SOURCE: "The Practice of Pictorial Realism" and "The Everyday and the Low in Alexandrian Poetry," in Realism in Alexandrian Poetry: A Literature and Its Audience, Croom Helm, 1987, pp. 55-112, 155-227.

[In the following excerpt, Zanker studies the use of pictorial realism among Alexandrian poets, looking at Callimachus alongside Appollonius, Theocritus, and Herodas. Zanker's discussion of Callimachus considers many of his works, including the Aetia and the Hymns, but his thesis rests primarly on an extended study of the Hecale, which he finds particularly demonstrates the meaning of pictorial realism. He argues that Callimachus uses the style for a specific meaning—to show "that appearances may be deceptive and that moral nobility can be found in people of lowly circumstances"—and that he achieved "a totally new tone … in epic" with his use of pictorial realism.]

THE PRACTICE OF PICTORIAL REALISM

… In the case of Callimachus of Cyrene, … we have indisputable evidence of a keen yet judicious interest in pictorial realism, even though two works of great importance to this book, the Aetia and the Hecale, are in a fragmentary state,

To consider the Aetia first, it must first be noted that cult origins will not have been a theme naturally conducive to pictorial description. Callimachus is in general more interested in the brief delineation of the history which led to the founding of cults. Even so, Fr. 114.1-17 takes the form of a dialogue between Callimachus and a statue of Apollo, and in the course of the conversation an explanation is given of why Apollo is carrying a bow in his left hand and the Graces in his right; a definite picture of the statue emerges, though it appears to have been meant only as the occasion for Callimachus' explanation of its peculiarities.

The Hymns yield much interesting evidence for Callimachus' approach to pictorialism and the contexts to which he thought it appropriate. The third, that to Artemis, claims our particular attention. The poem opens with a family tête-à-tête, where little Artemis, still a child, is seated on her father Zeus' knee and in a forthright, ironically naive manner asks for her divine attributes as maiden goddess of the hunt and of childbirth and for polyonymy:

… Of Artemis we sing, … beginning at the time when, still a little child, she was sitting on her father's knees and addressed her parent with these words: 'Daddy, grant that I may keep my virginity forever, and grant me many names, so that Phoebus won't vie with me, and grant me arrows and a bow …' With these words the child wanted to touch her father's beard, and she kept stretching her hands in vain so that she might touch it. With a laugh her father nodded assent and said, caressing her, 'When goddesses bear me children like this, little need I bother about Hera's jealous anger.'

The homely visual details of the little goddess, repeatedly straining to touch her father's beard and being unable to reach, Zeus' delighted laugh and his spite for his wife, Hera, are carefully emphasised. Now one of Callimachus' models is a scene in the Iliad and a brief comparison will prove instructive. In Homer, Artemis, who is unlike her counterpart in Callimachus in that she is adult, has been put in her place by her stepmother, Hera, for meddling in the affairs of gods greater than herself in the divine struggle over Troy. She flies home to her father and sits weeping on his knee, her robe trembling with her sobs; Zeus makes her look at him and with a smile asks her who is troubling her and she tells him it is Hera and blames her for the gods' dissension (II. 21.505-13). The pose of the daughter on her father's knee, Zeus' laughter and the family frictions are already present in Homer, but Callimachus' version is even more intent upon highlighting amusing domesticities, again of a predominantly visual nature, and upon giving the scene individuality and vividness by so doing; its aim is to dwell on the particular, individualising detail, whereas the Homeric passage gives the impression of stylisation, not only because of its formulaic phraseology, but also because a sense of decorum is preserved to a greater degree; Callimachus dwells upon characterising, homely strokes and invests the portrayal of the behind-the-scenes dealings of the gods with a feeling of tout comme chez nous. Another main model seems to be a hymn to Artemis by Alcaeus (304 Lobel-Page (= Sappho 44A Voigt)) in which Artemis makes her vow of chastity with a solemnity which contrasts pointedly with the tone of the Callimachean Artemis' request, and in which the pictorial is scarcely discernible at all. The comparison with these two models thus reveals Callimachus' heightened concern with visual detail; it also illustrates the close connection between pictorialism and the depiction of the everyday which of course lends the scene its humour. The fusion of vividly pictorial representation of realistic matter and momentous grandeur of setting is curiously paralleled in baroque art.

The second chief section of the hymn maintains a pronounced emphasis on the pictorial. At lines 46ff. Artemis goes to Hephaestus' workshop to ask the Cyclopes for a bow, arrows and a quiver. The giants are at work around a red-hot mass of iron and an anvil (48f.). The attendant nymphs are terrified at the sight of them, and Callimachus does not miss the opportunity to give a vivid picture of the Cyclopes' appearance: they are 'dread monsters that look like the crags of Mount Ossa and beneath their brow their single eyes, like a shield with four folds of hide, glare fearfully' (51-4). The nymphs are frightened, too, by the noise the smiths make and, once again, we are given a picture of the Cyclopes as they swing their hammers above their shoulders and strike the iron or bronze hissing from the furnace, their hammer blows falling in alternate succession (59-61). But no shame to the nymphs, Callimachus remarks, for not even the goddesses who are already past their childhood look upon the Cyclopes without a shudder (64-5). Moreover, he says, divine mothers bring their disobedient daughters to heel by calling the Cyclopes to frighten them; or Hermes comes out from inside the house, all stained with ashes, and plays bogy with the child, who covers her eyes with her hands and runs to her mother's lap (66-71). But Artemis is different from the nymphs. On an earlier occasion, when she was only three years old (72) and needed her mother, Leto, to carry her (73), she had visited Hephaestus who had promised her the presents customarily given to a new-born child when an adult sees him for the first time …; the little goddess sat on Brontes' knees and tore a handful of hair from his chest (76f.); 'even to this day', we are told, there remains a bald patch on Brontes' chest, just as when a man gets mange and loses his hair (78-9). So now Artemis finds no difficulty in framing her request boldly (80). Homely realistic detail and thoroughgoing pictorial portrayal of it form the appeal of the passage and humorously contrast with the grandeur of the metre and the dignity of treatment normally expected in a hymn.

