesian winds in midsummer on the appearance of the Dog Star, to assuage the heat of the dog days, and again in the early spring to pray for the favorable north wind which drives swarms of birds of passage into the nets of the island Greeks. This last feature is especially characteristic of the life of the inhabitants of the Cyclades, and I should not be surprised if even today some saint, instead of Zeus, is asked for favorable weather for quail catching. The very description of Acontius' fortune in love is also embellished with an erudite flourish. That the youth would not have exchanged the possession of his beloved for the gold of Phrygian Midas seems to us so commonplace a figure that one is almost surprised to find it in this connection. But it was only through the Hellenistic poets and particularly Ovid that the story of Midas became so familiar. Even stranger is the other boon for which Acontius would be unwilling to exchange his bride, namely, the swiftness of foot of Iphicles. Hesiod had told of him who, vying with the winds, ran so swiftly over a grainfield that the ears did not bend under his steps. Only the immense importance which the Greeks attached to all accomplishments relating to sport made it comprehensible that such athletic ability could possibly be mentioned as the equivalent of a bride.

In spite of all its erudition, Callimachus' narrative is by no means dry. Everything he relates presents vivid pictures. The sacrificial oxen doomed to death, which on the festal morning spent the force of their rage in the sea, the suffering maiden, the goddess Artemis weaving rushes on the banks of the Eurotas and washing away the dust of the hunt in the river Parthenius, the priests on the rocky shore with their prayer for help in quail catching, the maidens singing at the marriage ceremony and the bridegroom beaming with happiness we see, every one, clearly, before us. The language too is quite simple and strives for the popular tone by means of such proverbial expressions as "knives are not befitting boys" or "no mingling of lead with silver." In giving the oracle of Apollo the poet succeeded best in reproducing the tone of fable, which makes the great of earth and heaven speak the language of common folk. In his outspoken simplicity this Olympian matchmaker anticipates Tieck's fairy kings. But in fact this popular simplicity is as little sustained by Callimachus as by our own older romanticists, and doubtless he did not aspire to uniformity of tone any more than they aspired to it. When the poet immediately before a climax of his story sets about giving an explanation of a peculiar ritual custom and then suddenly leaves this explanation to moralize at length on the dangers of garrulity, or when he appends the dry statement that he read all this in Xenomedes to the bright conclusion of the tale, we have conscious violations of atmosphere such as Tieck was so fond of, and which Friedrich Schlegel emphatically praises as an artistic expedient. Callimachus carries this peculiarity furthest in a small Berlin papyrus fragment of the Aitia, in which he coolly advises the reader to imagine for himself the further action and thus to reduce the length of the poem. Never to be tedious, never to be commonplace, always to charm and to surprise were obviously the guiding principles to which the poet adhered in the course of composition of his long work. The endless store of scholarly material is articulated and dovetailed with the highest art. The mood is now a leisurely andante, now a headlong presto; at one time the tone has the simplicity of a fairy tale, at another it is ingeniously pointed, and always the clever and smiling face of the poet peeps through the richly variegated array of his characters. In regard both to art of composition and to narrative, Ovid's Metamorphoses, alone of ancient works, can be put side by side with the Aitia. In the Metamorphoses, however, Ovid's personality is by no means as prominent as is that of Callimachus in the Aitia. Of modern poems, as von Wilamowitz has rightly observed, Byron's Don Juan shows the closest resemblance.

With the Aitia Callimachus intended to terminate his poetic career; to this he gave clear expression at the end of the work. After Zeus has endorsed the Hesiodic character of his work, as we have said, and the god takes leave of him with the friendly wish that he may fare better in life than did the Boeotian poet, Callimachus subjoins these lines:

… Hail, greatly hail to thee also, O Zeus! do thou save all the house of our kings! and I will visit the haunt of the Muses on foot.

—A. W. Mair

To understand the last line, we must remember that, both in Greek and in Latin, 'pedestrian language' can signify only prose; and the learned work in the library, to which the poet intended to devote himself entirely, was as much in the service of the Muses as was his poetry.

Callimachus, however, did not live up strictly to the resolution which he had made. It is true that some of his poems, which I have as yet not taken into consideration, e.g., his epyllion Hecale … and the hymn The Bath of Pallas, belong to the period before the conclusion of the Aitia; other poems, however, are with probability or even with certainty to be put later.

Among these the book of Iambi is very peculiar. The same Oxyrhynchus papyrus which gave us the Cydippe contains more than two hundred and fifty verses of the Iambi which, unfortunately, are in many places hopelessly mutilated. Their form is the so-called halting iambic (scazon), a trimeter the last foot of which is inverted, i.e., a trimeter ending in υ--υ instead of in υ-υ-. This inversion gives the verse a lame, even vulgar effect. Hipponax of Ephesus had introduced this meter into poetry in the sixth century, and it was well suited for his vulgarly realistic, abusive and beggarly poetry. Because he was as unlike as possible an Attic youth such as we find on the Parthenon frieze, this uncouth proletarian aroused great interest among the Alexandrians, and Callimachus adopted not only his meter, which, in fact, he manages more artistically and vigorously than the Ephesian had managed it, but also the Ionic popular dialect. This is not the language which was spoken in the streets of Miletus and Ephesus in the time of Callimachus, but, as we learn from Ionic inscriptions, a dialect which for a long time had been obsolete, a language therefore which the Dorian Callimachus learned out of books. This is not so surprising as may appear to us today, for Greek poetry since Homer had almost always made use of a literary language which was never actually spoken anywhere. The Cyrenean had also to learn the language of his elegies and hymns; though in the fifth and the sixth hymn he gives a Doric tone to the epic dialect, the Doric element is, after all, but a varnish laid over the epic. At the opening of the Iambi he introduces as speaker Hipponax, who comes from Hades, "where they sell an ox for a penny," to tell a story. How far Hipponax is retained as a narrator cannot be exactly determined; he is not retained throughout the whole book, for in a later passage we hear, "This is the tale of Aesop of Sardis, whom, when he sang his story, the Delphians received in no kindly wise." The book has no unity, and one story or tale is quite loosely linked with another. After the story of the golden cup of Bathycles, which was passed from one to another of the Seven Sages because none of them was willing to consider himself the wisest, the tale of the quarrel of the Laurel and the Olive is humorously narrated. It is in good preservation. First the haughty laurel speaks and disdainfully looks down upon the "foolish olive." It boasts of the beauty of its foliage and, above all, of its position in religious worship. Laurel branches decorate every doorpost; every seer and every priest wears them; the Pythia is surrounded with laurel branches; Branchus cleansed the plague-stricken lonians with laurel and abracadabra. Laurel is used at festive banquets and by the choruses of Apollo, nay, the laurel is made the prize of victory at the Pythian games and is fetched from the Vale of Tempe for this express purpose. The laurel is pure and therefore has naught to do with mourning; the olive, on the other hand, is spread beneath corpses. But the olive is not easily intimidated by the laurel's boast. That which the laurel cites as a reproach, its use in the service of the dead, constitutes the olive's chief pride. The olive accompanies those gloriously slain in battle, as well as aged women and men on their last journey, and is more desirable for them than is the laurel for those who fetch it from Tempe. Even in the games the olive is more highly esteemed than the laurel, for the former is the prize at Olympian games, the latter only at Delphi—the very birds in the trees have long been twittering of this. Who brought forth the laurel? Earth, sun and rain, just as they created other plants; the olive was created by Athena when she contended with Poseidon. The fact that both are pleasing to the gods the olive does not wish to dispute. But now she plays her trump. The fruits of the laurel are useless, while the fruits of the olive yield a highly esteemed food and furnish delicious oil. Further, suppliants carry olive branches, and the Delians preserve most carefully the olive's stump. The olive remains triumphant!

Even during the olive's speech the birds in the branches were so boisterous that the olive had impatiently to bid them keep silence. The laurel is furious and wants to boast anew; but a bramble bush intercedes and, assuming an air of equality with the nobler trees, urges peace. But this intervention was ill received by the haughty laurel: "Art thou one of us?" says she, and is all the more eager to quarrel.

At this point, the continuity is broken. We have here a genuine example of lonian story telling—a merry tale with a didactic touch, such as was told in the market places and palaces of Ionia as far back as the seventh century, and such as may be heard even today in Anatolian bazaars.

It is therefore very remarkable that on the two following, hopelessly mutilated sheets, the poet suddenly turns to questions of poetic technique, mixture of dialects, use of certain meters and limitation to certain classes of poetry—apparently, throughout, in an irate tone. Thus even in the innocent Ionic tales the personality of the poet obtrudes, by way of expressions that have to do with his literary quarrels.

The third and fourth hymns, those to Artemis and to Delos, will be touched upon only briefly; both are rich in original invention and both often treat the gods with as little respect as did the Old Attic Comedy. The opening scene of the Artemis hymn is delightful. The little divine babe sits in the lap of her father, Zeus, and begs him, with a mixture of naivete and precociousness, to grant her all the gifts which she will later need as an adult goddess:

"O grant me, father," thus the goddess said,
"To reign a virgin, an unspotted maid.
To me let temples rise and altars smoke,
And men by many names my aid invoke;
Proud Phcebus else might with thy daughter
  vie,
And look on Dian with disdainful eye.
To bend the bow and aim the dart be mine,
I ask no thunder nor thy bolts divine;
At your desire the Cyclops will bestow
My pointed shafts and string my little bow.
Let silver light my virgin steps attend,
When to the chase with flying feet I bend,
Above the knee be my white garments roll'd
In plaited folds, and fring'd around with gold.
Let Ocean give me sixty little maids
To join the dance amid surrounding shades;
Let twenty more from fair Amnisius come,
All nine years old, and yet in infant-bloom,
To bear my buskins, and my dogs to feed,
When fawns in safety frisk along the mead,
Nor yet the spotted lynx is doom'd to bleed.
Be mine the mountains and each rural bower,
And give one city for thy daughter's dower;
On mountain-tops shall my bright arrows
 shine,

And with the mortal race I'll only join,
When matrons torn by agonizing throes
Invoke Lucina to relieve their woes;
For at my birth the attendant Fates assign'd
This task to me, in mercy to mankind,
Since fair Latona gave me to thy love,
And felt no pangs when blest by favouring
 Jove."
 She spoke, and stretch'd her hands with
 infant-art,
To stroke his beard, and gain her father's
 heart;
But oft she rais'd her little arms in vain.
At length with smiles he thus reliev'd her
 pain.
 "Fair daughter, lov'd beyond th' immortal
 race,
If such as you spring from a stol'n embrace,
Let furious Juno burn with jealous ire,
Be mine the care to grant your full desire,
And greater gifts beside …"
—H. W. Tytler

In this graceful nursery scene the request of the little maid for eternal maidenhood and for sixty daughters of Oceanus, who should be unmarried though already nine years of age, approaches travesty very closely. Father Zeus resembles the Raphaelite portrait in which he is represented as pinching the cheek of Ganymede. The poet almost oversteps the bounds of good taste in describing the wild Cyclops smiths, of whom all divine children are in dread: when they are naughty, their mothers quickly call for Arges and Steropes; in the place of these, Hermes blackened with soot comes out from his corner and the divine children cry and hide their heads in their mothers' robes. And yet the charm of this hymn rests entirely on the genre scenes, freely invented, and not on the scholarly catalogue of all the mountains, islands and cities where the Artemis cult flourished, which forms the conclusion of the poem.

In the Hymn to Delos, Callimachus enters into a dangerous competition with the first Homeric Hymn; but his poem contains such a rich flood of new ideas that, so far as his contemporaries were concerned, he no doubt forced the older poem into the background.

Among other things, the Celtic invasions and their menace to the Delphic sanctuary in 279 are effectively depicted in this poem. The poet knew these dangerous barbarians from personal observation. Ptolemy had procured a detached band of Celts to serve him as mercenaries and, finding that they proved insubordinate, he had them destroyed by fire on a small island in the Sebennytic mouth of the Nile. Callimachus describes "the Titans of a later day" and their strange weapons with a mixture of horror and admiration, just as do the Pergamene sculptors in their masterly statues of the Celts. It was on account of this Celtic adventure in Egypt that Callimachus admitted the Celts into his poem. To be able to do so, he resorts to a rococo contrivance: while the pregnant Leto seeks in vain for a place to bear her divine progeny—out of fear of the anger of jealous Juno all countries, cities and islands refuse to receive her—Apollo, yet unborn, utters from his mother's womb quite a long prophecy; he does not want to be born in Cos, because another god is destined to be born there in the future (King Ptolemy Philadelphus), with whom, in days to come, he will make common cause against the Celts, he himself at Delphi, Ptolemy on the Nile. For this reason Leto is bidden to go to the floating island of Delos and to give birth to him there! And this is not the first but the second prophecy of the unborn; he had already threatened Thebes, where in days to come he was to inflict destruction upon the offspring of Niobe.

Some twenty years after the completion of the Aitia, Callimachus composed the second hymn, that to Apollo, his only hymn with a political background.