Though Callimachus' pictorialism is evidenced most clearly in the Hymn to Artemis, it is by no means exclusively confined to that poem. Consider Callimachus' account in the Hymn to Delos of the crucial moment when Leto finally gives birth to Apollo: she comes to rest and sits by the River Inopus, undoes her girdle and, wearied by her pain, leans backwards with her shoulders supported by the trunk of a palm-tree; her whole body is covered in sweat; she addresses her unborn child and begs him to come forth (205-12). The visual elements here employed to heighten the pathos of the scene may certainly be called realistic. Callimachus' model is the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and a comparison will illustrate the Alexandrian poet's realism. In the Homeric hymn, the birth of the god is mentioned briefly at lines 25-7, but is treated at greater length ninety lines later (115-19). Eileithyia visits Delos and Leto longs to give birth; she throws her arms around the palm-tree, kneeling on the soft meadow, and the earth smiles beneath; Apollo springs forth into the light of day and all the goddesses shout for joy. The scene is pictorial enough, though perhaps less precisely observed, but the birth is an easy one and Eileithyla is allowed to help Leto, whereas Callimachus makes no mention of her presence at the birth. Callimachus has invested the scene with a dramatic force and pathos absent from his model; his choice of pictorial detail from actual childbirth with its emphasis on pain and particularly his alteration of Leto's pose to one realistically evocative of utter exhaustion are the main means of achieving his effect. And … we have evidence of just how closely the aims of enargeia and mimesis biou are connected.

Now this passage is set in an account of Leto's flight in which Callimachus has gone far out of his way to introduce incidents which are realistically quite fantastic and incredible. We can hope to understand the motivation behind his procedure only once we have analysed, in their proper place, the other aspects of the scene's realism.

Also in the Hymn to Delos is the description of Iris, where the messenger-goddess sits down after informing Hera that Leto has given birth to Apollo:

… So she spoke and sat at the foot of the golden throne like a hunting hound of Artemis which, after the swift chase, sits at her feet, its ears pricked up, always ready to receive the goddess's call; like that, Thaumas' daughter sat at the foot of the throne. She never neglects her post, not even when sleep brushes its wing of forgetfulness against her, but there by the corner of the great throne she sleeps tilting her head aslant a little. She never undoes her girdle or her swift hunting-boots in case her mistress gives her even a sudden command.

Pindar's passage on Zeus' eagle being lulled to sleep by the phorminx (P. 1.6-10) is in some ways interestingly comparable. The eagle's external appearance is clear enough: the bird is perched on Zeus' sceptre, its wings relax, its head droops, its eyes are closed, and its supple back rises and falls as it breathes. But Pindar moves easily from this external picture to the less pictorial imagery of the dark cloud which the phorminx spreads over the eagle's head, 'a sweet seal for his eyelids', and of the dream and enchantment that the phorminx induces. Callimachus is far more pictorial and, moreover, limits his less visual sleep-imagery to the motif of the brushing of sleep's wing. The lines present an image of Iris so graphic and precise in its detail that scholars have claimed that they are inspired by particular works of plastic art, though unanimity has never been reached over which. The picture may well have been influenced in its general conception and composition by works of art and the poet's eye may have been opened to the possibilities of pictorialism by his contemplation of art, a point I have already argued, but there is no need to postulate the influence of any particular statue or the like, given the fact that for Callimachus and his movement pictorialism, which we have found denoted in second-century criticism by the word enargeia, was in itself a well-attested aim in literature. Still, in the case of the description of Iris one may agree with a modern scholar that 'in general Callimachus' imagery is less static than this'. As we shall see, however, other Alexandrian poets, notably Apollonius and Theocritus, offer us even more detailed and extended descriptive passages.

One further aspect of the Hymns deserves mention here. It is the 'mimetic' approach of the Hymn to Apollo, The Bath of Pallas and the Hymn to Demeter. The most recent editors of these poems agree that they are literary pieces and are meant only to create the illusion that they accompany actual rituals: the audience, consequently, was not present at them. The narrators, who are identifiable with the masters of ceremonies at the different festivals, realistically evoke for Callimachus' audiences an atmosphere of religious excitement by reporting the different stages of the rites, by urgent commands to the participants, by addresses to the deity and by expressions of awe at his or her epiphany. This realism is not pictorial, but it is analogous to pictorial realism as a style lending immediacy to its subject.

It is now time to examine a poem by Callimachus which exhibits, despite its fragmentary state, all the major aspects of Alexandrian realism and may be called the centre-piece of this book. It is the Hecale. The fragments provide ample evidence that Callimachus throughout the epyllion aimed at pictorially realistic description.

We possess a fragment which appears to have described the weather on the day Theseus left (Fr. 238.15-30). It describes first, I take it, the weather as it was at noon:

… So while it was still noon and the earth was warm, the bright sky was clearer than glass and not a wisp of cloud appeared anywhere, and the heavens stretched cloudless.

Evening is described as 'the time when girls take the wool they have spun to their mother, ask for their evening meal and take their hands from their work' (19-20), in itself a picturesque scene. It is then that the storm suddenly breaks over Attica; the clouds, the wind and the lightning are described; and the mountains of Attica over which the storm passes, Parnes, Aegaleos and Hymettus, are detailed (21-30). This will be the storm which forced Theseus to lodge with Hecale, and it is evident that Callimachus has taken much care over presenting a vivid picture of it and the time it occurred. Moreover, the storm he describes motivates Theseus' taking refuge in Hecale's hut.

Callimachus' portrayal of Hecale herself is of key importance to this book. Her person, life and milieu are described with a remarkable visual realism, and her poverty is emphasised largely by means of it; enargeia and mimesis biou are therefore once again inseparable. Callimachus' presentation of her as a figure of low realism in fact depends for its impact on his vivid description of her, so that the real point of his pictorialism is only intelligible once the background to low realism has been explored. Discussion of the description of Hecale must therefore wait till that has been done. It is sufficient here to note that the 'heroine' of the epyllion—who, after all, gives it its name—is described extensively and in arresting detail, and that the poem's real point (aside from its formal, aetiological one), namely that appearances may be deceptive and that moral nobility can be found in people of lowly circumstances, actually depends upon pictorialism.

It looks as if Theseus' victory over the bull of Marathon was also described. One fragment tells how Theseus 'forced the terrible horn of the beast down to the ground' (Fr. 258). We learn from Fr. 288.1 S. H. (= Fr. 260.1 Pf.) that Theseus probably broke off one of its horns with his club. Another fragment describes how after the struggle Theseus 'dragged [the bull] and it followed, a reluctant travelling-companion' (Fr. 259). A more substantial fragment (Fr. 288.1-15 S.H. = Fr. 260.1-15 Pf.) depicts Theseus' triumphal procession, dragging the bull by its remaining horn, and relates how the country-folk grew frightened at the sight of the hero and the animal and showered him with leaves in a ritual φνλλοβολία; the simile describing the number of the leaves, and hence the people's relief, is also graphic:

… The south wind does not spread so great a fall of leaves, nor even the north wind itself when it is the month of falling leaves, as the country folk then showered Theseus with, around and on both sides of him, … surrounded by the crowd[?], and the women … crowned him with girdles …

The fragments permit us, surely, to conclude that Callimachus' narration of the victory was pictorially vivid.