Already Ptolemy I had appointed his stepson Magas viceroy of Cyrene. Magas later (about 274) rebelled against his stepbrother, Ptolemy Philadelphus, invaded Egypt, and achieved full independence, although the formal suzerainty of Ptolemy was preserved. To secure the restoration of Cyrene, at least after Magas' death, Philadelphus betrothed his son and heir apparent, the later Euergetes, to Magas' only daughter, Berenice. But when Magas died (about 250), his widow, Apame, a daughter of the Syrian king Antiochus, wished to dissolve the arrangement; she offered the hand of Berenice and with it the throne of Cyrene to a Macedonian prince, the young and handsome Demetrius. He promptly came to Cyrene and assumed the kingship; he appeared even more desirable to his mother-in-law, however, than to his bride. The very youthful princess became the head of a court conspiracy; Demetrius was slain in the bedroom of the dowager queen; the latter, however, was spared. Thereupon Berenice consummated her marriage to the Egyptian heir apparent, Euergetes, and shortly thereafter (246) ascended the throne of Egypt. Callimachus' Hymn to Apollo belongs, therefore, to the period between Magas' death and Berenice's marriage with Euergetes. The poet relates in detail the colonization of the country and the foundation of the city of Cyrene by the Greeks, and states emphatically that Apollo, the protector of the Greek colony, had solemnly promised to give it to "our kings," and Apollo is wont always to keep his promise. The hymn is, therefore, at the same time a poetic manifesto against the threatened defection of Cyrene from the empire of the Ptolemies. The personality of the poet stands out in incomparably bolder relief in the Hymn to Apollo than in the older hymns; in this respect a resemblance to the choral odes of Pindar is noticeable. In the Bath of Pallas Callimachus had already attempted to make his audience share in the emotions of those participating fully in a lengthy ritual, and in the present poem he resumes this manner of representation. At the beginning of the hymn we stand with the poet amid the crowd of worshipers in front of the temple and experience the expectant awe which precedes the appearance of the god. I quote the first few lines:

What force, what sudden impulse, thus can
 make
The laurel-branch, and all the temple shake!
Depart, ye souls profane; hence, hence! O fly
Far from this holy place! Apollo's nigh;
He knocks with gentle foot; the Delian palm
Submissive bends, and breathes a sweeter
 balm:
Soft swans, high hovering, catch th'
 auspicious sign,
Wave their white wings, and pour their notes
 divine.
Ye bolts, fly back; ye brazen doors, expand,
Leap from your hinges, Phcebus is at hand.
Begin, young men, begin the sacred song,
Wake all your lyres, and to the dances
 throng …
—H. W. Tytler

But the epiphany of the god which we are led by the thrilling proclamation to expect does not take place. In the following verses, which render praise to the god, we sometimes think that the chorus is singing, but then again the poet bids the ritual cry to be uttered and speaks of the chorus in the third person. From the glorification of Apollo's varied manifestations of power uninterrupted by any interposition of genre-like or even parodic features there gradually develops the story of Cyrene's foundation under Apollo's guidance. And here again verses are found which could only have been spoken by the poet, not by the chorus:

  To tuneful Phebus, sacred god of song,
In various nations, various names belong;
Some Boëdromius, Clarius some implore,
But nam'd Carnets on my native shore.
—H. W. Tytler

The Dorian god, Apollo Carneius, is the true racial god for the Cyrenean Callimachus, but not for the Alexandrian chorus. What is more, the poet does not want us to distinguish sharply his own utterances from those of the chorus; he would have us feel with him the mood of Apollo's festival. This mood is genuine, even if its true source be love of his native country rather than faith in the gods. The slaying of the Pythian dragon, which in other ceremonial songs in honor of Apollo forms the central theme, constitutes in this affectionate account of Cyrene an incidental appendix, as it were; the conclusion, however, shows a surprisingly personal touch:

 An equal foe, pale Envy, late drew near,
And thus suggested in Apollo's ear:
"I hate the bard who pours not forth his song
In swelling numbers, loud, sublime, and
  strong;
No lofty lay should in low murmurs glide,
But wild as waves, and sounding as the tide."
Fierce with his foot indignant Phcebus spurn'd
Th' invidious monster, and in wrath return'd.
Wide rolls Euphrates' wave, but soil'd with
 mud,
And dust and slime pollute the swelling flood:
For Ceres still the fair Melissae bring
The purest water from the smallest spring,
That softly murmuring creeps along the plain,
And falls with gentle cadence to the main.
 Propitious Phcebus! thus thy power extend,
And soon shall Envy to the shades descend.
—H. W. Tytler

Here we are suddenly thrust out of the religious mood and thrown into the midst of the battle waged by Alexandrian poets over the justification for the existence in their age of the heroic epic. Already in antiquity it had been recognized that these lines are a rough rejoinder to the reproach uttered in the circle of Apollonius of Rhodes, that Callimachus rejected heroic epos only because he himself lacked power to create one. The fact that Callimachus adds this strange appendage to the hitherto harmonious unity of the Hymn to Apollo shows clearly enough that this disruption of harmony affords him conscious pleasure, quite in the spirit of Friedrich Schlegel. The quarrel with Apollonius was probably the cause of a smaller, apparently far from pleasing poem, the Ibis. With reference to Callimachus, Ovid composed an elegiac poem of six hundred and forty-four verses under the same name, in which he curses an unnamed enemy, quoting a large number of purposely veiled stories of divine punishments and misfortunes. Ovid's Ibis is not, as was formerly believed, a free adaptation of Callimachus' poem. Of the latter we know only that it was substantially shorter, but similar to Ovid's in construction; not even the meter is certain. I maintain that Callimachus' poem bears a relationship to Apollonius Rhodius, in spite of recent doubts on the subject. I mention this work, although for us it is only a phantom, because of the considerable influence it exerted upon later poets.…

The sixth hymn, to Demeter, is closely related to the Hymn to Apollo in mood, style of narrative, and verse technique; the two hymns cannot be far apart in time of composition. I give a short introduction. Again we witness a great ritual celebration, the Procession of the Sacred Basket of Demeter, in Alexandria. We are among women standing along the street, who, excited and exhausted by fasting, eagerly await the approach of the procession and the appearance of the evening star which is to put an end to their fast. To shorten the hours of waiting, the women chat about the sufferings and might of the goddess. From this conversation there develops the long burlesque, yet gruesome, legend of Erysichthon, who was punished with a voracious and unquenchable appetite—a legend which occupies the larger part of the hymn. This gruesome example of the great goddess's power is related quite in the popular tone. To be sure, the waggish poet applies his colors so generously that what seemed ghastly to the pious appeared facetious to his readers; the worst part, the death by starvation, he suppresses. But this legend is kept within the frame of the ceremonial rite; the procession draws near and the women join it. The poet himself withdraws to the background and the final prayer is also in perfect accord with the harmony of the whole.

The basket swift-descending from the skies,
Thus, thus, ye matrons, let your voices rise:
"Hail! Ceres, hail! by thee, from fertile ground
Swift springs the corn, and plenty flows
 around."
Ye crowds, yet uninstructed, stand aloof,
Nor view the pageant from the lofty roof,
But on the ground below; nor matrons fair,
Nor youth, nor virgins, with dishevell'd hair,
Dares here approach: nor let the moisture flow
From fasting mouths to stain the mystic show.
But radiant Hesper from the starry skies
Beholds the sacred basket as it flies:
Bright Hesper only could persuade the power
To quench her thirst, in that unhappy hour,
When full of grief she roam'd from place to
 place,
Her ravish'd daughter's latent steps to trace.
How could thy tender feet, O goddess, bear
The painful journey to the western sphere?
How couldst thou tread black Æthiop's
 burning climes,
Or that fair soil, in these distressful times,
Where, on the tree, the golden apple beams,
Nor eat, nor drink, nor bathe in cooling
 streams?
 Thrice Achelous' flood her steps divide,
And every stream that rolls a ceaseless tide.
Three times she press'd the centre of that isle,
Where Enna's flowery fields with beauty
 smile.
Three times, by dark Callichorus, she sat,
And call'd the yawning gulf to mourn her
 fate:
There, faint with hunger, laid her wearied
 limbs,
Nor eat, nor drank, nor bath'd in cooling
 streams.
 But cease, my Muse, in these unhallow'd
 strains,
To sing of Ceres' woes, and Ceres' pains;
Far nobler to resound her sacred laws,
That bless'd mankind, and gain'd their loud
 applause.
Far nobler to declare how first she bound
The sacred sheaves, and cut the corn around,
How first the grain beneath the steer she laid,
And taught Triptolemus the rural trade.
Far nobler theme (that all his crime may shun)
To paint the woes of Triopas' proud son;
How meagre famine o'er his visage spread,
When her fierce vengeance on his vitals fed.
 Not yet to Cnidia the Pelasgi came,
But rais'd at Dotium to bright Ceres' name
A sacred wood, whose branches interwove
So thick, an arrow scarce could pierce the
  grove.
Here pines and elms luxuriant summits rear;
Here shone bright apples, there the verdant
 pear:
A crystal fountain pour'd his streams around,
And fed the trees, and water'd all the ground.
With wonder Ceres saw the rising wood,
The spreading branches, and the silver flood,
Which, more than green Triopium, gain'd her
 love,
Than fair Eleusis, or bright Enna's grove.
But when, incens'd, his better genius fled
From Erysichthon, rash designs invade
His impious breast: he rush'd along the plain
With twenty strong attendants in his train,
Of more than mortal size, and such their
  power,
As could with ease o'erturn the strongest
 tower.
With saws and axes arm'd they madly stood,
And forc'd a passage through the sacred
 flood.
A mighty poplar rais'd his head on high
Far o'er the rest, and seem'd to touch the sky
(The nymphs at mid-day sported in the shade).
Here first they struck: on earth the tree was
 laid,
And told the rest her fate in doleful moans;
Indignant Ceres heard the poplar's groans,
And thus with anger spoke: "What impious
 hand
Has cut my trees, and my bright grove
 profan'd?"
She said, and instant, like Nicippa, rose,
Her well-known priestess, whom the city
 chose;
Her holy hands the crowns and poppy bore;
And from her shoulder hung the key before.
She came where Erysichthon's rage began,
And mildly thus address'd the wretched man.
 "My son, whoe'er thou art that wounds the
 trees,
My son, desist, nor break high heaven's
 decrees:
By thy dear parent's love, recall thy train,

Retire, my son, nor let me plead in vain:
Lest Ceres' wrath come bursting from above,
In vengeance for her violated grove."
  She said: but scornful Erysichthon burn'd
With fiercer rage, and fiercer frowns return'd,
Than the gaunt lioness (whose eyes they say
Flash keener flames than all the beasts of
  prey)
Casts on some hunter, when, with anguish
 torn,
On Tmarus' hills her savage young are born.
"Hence, hence," he cried, "lest thy weak body
 feel
The fatal force of my resistless steel:
Above my dome the lofty trees shall shine,
Where my companions the full banquet join,
And sport and revel o'er the sparkling wine."
 He said. Fell Nemesis the speech records,
And vengeful Ceres heard th' insulting words;
Her anger burn'd: her power she straight
 assum'd,
And all the goddess in full beauty bloom'd:
While to the skies her sacred head arose,
She trod the ground, and rush'd amidst her
 foes.
The giant woodmen, struck with deadly fear,
That instant saw, that instant disappear,
And left their axes in the groaning trees:
But unconcern'd their headlong flight she
 sees;
For these t' obey their lord the fences broke,
To whom with dreadful voice the goddess
 spoke.
 "Hence, hence, thou dog, and hasten to thy
 home;
There shape the trees, and roof the lofty
 dome:
There shalt thou soon unceasing banquets join,
And glut thy soul with feasts and sparkling
 wine."
 Her fatal words inflam'd his impious breast;
He rag'd with hunger like a mountain-beast:
Voracious famine his shrunk entrails tore,
Devouring still, and still desiring more.
Unhappy wretch! full twenty slaves of thine
Must serve the feast, and twelve prepare the
 wine;
Bright Ceres' vengeance and stern Bacchus'
  rage
Consum'd the man who durst their power
  engage:
For these combine against insulting foes,
And fill their hearts with anguish and with
  woes.
His pious parents still excuses found
To keep their son from banquets given
  around.
And when th' Ormenides his presence call
To Pallas' games, by sacred Iton's wall,
Th' impatient mother still their suit denied.
"The last revolving day," she swift replied,
"To Cranon's town he went, and there
  receives
An annual tribute of a hundred beaves."
Polyxo comes, the son and sire invites,
To grace her young Actorion's nuptial rites:
But soon the mournful mother thus replies,
With tears of sorrow streaming from her eyes:
 "The royal Triopas will join thy feast;
But Erysichthon lies with wounds opprest;
Nine days are past, since, with relentless
 tooth,
A boar on Pindus gor'd the unhappy youth."
 What fond excuses mark'd her tender care!
"Did one the banquet or the feast prepare?
My son is gone from home," the mother cries:
Was he invited to the nuptial ties?
A discus struck him, from his steed he fell,
Or numbers his white flocks in Othrys' dale.
Meanwhile the wretch, confin'd within the
 rooms,
In never-ending feasts his time consumes,
Which his insatiate maw devour'd as fast,
As down his throat the nourishment he cast;
But unrequited still with strength or blood,
As if in ocean's gulfs had sunk the food.
 As snows from Mima's hills dissolving run,
Or waxen puppets melt before the sun,
So fast his flesh consum'd, his vigour gone,
And nervous fibres only cloth'd the bone.
His mother mourn'd; his sisters groans
  resum'd;
His nurse and twenty handmaids wept around:
The frantic father rent his hoary hairs,
And vainly thus to Neptune pour'd his
 prayers:
 "O power divine, believ'd my sire in vain;
Since thou reliev'st not thy descendant's pain:
If I from beauteous Canace may claim
My sacred birth, or Neptune's greater name;
Behold a dire disease my son destroy:
O! look with pity on the wretched boy.
Far happier fate, had Phcebus' vengeful dart
Struck, with resistless force, his youthful
  heart;
For then my hands had funeral honours paid,
And sacred rights to his departed shade.
But haggard famine with pale aspect now
Stares in his eyes, and sits upon his brow.
Avert, O gracious power, the dire disease,
Or feed my wretched son in yonder seas.
No more my hospitable feasts prevail,
My folds are empty, and my cattle fail.
My menial train will scarce the food provide;
The mules no more my rushing chariot guide.
A steer his mother fed within the stall,
At Vesta's sacred altar doom'd to fall,
This he devour'd, and next my warlike horse,