The description of the dawn at which Theseus returns to Hecale is a charming mixture of everyday and pictorial detail. Dawn is called the time when burglars have given up searching for loot; the early morning lanterns are beginning to appear and many a water-bearer is singing the Song of the Well; people whose house is on the road-side are woken by the axles squeaking under wagons; and blacksmiths are either being troubled for a light or are troubling others for it (Fr. 288.65-9 S.H. = Fr. 260.65-9 Pf.).

There is only one more poem of Callimachus that need be discussed here to demonstrate that pictorialism was by no means limited to the poet's epos. In Iambus 6 (Fr. 196) Callimachus goes to inordinately painstaking lengths to describe the statue of Zeus at Elis to a friend sailing off to see it. The Diegete tells us that he describes the length, height and width of the base, the throne, the footstool and the god himself, and how much the whole group cost. The fragments mention the winged Victory in Zeus' hand (39), the Horae (42) and, conjecturally, the Graces (44f.), attested elsewhere as adornments of the statue. The poem, as we know it, looks like a monstrous display of erudition, and its joking point may have been to render Callimachus' friend's visit to Elea unnecessary.

We have now surveyed sufficient evidence to allow us to conclude that pictorial realism is used extensively by Callimachus. Whenever we have been able to compare Callimachus' treatment of earlier, especially Homeric models, we have seen that he extends the everyday, low and pictorialist elements in his version. Sometimes pictorialism is used to give high-flown material an impression of immediacy or ironic tout comme chez nous, as in the Hymns, sometimes it is integral to his thematic point, as in the case of the Hecale, but it is always an important aspect of his poetry.…

THE EVERYDAY AND THE LOW IN ALEXANDRIAN POETRY

The Alexandrians' literary-critical thinking on the content appropriate to the genres can be reconstructed quite clearly. The movement's central figure, Callimachus, provides us with the most direct evidence. This is found in the proem to the Aetia, which is written in elegiacs, but by this time narrative elegiac and hexameter poetry were both viewed as epic, so that the prologue's programme is relevant to Callimachus' thought on hexameter epic as well. Callimachus claims that his poetry is criticised 'because I did not accomplish one continuous poem of many thousands of links on … kings or … heroes, but I unroll a tale … for a short time, like a child' (Fr. 1.3 6). The comment is valuable to us because it explicitly shows that readers of Callimachus' poetry missed in it the 'kings and heroes' of traditional epic. Nor does the poet reject these charges. Moreover, the statement implies that his interest was perceived to have been fixed on people of another kind. That these are ordinary, everyday folk like Acontius and Cydippe and their non-heroic encounter, or low folk like Molorchus, or heroes in uncharacteristically domestic settings like Heracles, will become evident in the following pages. Callimachus' reply to his critics that Apollo taught him to tread untrodden poetic paths (25-8) is probably in part a defence against their objections to his avoidance of traditional themes and subject matter. Perhaps the concern with such people is a reason for Callimachus' interest in Hesiod, whom he seems to have taken over as the authority for his literary doctrine when he rejected traditional epic on the scale of Homer's poems and the bombast that he apparently viewed as the standard epic tone. Quite apart from certain stylistic features of Hesiodic poetry, like its comparative shortness, its continual change of subject, its disjointed, seemingly illogical sequence of thought and its personal tone, Hesiod's celebration of the farmer and not the kings in the Works and Days may have struck Callimachus as particularly congenial and fruitful.

It appears from the Aetia-prologue, then, that Callimachus was consciously subverting traditional expectations of epic subject-matter. Perhaps he was thinking of Aristotelian notions of epic in particular. But Callimachean thinking can be discerned elsewhere in the Alexandrian movement. Apollonius, for example, yields clear evidence in the Argonautica that his conception of the material appropriate to epic was untraditional. He makes the seer Phineus prophesy to the Argonauts that the success of their expedition depends on Aphrodite (2.423f.). Now Phineus is like Teiresias who advises Odysseus which deity should be supplicated (Od. 11.101-3, 130ff., and with A.R. 2.310 compare Od. 10.539f.), but, while Teiresias directs Odysseus' attention to his persecution by Poseidon, Phineus alerts Jason to the special role to be played by the goddess of love. Love is an emotion which post-Euripidean poets and especially the Alexandrians seem to ahve viewed as a more human and familiar and hence a more compelling motive for action than a desire for glory or the like. Apollonius makes his intention even more plain in his proem to Book 3. There he calls upon Erato, the Muse of love poetry, to tell 'how Jason brought the fleece to lolcus through the love of Medea', and makes much of the Muse's close connections with Aphrodite (3.1-5). And he shares Callimachus' misgivings over the traditional status of the epic hero, for … in his characterisation of Jason he scales down traditional ideas of heroic grandeur to a more emphatically everyday level.

Theocritus' agreement with Callimachus' programme cannot reasonably be doubted. There is the interesting passage in Idylls 16, the Graces or Hiero, in which he shows very clearly what he really thinks to be the material appropriate to modern epic. At lines 48-57 he cites examples of poetry's power to confer immortality on men, and it is interesting to see what caught is eye. He devotes three lines to heroes connected with the Trojan war, but he devotes no less than seven to the Odyssey (51-7), thereby showing a preoccupation with an epic which refused to fit into the neat categorisations of literary criticism as an epic of unequivocal heroic grandeur. But, most interestingly for us, the list of persons and events in the Odyssey culminates with the swineherd Eumaeus and the neatherd Philoetius, and with Laertes, whom we most readily picture at work in his orchard. Theocritus, then, is interested in the phauloi of the tradition, in particular those of the countryside. Moreover, he expresses this interest in poetry by making a reluctant patron say 'Who would listen to another? Homer is enough for everybody' (20). Poetry, Theocritus suggests, is not 'written out' provided that it strikes out in new directions, and, although Homer is certainly pre-eminent, there are aspects of his poetry which are worth closer attention. Figures like Eumaeus, who stand on the periphery of the heroic main narrative, become the literary legitimation of his pastoral poetry, a specimen of which he makes later in the poem (90-7), and it is to such phauloi that he wished to give the centre stage in his new epos. This is tantamount to saying that in his pastorals he crosses the traditional genres, though that observation is true also of the other main branches of his oeuvre. The passage became something of a manifesto for later pastoral. The Lament for Bion, for an example, claims that while Homer sang of heroic persons Bion eschewed warlike themes and opted instead for Pan, pastoral song and love (70-84).