So oft victorious in the dusty course.
Ev'n puss escap'd not, when his fury rose,
Herself so dreadful to domestic foes."
 Long as his father's house supplied the feast
Th' attendants only knew the dreadful waste.
But when pale famine fill'd th' imperial dome,
Th' insatiate glutton was expell'd from home,
And, though from kings descended, rueful sat
In public streets, and begg'd at every gate:
Still at the feast his suppliant hands were
  spread,
And still the wretch on sordid refuse fed.
 Immortal Ceres! for thine impious foe
Ne'er let my breast with sacred friendship
 glow.
Beneath my roof the wretch shall never prove
A neighbour's kindness, or a neighbour's love.
Ye maids and matrons, thus with sacred song,
Salute the pageant as it comes along.
"Hail! Ceres, hail! by thee from fertile ground
Swift springs the corn, and plenty flows
 around."
As four white coursers to thy hallow'd shrine
The sacred basket bear; so, power divine,
Let Spring and Summer, rob'd in white,
  appear;
Let fruits in Autumn crown the golden year,
That we may still the sprightly juice consume,
To soothe our cares in Winter's cheerless
  gloom.
As we, with feet unshod, with hair unbound,
In long procession tread the hallow'd ground;
May thus our lives in safety still be led,
O shower thy blessings on each favour'd
  head!
As matrons bear the baskets fill'd with gold,
Let boundless wealth in every house be told.
Far as the Prytaneum the power invites
The women uninstructed in the rites;
Then dames of sixty years (a sacred throng)
Shall to the temple lead the pomp along.
Let those who for Lucina's aid extend
Imploring arms, and those in pains attend
Far as their strength permits; to them shall
  come
Abundant bliss, as if they reach'd the dome.
 Hail, sacred power! preserve this happy
 town
In peace and safety, concord and renown:
Let rich increase o'erspread the yellow plain;
Feed flocks and herds, and fill the ripening
  grain:
Let wreaths of olive still our brows adorn,
And those who plough'd the field shall reap
 the corn.
 Propitious, hear my prayer, O Queen
 supreme,
And bless thy poet with immortal fame.
—H. W. Tytler

The last poem of Callimachus, so far as our knowledge goes, is The Lock of Berenice, a courtly occasional poem which shows the poet's art at its zenith. In 346 Ptolemy Euergetes ascended the Egyptian throne, together with the young and beautiful queen, Berenice, to whose determined intervention the empire of the Ptolemies owed the recovery of Cyrene.

Immediately upon his ascension the young king set out for Asia to wreak his vengeance upon the Syrian king Seleucus for the murder of his sister. His wife, Berenice, vowed to the gods a lock of her hair for his safe return. After a brilliant and triumphant expedition which brought him farther east than any Ptolemy before him had penetrated, revolts in Egypt induced the king to return; he brought with him rich booty, and the queen fulfilled her solemn vow. But on the next day, to the consternation of all, the royal lock disappeared from the temple. Thereupon the famous court astronomer, Conon, contrived an exquisite means of rendering homage to the adored queen. As he had just discovered a new constellation among the fixed stars in the heavens, he named it the Lock of Berenice and invented the myth that the gods themselves had carried off the lock from the temple and placed it in the heavens, just as once upon a time they had vouchsafed eternity to Ariadne's crown in the heavens. Even today the constellation retains this name: it lies between the Great Bear and the Virgin.

This gallant invention of the astronomer, which must certainly have interested the court circles of Alexandria, Callimachus now glorified in a grand elegy. We possess it only in the Latin translation of Catullus, which can hardly be literal, but doubtless faithfully reproduces the poetic style. Recently, mutilated fragments of the original turned up in a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus. In Catullus' poem, which I give in translation, the lock itself is the speaker.

Who first discerned the heavenly lights, the
 rise
And set of stars, the pageant of the skies,
How wanes the splendour of the striding sun,
How stars set duly, when their course is run,
How from her orbit through the sky sweet
 love
To Latmos' caves can Trivia remove,
'Twas he, 'twas Conon who me too descried
A lock of Berenice's hair enskied,
A glory, which to many a god in prayer
She vowed, outstretching arms so smooth and
  fair,
What time the newly-married king arose
To leave his home and clash with Syrian foes.
Is Venus hated by new brides? Or is
It all to cheat fond bridegrooms of their bliss,
The tear-drop in the bower, the wail of woe?
So help me all the gods 'tis idle show.