One of the problems of particular concern to the Alexandrians was clearly, then, the nature of the hero appropriate to contemporary epic. Callimachus, Apollonius, Theocritus, and the author of the Lament all show a distaste for traditional concepts of what constitutes a literary hero, and their literary-critical utterances indicate that they were predisposed towards everyday and low heroes in epic and hence towards the violation of generic expectations like those formulated by Aristotle.

Our main field of inquiry in what follows will be epic. It will pay to heed the reminder of Ziegler and others that Alexandrian epic was in fact an isolated branch of the epic written in the Hellenistic period and that the hexameter-poetry of the age continued to deal with grand themes, whether mythological, historical or encomiastic. Evidently, the grand associations of the genre and its metre were still the norm. Further proof of this is provided (if it were still needed) by the fact that later in the third century Ennius chose to introduce the metre into Latin poetry and to employ it in his Annales: if its acoustic grandeur had been dissipated, would he have taken such an enormous step? In investigating the Alexandrians' use of the everyday and low in epic, we must place their generic experimentation within the context of contemporary epic as a whole in order to try to appreciate their poetry's impact on people's minds and ears.

One of the chief aims of this chapter will be to establish the tones and effects which the Alexandrians created through their deployment of everyday and low material. Tone is a notoriously labile commodity, and I am aware that many readers may disagree with my judgements. I have, however, at least tried to relate these to the aesthetic, cultural, political and moral sensibilities of the period as I understand them. But in my attempt to ascertain the tone that might have been perceived by an Alexandrian audience I am aware that here too responses were probably multiple. I can only hope that my readings will not contradict what is known of the Alexandrian audiences' tastes and that they will approximate to the responses of a reasonable section of the original readership.

A poet obviously preoccupied with the everyday and the low is Herodas. His bawds, panders, child-delinquents, sadistic schoolmasters, chattering housewives, jealous mistresses of sexually disobedient slaves, and his dildo-stitching cobblers are realistic enough as subject-matter, but Herodas makes no attempt at an analytical presentation of their circumstances, or, we may add, of their psychology: the characters are designed simply to provoke our laughter. We may, in other words, conclude that in his poems the separation of genres remains intact.

We need examine only one of the Mimiambi in order to substantiate these conclusions. The second, The Pandar, is as instructive as any. In his legal suit before the Coan jury Battarus, the Pandar, is, for comic effect, repeatedly made to revert to well worn phrases and arguments in Attic oratory. So, for instance, he solemnly reminds the court of their duty to judge him and the sea captain, Thales, as equals before the law, despite the latter's superior wealth (1-10), argues that judgement on his suit will determine the security of the state and the rights of non-citizens like him (25-7, 92-4), and appeals to the legendary glories and deeds of the jury's Coan ancestors to stimulate pride of country (95-8). He even offers his own body to be tortured as if he were a slave, provided that Thales places before the court the compensation-money. This is an impudent and avaricious perversion of the law that the accuser had to pay damages to the master of a slave tortured before giving evidence on a charge which proved false (87-91). The Pandar's claptrap rhetoric is a means of characterising him, rather than simply a parody of legal rhetoric.

Another aspect of Battarus' characterisation is his continual use of proverbs, on occasion supremely sordid. Proverbs had long been an integral part of mime and Sophron himself is attested as having used them extensively. So, for example, when the Pandar asks the clerk to stop the clepsydra, he is reminded of a proverb running something like 'lest the anus is incontinent and the bedcovers are stained' (44-5). Again, he complains that he was treated by Thales 'like the mouse in the pitch-pot' (62-3).

The story of how Battarus was wronged is skilfully unfolded detail by detail, from his own mouth, but in such a way that it becomes perfectly plain that his presentation of himself as a poor, law-abiding metic in Cos is a total sham and that his charge, for all its bullying abuse of rhetoric, cannot stand. We do not get a real idea of what has happened until lines 33ff., when we are told that Thales, in what was evidently a rowdy revel, stole one of Battarus' girls from his establishment by night, setting fire to his house with torches. Finally, and almost incidentally, the Pandar lets it out that Thales abducted the girl because he was in love with her (79). He goes on to claim that all Thales has to do is to pay him for Myrtale's services and there the matter will rest. He thereby reveals that his indignation over the sailor's treatment of her is insincere and that he is bringing suit merely because one of his girls is being used free of charge and because he stands to win a fast buck if he is successful or bludgeons Thales into a settlement out of court.

The characterisation of Battarus is achieved by means of what has been called the 'mosaic' technique. It is the method of the New Comedy and Theophrastus: a general type is selected and then individualized by realistic traits and details. Within the bounds of ancient comic character-portrayal, then, we do not have any difficulty in calling the chief character of Mimiamb 2 realistic. However, there are other aspects of the poem which are not at all realistic. Battarus' oratory is a perverted imitation of Athenian legal rhetoric, but the scene of the poem is Cos (95-8). Since the scene is Doric-speaking Cos, the dialect in which Battarus speaks is unrealistic, being an imitation of Hipponax' Eastern lonic and thus obsolete. The metrical form of the poem, a revival of Hipponax' choliambs, makes it much more stylised than the prose of traditional mime. If, as seems probable, Herodas wanted to catch his audience's interest by presenting a scene from contemporary Coan low life in a revived and confessedly archaic form, one which had originally been used for satirical rather than mimic purposes, and in a defunct form of Greek, then Mimiamb 2 must to some extent have represented a literary in-joke: the philological-learnedness of the piece (and of the collection as a whole) must have been perceived as colliding ironically with the lowness of the subject-matter. Herodas' aim in selecting and portraying low material like the Pandar is the unswerving pursuit of comic effect, and we can now see how absurd it is to try to label the poet a prototype social realist or the like.

Callimachus' Iambi have a moral earnestness absent from Herodas. Callimachus, too, revives Hipponax' choliambic metre and, in modified form, his Ionic, but everyday and low material is firmly subordinated to the comparatively contemplative character of the poems. The first Iambus will illustrate my point. The Diegete (Dieg. VI. 1-21) informs us that the purpose of Hipponax' appearance among the living was to forbid the literati of Alexandria from jealous feuding. Thus the poem is moralistic in intention. Hipponax' speech has a colloquial tone. For example, he expostulates in lively terms at the size of the crowd of scholars who have gathered to listen to him: 'Apollo, these people are swarming in droves like flies on a goatherd or wasps from the ground or Delphians from a sacrifice; Hecate, what a crowd! The old baldy over there will burst his lungs trying to keep his measly cloak from being torn off (26-30). Secondly, he is repeatedly made to resort to common proverbs. His comments on the crowd, for instance, contain a reference to the Delphians who were proverbial for the way they filched meat from other people's sacrifices. Such proverbs are doubtless intended to give a realistic flavour to Hipponax' speech. True, by this period proverbs had become a field of scholarly research and their use was perhaps to some extent a self-conscious literary device, but this need not detract from a realistic effect. Thirdly, it is worth noting how carefully Callimachus sets the scene. He refers to places and personages of topical interest and makes Hipponax call the scholars outside the city walls to the Serapeum dedicated by Parmenio, where 'the old babbler who fabricated the ancient Panchaean Zeus scribbles his impious scriptures' (9-11), referring to Euhemerus. The 'old baldy' crutching at his cloak in the bustle seems meant to be a Cynic philosopher. The realistic setting of the imaginary scene is wittily ironic. Fourthly, the poet appears keen to make his characterizations as dramatically vivid as possible by means of realistic touches. So Hipponax calls his audience to silence and commands them to begin note-taking (31), interrupting his lecture by abusing someone whom he sees turning up his nose at the thought of a long harangue (32-5). The same concern is present in Hipponax' cautionary tale about the Seven Wise Men. There is, for instance, the picturesque, everyday piece of scene-setting when the cup which Bathycles bequeathed to the best of the Wise Men is offered to Thales. The philosopher, who has been discovered characteristically pondering mathematical problems and drawing diagrams on the ground (52-63), apparently scratches the ground with his stick and with his free hand thoughtfully strokes his beard (69f.)

Among the poems on sex (3, 5, 9, 11), the third is an attack on the materialism of the times and the venality of a boy whom Callimachus is inconclusively lusting after, but, in contrast with what Herodas might have done, the poet apparently refrains from the obvious humour that the theme might lend itself to. The other poems, like Iambus 13, with Callimachus' defence of his writing in different genres and his dialect-mixing, also demonstrate how much more reflective the choliambic tradition became in Callimachus' hands.

In the first two lines [of the Hymn to Artemis] there is a jarring note for the reader expecting a traditional hymn. In the manner of the Homeric Hymn to Artemis … Callimachus begins by saying 'we hymn Artemis'. But, while the older poet mentions the goddess' golden arrows and her attribute of 'stag-hunter' … and draws a magnificent picture of her as she hunts, the Alexandrian talks of her love of the bow—and hare-hunting.… He has picked out the least of her quarries and established a tone which is deliberately lower than that of the Homeric poem. This tone persists, moreover, for, after a brief mention of her love of dance and sport in the mountains (3), we are immediately led into the scene of Artemis and Zeus' tete-a-tete in which Artemis first asks 'daddy' … for no less than eternal virginity (6). The poet does not specify the goddess' age, though we may assume from her expressed desire for nine-year-old Oceanids as her companions (14) that she is about the same age, perhaps a little older. In any case, her naive precociousness astounds us. Callimachus has, however, carefully prepared us for the moment with a deliberate shift of emphasis in his depiction of the goddess, displacing traditional sublimity with a homely, domestic detail of a child seated on its father's knee. The altered perspective is all the more striking when we consider the solemnity with which Artemis expresses to Zeus her vow of chastity in the Aeolic hymn (Alcaeus 304 Lobel-Page = Sappho 44A Voigt) which appears to have served as Callimachus' model for his Artemis' request, for he makes her voice her wish with a frankness which is borne of truly child-like innocence. It is matched by her desire for polyonymy, which she wants 'so that Phoebus may not rival her' (7). This sibling-rivalry is also a detail taken straight from life.

When she asks for a bow and arrows, but interrupts her request by saying that she won't ask them of 'you, father', for the Cyclopes will provide her with them 'immediately' (8-10), this is again humorously realistic, for the little girl assumes with an infant's imperiousness that the Cyclopes will have nothing else to do and will drop tools on any other project just for her. Her request for her hunting-dress (I If.) and for no less than sixty Oceanids to dance with has the specification that all of them should be nine years old and all still virgins, which reminds us of her earlier display of precociousness (13-14). Her demand for twenty nymphs, who are to be her attendants in the hunt and will perform the humdrum task of looking after her boots and hounds after it (15-17), also juxtaposes the marvellous and the banal. Her request for 'all mountains' as her domain is typically childlike in its hyperbole, but when she says that she'll only visit cities when she is called upon to assist women in childbirth (18-25), we notice once more her precociousness over sex, which she talks about in the most matter-of-fact way.

Artemis' whole speech is, therefore, a masterpiece of comic characterisation. This extends to linguistic features. So, for instance, quite apart from her address to 'daddy' … at line 6, we have the five-fold repetition of the phrase 'give me' … and her reference to herself in the third person when she says 'Artemis will rarely go to town' (19), a trait typical of 'naive' speech in ancient Greece.

We have already compared the scene of Artemis' supplication of Zeus with one of its models, the passage in the Iliad which depicts Artemis being comforted by Zeus after her rough treatment at the hands of Hera (11. 21.505-13). The comparison demonstrated Callimachus' concern to outdo Homer's use of pictorialism and humorously realistic material. (The Aeolic poem by Sappho or Alcaeus is outstripped in this respect by far.) But there is a reference in the scene to another passage of the Iliad, that famous moment in which Thetis supplicates Zeus for revenge for Achilles (11. 1.495-532). Thetis sits at Zeus' feet and takes hold of his knee with her right hand and his chin with her left (11. 1.499-502); but Artemis sits on her father's knee and grabs in vain at his beard. Thus Callimachus negates the grandeur of the supplicatory gestures in his second model from the Iliad. Moreover, Homer's Zeus refers to the strife that he will have to face with Hera if he accedes to Thetis' request, and this is no doubt meant to lend humour to the characterisation of the grand god. But, whereas Homer makes him express his foreboding 'greatly troubled', Callimachus gives the motif a new complexion by making the god voice his claim that with spirited daughters like Artemis he need have no fear of Hera, and by making him laugh with delight and affectionately caress his little daughter. He has expanded the motif of Zeus and Hera's marital friction and relaxed the element of tension contained in the Homeric Zeus' frustrated anger; the god is characterized like a husband or father in the New Comedy.