My queen that lesson taught me on the day
When to grim war her bridegroom went away.
Or will you say you mourned not for your
  dear, But for your kinsman's absence shed
  the tear?
What! when the sorrow pierced your inmost
 soul!
When every sense was ravished, and your
 whole
Heart fainted in sore trouble! Yet I knew
No girl so valiant from a child as you.
Have you forgot the gallant deed which won
Your royal wedlock? Braver deed was none.
Then the last parting! All you tried to say!
Dear God! how oft you brushed the tears
 away!
What Power could change you so? You only
 prove
That lovers need the presence of their love.
'Twas then for your sweet husband's
 homecoming
To all the gods you vowed that you would
 bring
This lock of hair, with blood of bulls. Anon
Asia for Egypt by his arms was won.
Therefore, O queen! in duty bound I pay
Your ancient vow to heav'n's high host today.
Unwillingly, my queen, I left you; I
Swear by your life, your head, unwillingly
(And may whoe'er to these makes false appeal
Have due reward): but who could cope with
 steel?
Not ev'n the crest of all the crests that on
Earth's shores are traversed by bright Thia's
 son,
When through mid Athos Persian chivalry
Floated upon their new-created sea.
Shall locks of hair stand fast, when mountains
  fall?
God whelm the Chalybes, whelm one and all,
Him most, who foremost rifled earth, and 'gan
Draw out hard iron bars, the curse of man.
While still the sister locks made moan for me,
Lo! the winged courser of Arsinoe,
Ev'n Ethiopian Memnon's brother dear,
Striking the earth with waving wings drew
  near:
'Twas he who bore me through the darkling
 sky,
In Aphrodite's holy lap to lie,
When the Zephyrian queen with this intent,
Greek dweller on Canopus' shores, had sent.
So, on the threshold of the spangled skies
Lest Ariadne's golden crown should rise
And stand alone, that I no less might shine,
Spoil of that sunny head, with light divine,
Me, a new star in heaven, dripping yet
With brine, among old stars the goddess set.
For I beside Lycaon's child, between
The Maiden and the Lion's angry sheen,
Slope to my setting, slow Bootes' guide,
Who long delays to dip in Ocean's tide.
But though the gods by night beside me pace,
Though at the dawn I see white Tethys' face,
(Maiden of Rhamnus, suffer me to say
The word no craven fear shall hide to-day,
Though angry stars should scold and rend me,
 lest
The secret of my soul should be confessed)
Less joy have I herein than agony
To know my lady ever far from me,
With whom when she was maid, I drank
 untold
Abundance of sweet perfumes manifold.
But, lady mine, when on the stars you gaze,
While festal lamps in Venus' honour blaze,
Since I am yours, to me abundance sweet
Of perfume give, till all the stars repeat
With one accord: "O! were your lady mine!
Orion by Aquarius might shine."
—Hugh Macnaghten

The modern reader will not find it easy to adapt himself to the baroque style of this elegy; it is possible that the ancient reader was at first similarly affected. What surprises us most is the fact that the lock is made the speaker in a long poem, but this would not strike an ancient reader as strange, since the epigram had accustomed the ancients to speeches by inanimate objects. From the earliest times, poetic inscriptions were freely put into the mouths, as it were, of graves and votive offerings. As early as the sixth century we find in the epigrams tombs, statues, athletic implements, drinking cups and bowls speaking; why should not a consecrated lock utter speech? The only difference is that, while votive offerings are wont to be concise, the lock becomes diffuse in almost a hundred verses. We have already become acquainted with the rise of human relations and feelings to superhuman heights … in the dirge in honor of Arsinoë, with which the present poem is, in many respects, the most closely related of all of Callimachus' works. But what was set forth there with weighty gravity is here frequently turned into mirth and frivolity. The liberty which the old and renowned poet and scholar takes in teasing his young and royal compatriot is amazing. The description of the nuptial night and the amorousness of the queen, which strikes modern taste as being unduly coarse, was probably somewhat coarsened by Catullus. But, even if the tone be softened, as is done in the translation I have cited, the fact remains that Callimachus says things to his princess which no poet would have dared to say to a queen or a princess at the court of Louis XIV. The pathos, too, in places is so exaggerated that it calls forth a smile, especially in the comparison of the tunneling of Mount Athos with the cutting of the lock; but again there occur serious passages. Truly Callimachean is the entirely unexpected end, where the lock is so overcome with longing for its old place on Berenice's head that the entire arrangement of the fixed constellations in the heavens is of no consequence to it.

Here we see again united all those variegated elements which make Callimachus' art so inconsistent and so fascinating: spirit, wit, imagination, taste, mastery of form. Of all qualities that go to make a poet, he was denied but one—that, to be sure, the greatest of all—intense and lofty feeling; thus Ovid's verdict upon him is justified:

Even throughout all lands Battiades's name
  will be famous;
Though not in genius supreme, yet by his art
  he excels.

THE EPIC

Among the Hellenes the stream of epic poetry was never entirely dried up. Around the Iliad there arose the poems of the epic cycle, which related the happenings which preceded and followed the action of the Iliad; this entire epic mass bore the name of Homer until about the end of the fifth century. Aristotle was the first to limit the work of Homer to the Iliad and the Odyssey (though he let the mock epic Margites pass as Homeric), a view which later gained general acceptance. And now there began a diligent search for names for the authors of the cyclic poems, which had in fact been anonymously transmitted. The mythological and genealogical poetry like Hesiod's similarly continued into the fifth century. But in this instance a clear distinction between the Theogony of Hesiod and the genealogical poetry connected with it was not drawn as it was in the case of epic poetry between Homer and the poets of the Cycle. The late Catalogues of Heroines continued to be read as Hesiodic, and for this reason the Egyptian papyri restore to us an ever increasing quantity of these epics of the Epigoni, while not a scrap from the epic cycle has turned up in Egypt. Besides the two great spirits, Homer and Hesiod, who continued productive even in death, there were in Ionia poets of more tangible personality who lived in historic times. I will mention only Panyassis, an older relative of Herodotus, who composed a Heracleia about the middle of the fifth century, and Antimachus, the author of the Lyde, who composed a Thebais about the year 400. Bolder was the venture of Choerilus of Samos (about the end of the fifth century), who treated the Persian Wars in the epic meter. But though this attempt may have attained a certain success, on the whole the later epic was of little consequence in the literature of the fifth and fourth centuries; it paled into insignificance beside the shining splendor of the Attic Tragedy. When the Alexandrians consciously attempted to create a new poetry in tacit opposition to the Attic, the important question arose as to what attitude should be taken toward the Ionic epos. The want of new epic poetry was felt. Alexander had taken in his train the epic poet, Choerilus of lasos, in the hope that he would become a new Homer for the new Achilles—a hope in which he was wretchedly disappointed. There were those who held it possible and desirable for the great heroic epic to be resumed in the style of the cyclic poets, somewhat modernized perhaps, under the influence of Antimachus. Against this view Callimachus and his school waged vehement war. Time and again he insists on the rejection of the cyclic epic. When he says, "A big book is a big evil," he is thinking of corpulent epic. "I hate a cyclic poem," he says in an epigram, and another shows how lightly he esteems even the productions of the older cyclic poets. He lets the epic of Creophylus of Samos, The Sack of Oechalia, speak for itself, and adds a disparaging verse at the close:

A Samian gave me birth, the sacred bard
Whose hospitable feast great Homer shar'd;
For beauteous lole my sorrows flow,
And royal Eurytus oppress'd with woe:
But mightier names my lasting fame shall
 crown,
And Homer give Creophilus renown.
—H. W. Tytler

Callimachus' pupil Theocritus harps on the same chord:

For, even as I detest the artificer who essays
High as Oromedon's crest a mansion of men
  to upraise,
So the birds of the Muses I hate, who weary
  themselves in vain,
Cackling early and late, to rival the Chian's
 strain.
—A. S. Way

One must not believe that Callimachus would enter the lists against Homer himself. Parthenius … later dared to do so and called the Iliad "muck" and the Odyssey "mud." But Callimachus was convinced that any attempt at a great epic would be wrecked on the comparison with the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that compared to these the older cyclic epics were worth little, an opinion which Aristotle had already expressed. He would by no means abandon epic treatment of the materials of the saga, but the new epic must differ from the cyclic in every respect. Here he considers three points of special importance. First, the subject matter must not be taken from the sagas which had been dealt with innumerable times and were familiar to everyone, but it was necessary to discover new and untouched material in the immense abundance of Greek legends. Second, the compass of the poem must be reduced, so that it might be possible to achieve finished mastery of form, which to Callimachus was a necessary requirement of the poetic art. Third, the tone of the treatment must be entirely individual, and such as to bring the people of former ages near to the modern reader.