But what precisely is Callimachus aiming at with this extraordinary mixture of Homeric citation and everyday matter? In his redeployment of moments in the epic tradition he emphasizes everyday detail which is already present in them, thus effectively deheroising them. Simultaneously, he cites more elevated moments in the tradition to give, by contrast, even greater prominence to the domestic elements in his poem, so that they thus become comic. In this way he is subverting his contemporaries' received expectations of the epic and hymnal tradition. The use of the hexameter, with all its associations, will have contributed still further to his design. In short, far from committing mere unconscious lapses of taste in the first part of his hymn as he has been charged with doing, Callimachus is experimenting with his audience's notions of appropriateness in order to produce deliberate artistic effects. The result is not simply travesty or parody of either the Homeric passages or the epic genre in general, but rather an episode to which Herter originally applied the phrase 'Idyll der Kleinwelt', which we have found aptly describes other moments in Callimachus. Thus a totally new tone has been created in epic. Moreover, as we have noticed, the poet gives us a precise mental picture of the whole scene which contributes effectively to its special character.

The scene of Artemis' visit to the Cyclopes is no less a conscious study in contrasts. We have already noted its emphatic pictorialism. It is obviously modelled on the episode in the Iliad where Thetis visits Hephaestus to ask for arms for Achilles. Now there is light, everyday matter even in the Iliadic passage: so, for instance, Charis greets Thetis by remarking what a long time it's been since they've seen the goddess; she hasn't visited for ages (11. 18.385-7). But Callimachus goes to infinitely greater trouble to bring out such details. The giants of Lipara are making a horse trough for Poseidon. This is rather a humble project, one would have thought, for the poet to have called it a 'mighty task'; already the episode is placed in an unexpectedly everyday context (46-50). The nymphs' terror at the sight and sound of the Cyclopes at work is pardoned by the poet when he adduces another homely detail of everyday life on Olympus, the role played by the Cyclopes and Hermes as bogy-men for naughty little goddesses (64-71). Artemis' contrasting boldness is stressed by the reference to her willingness to sit, as a three-year-old, on Brontes' knee when she visited him to collect gifts and pulled out a handful of chest-hair (72-9). So now she has no shyness in framing her request for arrows and a quiver like those of her brother, a detail which again suggests her sibling-rivalry. And, as she has self-confidently assumed, the Cyclopes fulfil her wish immediately, by which we may infer that they do indeed drop their tools on the 'mighty task' for Poseidon!

The impression which the scene leaves upon the reader is the same as that of the preceding. The incongruity of so much homely detail and human characterisation in the framework of a hymn which, moreover, deliberately invites comparison with scenes in Homer, again creates an episode which may be called an 'Idyll der Kleinwelt'. We now see the rules according to which Callimachus is operating: he is 'crossing the genres' to secure a brilliant new literary effect.

Yet even though the Alexandrian evidently enjoys his achievement in humour, he is still concerned in other parts of the hymn to present his subject in its serious aspect. Artemis receives from Pan a pack of hounds, which, incidentally, conform with specifications for the very best hounds as laid down in the hunting treatises of Callimachus' own day (87-97). Next she captures with her own hands huge hinds to draw her chariot (98-109). The hymn here begins to leave behind the domestic tone of the earlier scenes. She tests her bow, first choosing as her target an elm tree, then an oak, then a wild animal, but finally turning her arrows on a city of unjust men. Thus the hymn proceeds from the levity of its earlier scenes, via the comparatively nonserious motif of target-practice with the bow, to the grave moment where the goddess exercises her supreme moral oversight over men's actions and is revealed in her traditional grandeur. The picture of the unjust city and of that on which Artemis looks with favour (122-37) is directly modelled on Hesiod's description of the unjust and just cities in the Works and Days. Here, of course, the subject-matter is in concord with the traditional expectations of its hymn-frame, and Callimachus shows his mastery of the orthodox conception of to prepon just as he has shown in the hymn's opening scenes how brilliantly he can subvert it.

But directly after he has conformed with his audience's expectations he proceeds to undermine them again, once more demonstrating his love of contrasting tones. In his description of Artemis' return to Olympus from the hunt Hermes and Apollo meet her, though the latter's task of collecting the goddess's booty has now been usurped by Heracles since his arrival on Olympus. The 'Tirynthian anvil', as he is heroically styled to contrast with the comic labour in which we are about to see him engaged, now stands before the gates, on the alert, as always, in case she brings meat. He is the laughing-stock of the Olympians, especially his mother-in-law Hera, when he drags some animal, a bull or a wild boar, from Artemis' chariot. He 'cunningly' (152) advises her to shoot at boars and bulls, animals which harm man, not harmless deer or hares; in that way men will call her a helper, even as they do to him. It is, of course, implied that his 'cunning' actually consists of his attempt to get more food. The poet explains that though Heracles is dead he still has the hungry stomach with which he faced Theiodamas ploughing (142-61). The nymphs attend to the hinds which draw her chariot while she goes into Zeus' house to sit next to her brother, even though others ask her to sit next to them (162-9).

It is clear that Heracles is presented here in his role as the comic glutton, and again low detail clashes with grand form. This comic tone seems meant as an ironic foil to an impressive episode in earlier epic, the opening scene of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (2-13), where Apollo enters the house of Zeus, all the other gods jumping up from their seats in welcome, and his mother Leto takes his hunting-weapons and leads him to his seat where Zeus welcomes him. Apart from the comic business with Heracles, Callimachus makes his Phoebus attend on Artemis, so that the theme of siblingrivalry is continued, even if this becomes apparent only once it is recognised that the welcoming-scene is a literary counterpiece to that in the Homeric hymn and that now Apollo is doing the welcoming. The result is again an 'Idyll der Kleinwelt', especially as regards Apollo and Artemis; in the depiction of Heracles we have outright burlesque. The range of comic effects in the passage is thus extraordinarily wide. Integral to it is the poet's skill in crossing the genres.