As a model of this new epic style Callimachus himself composed the small epic Hecale. Of the characteristics of this poem finds in Egypt have now given us a somewhat clearer idea, although the total number of the new verses amounts to only about seventy. The subject is an episode from the adventures of Theseus, the conquest of the bull of Marathon. The poem begins with an entertainment at the home of the poor but hospitable Hecale. The name of this heroine survived in that of a small Attic rural community and in that of a festival of Zeus, the Hecalesia, celebrated by the population of the surrounding country. The conclusion of the poem is devoted to the establishment of this festival. Hecale had prayed for the success of her bold young guest and had vowed a sacrifice to Zeus. But before Theseus returned victorious with the conquered monster, the good old woman had died, and the hero performed in her stead the sacrifice she had vowed. This saga, which the poet owed to some local chronicle of Attica, bears an aetiological character, and the poet might as well have included it in his Aitia.

The affectionate portrayal of detail with which the poverty of Hecale and her humble cheer are described was particularly effective. Ovid borrowed from the Hecale the colors for his idyllic pair, Philemon and Baucis. This pair has survived in Goethe's Faust. That the great heroes of antiquity could be placed in unpretentious, even needy circumstances was not altogether unheard of. The home of the godlike swineherd Eumaeus is luxurious compared to the hut of Hecale, but even so it showed rustic simplicity. But in general one is accustomed to see the Homeric heroes with all the circumstance of pomp and splendor, a splendor which had acquired its fairylike glitter through the dim recollection of the luxuriant Cretan-Mycenaean culture, and had made a powerful impression upon the Greeks of the seventh and sixth centuries. But in the meantime the standard of living had risen to extreme luxury. Even the palaces of Alcinous and Menelaus could hardly impress the courtly circle of Alexandria. It was much more effective for the audience of Callimachus to see' the heroes of the past represented as living under conditions which would appear quite unendurable to an educated Alexandrian.

An important point with reference to the style of composition of the Hecale, deduced from an Egyptian wooden tablet, is that about a hundred verses were devoted to a conversation between two birds, a considerable part of a poem that was surely not very long. The poet has inserted a rather detailed episode, whose motivation we are not able to discover, into the simple action of his poem. A crow relates to another bird the story of the birth of Erichthonius and the consequent wrath of Athena against the crows. She foretells further that the raven, heretofore white, would receive black feathers from the furious Apollo. Quite surprising is the conclusion of this bird episode:

While she spoke thus sleep seized her and seized her hearer. They fell asleep but not for long; for soon came a frosty neighbour: "Come, no longer are the hands of thieves in quest of prey: for already the lamps of morn are shining; many a drawer of water is singing the Song of the Pump and the axle creaking under the wagon wakes him that hath his house beside the highway, while many a thirled smith, with deafened hearing, torments the ear."

—A. W. Mair

This bold somersault of the imagination is very characteristic of Callimachus. The custom was for the birds to report the new day to mankind; the poets had many times used the cock's crow and the song of the lark to announce the dawn. Callimachus now turns the tables and has his birds deduce the coming of a new day from the restless activity of men. But the men whose early clamor was heard by the birds of the Attic mountains in the time of Theseus are in reality the inhabitants of the noisy metropolis of Alexandria. The noises which may often enough have disturbed his own morning slumbers—the song of the water carrier, the creaking of wagons and the smithy's clangor—Callimachus cleverly puts into the mouths of his mythical birds. Therefore, even in that class of poetry which least favors the portrayal of the personality of the poet and his period, Callimachus knew how to introduce modern and subjective elements.

THE EPIGRAM

Next to Asclepiades, Callimachus is by far the most important master of the Alexandrian epigram. He is not quite as simple as Asclepiades in language and thought, but is his equal in vigor and perfection of form, and superior in the art of saying much in a few words.…

Of the sixty-three epigrams which we have from his hand the majority, it is certain, belong to his youth, when he was teaching boys in Eleusis. But as an old man he occasionally harked back to the epigram with undiminished skill, as in the graceful homage to his young compatriot, Queen Berenice, in celebration of whom the last of his great elegies was also written:

Four are the Graces: three we know
And Berenice here below.
See how she holds their linked hands,

And wet with perfume by them stands.
Without her now who shines afar
Not e'en the Graces graces are.
—F. A. Wright

Callimachus shows a somewhat richer variety of form than Asclepiades and his companions. In addition to the customary elegiac distich, he employs other measures in four epigrams, one of which I quote:

Menoetas' quiver, with his bow,
 Serapis, at thy feet cloth lie.
No shafts are here—the stricken foe
 Of Hesperis shall tell thee why.
—J. A. Pott

This little poem, which also belongs to the poet's later years, under the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes, is in no wise as artless as it appears at first blush. Much history is involved in it. The Cretan archer Menoetas served in the king's army, and with him subdued the insubordinate inhabitants of Euhesperides in the territory of Cyrene. Now the war is over; Menoetas gives up his military service and dedicates his weapons, which had become useless to him, to Serapis, the great god of Alexandria. In the candid address to the god the bow is slightingly referred to by the name of its material, horn; we see that its possessor no longer values it highly. He can give up his bow and quiver, but not his arrows, for with them he has unerringly smitten the inhabitants of Euhesperides, and thereby faithfully discharged his warrior's duty. All this is told without a trace of boasting. We can hardly believe, yet can scarcely deny with certainty, that the famous old poet could at that time really be induced to compose a dedicatory epigram for a simple soldier.

But that in his youth Callimachus composed dedicatory and sepulchral epigrams to order seems to me indisputable. In contrast to Asclepiades, the number of his poems which give the impression of being real inscriptions is quite large. In fact many of those extant give only the necessary names and the statement of the dedication or burial. The charm of these little poems lies only in their conciseness of expression and the skillful arrangement of names. It is a charm which can hardly be rendered by translation; I venture, however, a few citations. First, I give the dedicatory inscription of a statue of a young maiden in the temple of Isis:

Fair Æschylis, from Thales sprung,
In Isis' fane an offering hung;
And thus the vow her mother made,
Irene's vow, is fully paid.
—H. W. Tytler

The only information given here beside the bare statement of the facts is that the mother and not the father vowed the statue.

Next comes a sepulchral inscription:

Who pass this tomb of Elean Cymon, know
The son of old Hippæus sleeps below.
—R. G. MacGregor

The second verse serves only to emphasize the father's name.

To be sure, Callimachus often understands how to sound a short but sharp note of sentiment even in the briefest form:

His son, now twelve years old, Philippus sees
Here laid, his mighty hope, Nicoteles.
—Lord Neaves

By being placed at the close of the verses the two names are emphasized, and thereby a contrast is drawn between the tender youth of the deceased and the high hopes his father lost in him, a motif which is ever suitable for graves of children at all times and in all places.

And now I give the pearl of all the poet's sepulchral epigrams:

Here Dicon's son, Acanthian Saon lies
In sacred sleep: say not a good man dies.
—Lord Neaves

I know that the second verse with its unexcelled simplicity of spirit has seemed to German fathers in our own day the best expression of mourning for a hopeful son.

Even when the poems become somewhat longer and more pretentious in content and expression, they may yet have been composed for the practical end of being inscribed. Note the pretty dedication of a brazen gamecock for a sporting victory, probably in cock-fighting. The fowl itself speaks, with waggish candor:

I am a bronzen game-cock—thus
My donor says, Eusenetus;
For of myself I know not aught—
Unto the Great Twin brethren wrought,
In gratitude for victory won;
I take the word of Phaedrus' son.
—Walter Leaf

How the confidence of the cock in the veracity of his donor Euaenetus makes it possible for the father and the grandfather of the dedicant to be mentioned is as unexpected as it is clever.

One of Callimachus' epigrams on cenotaphs of victims of the sea may also have been a real inscription:

Would there had never been a ship to run
  The hazard of the deep:
We had not wept for Diocleides' son
   As vainly now we weep.
Dead in the dreary waste, dear Sopolis,
   You drift upon the wave,
And nought is left us but your name, and this
   Only an empty grave.
—J. A. Pott

In the case of the epigram for the cenotaph of the Cyzican Critias we have already seen … that it was only an elaboration of an Asclepiadean poem and that in reality its presuppositions were impossible. Callimachus, therefore, used the form of the sepulchral inscription for clever pastime just as Asclepiades had done. Sometimes an epigram has the effect of an interpretation, occasioned by the poet's mood, of an actual epitaph.

Timonoe! Who art thou? By Heav'n! I should
  not thee have known,
But for thy sire Timotheus' name carv'd on
 thy fun'ral stone,
Methymna's too, thy natal town. Well wet I,
 losing thee
Great of thy lord Euthymenes the pain and
  grief must be!
—R. G. MacGregor

Apparently the poet approached the grave and at first read only "Timonoe." The name alone told him nothing, but he reads also the name of the father and the home, and he realizes that he has known the deceased and her husband. The poet's positive assertion that the surviving husband will be affected with great sorrow is a tribute to the dead.

A form of sepulchral inscription which in later times was repeated with variations ad nauseam and was often actually carved on stone was the dialogue between a passerby and the grave or the dead. Callimachus has an example of this form:

A

Rests Charidas beneath this tomb?

B

Here I,

Son of Arimnas of Cyrene, lie.

A

Charidas! what's below?

B

Eternal night.

A

What your returns to earth?

B

A falsehood quite.

A

And Pluto?

B

          But a fable: all as one,
Body and soul are ended and undone.
Soft words you'd have of me, I speak the
  true,
An ox in Hades fares as well as you.
—R. G. MacGregor

The poet first addresses the grave, which then replies, after the manner of a doorkeeper. Then the dead himself enters into the conversation. His replies to the curious questioning of the living regarding conditions in the hereafter are delightful. At first his utterances are brief and bitter, but when the stranger expresses shocked surprise at the complete evanescence of the amiable and hopeful pictures of the world below he is moved to a long and very incisive response. Myths, philosophical speculations and popular imaginings are amusingly intermingled in the few verses. Callimachus also had Hipponax say in his collection of iambi … that he comes from the place where they sell an ox for a penny.…

Callimachus' love epigrams, like those of Asclepiades, deal with either his own or others' love affairs. The following, for example, deals with a comrade:

To Fair lonis Callignotus said:
'None will I love but thee, nor man nor
  maid.'
So did he vow; but lovers' oaths, men say,
Reach not the ears of gods, they go astray.
Now for a youth he burns; and she, forlorn,
Is like poor Megara a thing of scorn.
—F. A. Wright

The last verse contains an allusion to a well-known oracle. The Megarians had complacently inquired of the Delphian god what rank they held among the Greeks. But they came off badly, for Apollo enumerated various states and peoples who took first place respectively in various domains and then closed:

But as for you, men of Megara, not third, not
 fourth, nor yet twelfth
Can ye be reckoned, nor come ye at all into
 possible counting.

In Callimachus' own amatory experiences handsome lads played a larger role than did girls. Probably his best love poem, a companion piece to the Amyntas epigram of Asclepiades, treats of his love for Archinus with a tenderness and warmth that is not surpassed by the work of any other epigrammatist:

If I did come of set intent
Then be thy blame my punishment;
But if by love a capture made
Forgive my hasty serenade.

Wine drew me on, Love thrust behind,
I was not master of my mind.
And when I came I did not cry
My name aloud, my ancestry;
Only my lips thy lintel pressed;
If this be crime, the crime's confessed.
—F. A. Wright

In love as in poetry Callimachus contemns anything trivial, or light of attainment; he is attracted only by the unusual and the difficult. To this feeling he gives open and impressive utterance:

The hunter, Epicydes, will not spare
To follow on the trace of fawn and hare
Through snow and frost, so long as still they
  fly;
But if one say " 'Tis hit," he passes by.
Even so my love, winged for no willing prize,
Follows what flees, and flees what fallen lies.
—Richard Garnett

Of his own love for a girl he speaks in only one poem, which is a skillful compression of a paraclausithyron into the narrow frame of an epigram:

O Cruel, cruel! As I lie
 Upon this ice-cold stone,
So may you sleep whose lovers sigh
 In misery alone—
The very neighbours grieve to see
How here I lie in agony.

So may you sleep! Within your heart
 No shade of pity lives;
Your pride in mercy has no part,
 To love no kindness gives.
Soon will the grey hairs come—and they
Perchance will make you rue this day.
—F. A. Wright

The repetition of the identical expressions was intended to echo the artless manner of the serenade before the door of the beloved, which comprised only few motifs often repeated.…