In Hymn 6, the Hymn to Demeter, Callimachus again makes extensive use of everyday matter. In the scene depicting Demeter's punishment of Erysichthon we are presented with a domestic comedy of manners. As a result of the bulimia with which the goddess has punished him, we are told, Erysichthon constantly craves for another meal of the same size as the one he has just consumed; it takes twenty cooks to prepare his food and twelve waiters to draw off his wine (68f.). In his present state he will inevitably be a disgrace at any dinner that he attends, and his parents invent every excuse for his not accepting dinner invitations. This is simply because they are socially embarrassed.… Erysichthon's mother is characterized as worried not so much about her son as about her family's reputation. Her bourgeois concerns are matched by the excuses which she fabricates: her son is said to be involved in all the sorts of activities that any son of a well-to-do family might be expected to (72-86). Her embarrassment would be entirely appropriate in a scene from the New Comedy. Likewise, when Triopas prays to his father, Poseidon, it is far from obvious that his words are motivated by pity for Erysichthon's plight, because he concludes the prayer with the wish that Poseidon either get rid of Erysichthon's disease or feed him himself, for the cooks have emptied Triopas' tables, folds and byres. His real feelings are thus ones of pique at the impoverishment of his household. This is made even clearer in the remainder of his speech: the cooks have slaughtered the wagon-mules and Erysichthon has eaten the heifer which his mother was fattening for Hestia, the prize race-horse, the warhorse and even the ancient equivalent of the cat at which the mice trembled (96-110). We are also told how as long as Triopas' provisions held out only the household knew of the scandalous business, but when Erysichthon had got through them, the scandal was a secret no longer: 'the son of the king' sat in the very crossways begging for crusts and scraps (111-15). This, then, is the 'bourgeois denouement to the story'; the parents' shame is complete and so is the comedy. The humour of this part of the story (Callimachus, we note in passing, has kept his version of the tale as light as possible by toning down the more gruesome elements in the legend) will have been increased by the clash of the domestic material with the hymnal form and metre.

The poet's aim in incorporating so much comical domesticity in the hymn seems once again to lie in his love of contrasts. The description of Erysichthon's punishment and his parents' reaction to it is immediately preceded by the episode of his crime. There the tone is anything but comic, and the crime is presented as a very serious affair indeed. Erysichthon is depicted as a wilfully wicked man and is characterized as such by his ruthlessness in the attack on the sacred grove and by his angry and arrogant defiance of the gentle admonitions of Demeter who has disguised herself as one of her own priestesses, Nicippe. Demeter, on the other hand, is both patient and reasonable. When her request that he stop his tree-felling is refused, she assumes her divine form, her feet touching the earth, her head Olympus. She mercifully exempts from her wrath Erysichthon's attendants, who had been acting under their master's orders, but curses Erysichthon, ominously proclaiming that he will indeed have many banquets in future, picking up his hot-headed retort to her that he intended to use the wood from the grove to make a dining-hall for banquets. The narrator tells us that the aim of the cautionary tale is 'so that one may avoid transgression' (22), and Erysichthon's crime is an indisputable instance of transgression. The story is one of crime and punishment and Callimachus couches the crime in serious terms. The scene of punishment, therefore, stands in stark tonal contrast with it. It is unthinkable that such a contrast could be unintentional, and we may conclude that the poet has intended his comedy of manners to act as a foil to the scene with Demeter. Nor do the everyday elements necessarily undermine the seriousness of the narrator's moral or the prayer 'May he be no friend or neighbour of mine who is hated by you, Demeter; I hate evil neighbours' (116f.): Callimachus' approach resembles that of spoudaiogeloion-literature like certain of his own Iambi.

Finally, there is the Hymn to Delos. Apart from the pictorial and scientific elements in the scene of Leto's parturition, consider Leto's cry to Apollo to come forth. It is realistically representative of how a woman sounds in labour, for she speaks in short gasps; each word in the line that she utters, geineo, geineo, koure, kai epios exithi kolpou (214), corresponds with the metrical divisions, and a strong sense-break occurs at the caesura. This is mimesis biou indeed, and is in stark contrast with the traditional grandeur of the episode which we find in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (89-139). It contributes impressively to the pathos of the scene. But what is such everyday detail doing in a poem in which, among other things, an unborn god prophesies from his mother's womb (88-98, 162-95), an island turns into gold (260-3) and, apparently metamorphosing into a nymph, nurses the baby god (264-74)?

The exuterine prophecies are the basic problem. Callimachus is evidently building on the moment in the Homeric hymn where the god, just born, pronounces to the goddesses in attendance on Leto that music, archery and prophecy will be his particular care (131f.). This is greeted by the goddesses' wonder (135). I suggest that the poet is putting the motif of the god's precociousness, which is a teasing mixture of the everyday and the miraculous, back one stage further, and is thus, as with the birth-scene, trying to outdo his model, with the result that the everyday motif of a child's precocity is put on a miraculous plane indeed, as is under-lined by the words 'in his mother's womb' (86) and 'the prophet still in the belly' (189). There may have been a special piquancy for an Alexandrian audience in all this, for they would have been familiar with prophets who made their voice come from the bellies of other people, the point here being that Apollo is presented as a god performing the human practice, from within his own mother's belly! But having got the prophecies into the realm of the truly miraculous, he proceeds to place them in a strikingly immediate relation with his audience's experience. The forward reference to the event of the god's slaughter of Niobe's children is hardly especially immediate, though its accuracy does vindicate the god's exemplary prophetic powers. But when he makes Apollo prophesy the birth of Philadelphus on Cos, the victory over the Gauls in 279 BC, in which the god himself was supposed to have taken part, and Philadelphus' punishment of the Gallic mercenaries in around 274-2 BC (160-95), he touches on matters of direct, even sensational interest to an audience at Alexandria. Thus actual history and the world of myth and miracle are tantalisingly presented as compatible, just as in the birth-scene of Apollo the everyday and the scientific, and the mythical and miraculous are brought into a piquant unison. This is clearly part of the thinking behind Apollo's statement that in their dealings with the Celts he and Philadelphus will be united in a 'common struggle' (171). This, I further suggest, is the rationale of Callimachus' deployment of everyday and topical material in Hymn 4: it establishes a relationship between the world of myth and contemporary life, and in the process confers authenticity on Philadelphus' claim to a special and direct link with the Olympians.

Thus in the Hymns of Callimachus the incorporation of everyday, realistic detail is an important means of subverting generic expectations, which is evidently one of the poet's special preoccupations and one over which he shows a sure mastery. It also helps the poet to put the grand personages and events of myth into a new perspective. Topical matter is employed to bring the mythical past and the present into close relation with one another, to the enrichment of historical and contemporary people and events. Common to each of these functions is the poet's desire to put a new perspective on the Alexandrians' cultural heritage.

Mention of the Hymn to Delos has raised the question of encomiastic poetry again, and we may now inquire into the Alexandrian inclusion of realistic material in the poems written in praise of the Ptolemies. Theocritus' Heracliscus and Callimachus' Victoria Berenices have taught us that the Ptolemies were quite happy to be celebrated even where everyday and low material created an ironical effect. This is also true of Idyll 15, but the effect is striking in Idyll 14, where Thyonicus recommends that Aeschinas join Ptolemy's army to get over his shattered love-life. So too with Herodas' first Mimiamb, where Gyllis the go-between paints a picture of the pleasures of Ptolemaic Egypt (23-36) designed to convince Metriche that her Mandris is not going to come back to her and that she had better accept Gyllis' proposal of a substitute. Machon felt at liberty to refer to Soter and Philadelphus in the company of parasites and courtesans (Frr. 1,5,18 Gow). Sotades' fatal expression of revulsion at Philadelphus' incestuous marriage (Fr. I Pow.), however, shows that there was a line beyond which you could not go when commenting on the Ptolemies' personal lives. More restrained is the use of everyday matter in Callimachus' Lock of Berenice (Fr. 110), where the lock deprecates the frosty honour of catasterism since it will never again touch Berenice's head and enjoy the creature comforts of oils and myrrh.

The approach is adopted in the formal encomium, Theocritus' Idyll 17. Irony must have been perceived in passages like that on the Ptolemies' ancestor, Heracles (13-33), or in that on the personified Cos (58-71), which is comparable with the motif in Callimachus' Hymn to Delos. We may infer that such treatment was to the regents' taste and was actively encouraged by them, if only because they wanted to show they were 'with it' in their appreciation of realistic material in poetry. In any case, the savants of the Alexandrian court for whom these poems were meant would have been diverted by the sophisticated allusiveness of an Encomium for Ptolemy. The Ptolemies knew that the masses wanted a Pompe, but they were clearly happy to let their poets indulge in a modicum of irony to amuse the intelligentsia. When Theocritus turns in Idyll 16 to another Hellenistic monarch, Hiero II of Syracuse, his approach is perhaps significantly different. To be sure, he parades the phauloi of the Odyssey, arguably as an announcement of his pastoral poetry, but Hiero himself is portrayed in exclusively heroic terms, indeed as 'the like of the heroes of old' (80). The vignette of the peace in the countryside that will follow Hiero's expulsion of the Carthaginians from Sicily (90-7) is motivated by the belief that peace in the day-to-day life of the ordinary man reflects the prowess of the ruler. And the humour in the scene of the Graces' empty-handed return (8-12) is at Theocritus' expense alone. His failure to 'humanise' Hiero contrasts with his strategy with the Ptolemies. Perhaps this is further evidence of the uniqueness of the Egyptian monarchs' taste for the humorous realism of their court-poets.

But humour is not the only result of the Alexandrians' deployment of humble material in their encomia. In the fragments of Callimachus' Apotheosis of Arsinoe (Fr. 228), which laments in the unusual iambo-lyric archeboulean metre the death of Queen Arsinoe in 270 BC and celebrates her deification, the Queen's younger sister, Philotera, who apparently predeceased her, is depicted in congenial human terms. When she sees the smoke rolling over the Aegean from Arsinoe's pyre (40-5), she sends Charis to find out the cause and expresses anxiety whether 'her Libya', Egypt, is being harmed (45-51). Charis, too, is very human in her grief when she sees that the smoke is coming from Alexandria (52-5) and in the sympathetic way she assures Philotera that her country is safe and gently breaks the news about Arsinoe, 'her only sister' (66-75). Here the poet is exploring the more serious side of the humanity that Charis exhibits when she welcomes Thetis at Iliad 18.382ff. These touches invest the two new deities with real pathos and humanity.

Callimachus' Hecale exhibits a realism unprecedented in Greek literature both in its nature and its extent.

The old woman, Hecale, is the figure central to our inquiry. To judge from the fragments, Callimachus described her humble appearance in some detail. She is apparently said to have 'the ever-moving lips of an old woman' (Fr. 490). Another fragment describes her broad-rimmed hat, 'the felt headgear of a shepherd' … and her walking-stick (Fr. 292). The word for 'hat', πίλημα, which harks back to Hesiod's advice to the farmer to wear a πι̂λoς 'so as to keep your ears from getting wet', is typically Callimachean in that it is a technically precise word from the life of the peasant-farmer (W.D. 545f.). The stick is mentioned again as 'the support of her old age' (Fr. 355). Thus Callimachus appears to have used pictorialism to emphasise Hecale's lowly situation.

The old woman's generosity was celebrated right at the poem's opening, for we possess a fragment from there which says that 'all travellers honoured her for her hospitality, for she kept a house which was never closed' (Fr. 231). Her generous nature and humble circumstances are prominently displayed throughout the scene in which she receives Theseus in from the storm (the description of which itself contains domestic matter, already noticed, like the simile of the weaving girls laying aside their work for their evening meal: Fr. 238. 19f.). The hero casts off his cloak, wet from the storm, Hecale makes him sit down on her pauper's couch, having snatched a small tattered garment from her bed (presumably to spread over the couch), takes down dry wood that she has stored long ago and cuts it (Frr. 239-43). Callimachus' model here is the episode in the Odyssey in which Eumaeus gives shelter to Odysseus (Od. 14.48ff., 418ff.). Next follows the scene in which Hecale washes Theseus' feet. She brings a hollow, boiling pot (Fr. 244), empties the bowl and draws another draught (Fr. 246). Though the fragments of the foot-washing scene are, to say the least, meagre, it is plain enough that Callimachus' model is this time the moment in the Odyssey in which the second great phaulos of the epic tradition, Eurycleia, washes Odysseus' feet (Od. 19.386ff.). Thus the poet carefully places his heroine in the tradition of paradigmatic phauloi of canonical epic. Our fragments give us an idea of the humble meal which Hecale serves, 'olives which grew on the tree, wild olives and white olives which she had laid down in autumn to swim in brine' (Fr. 282.4-5 S.H. = Fr. 248 Pf.), wild vegetables and cabbage (Frr. 249, 250), and many bread-loaves 'of the kind which women store up for herdsman', which Hecale now takes from her bread-basket (Fr. 251). Mention is possibly made of her pauper's table (Fr. 284 S.H. = 252 Pf.).

Her moral goodness and straitened circumstances are further described in the conversation which she and Theseus apparently strike up after the meal. Theseus then asks her why she, an old woman, dwells in such a lonely place. It is likely that she begins by asking Theseus why he wants to 'awaken a sleeping tear' (Fr. 682); certainly there is much pathos in what follows. She evidently goes on to tell Theseus of her former life, possibly prefacing her story with the statement 'my poverty is not hereditary nor am I a pauper from my grandparents' (Fr. 254). She mentions men who guarded her threshing-floor which her oxen trod in a circle, an indication of her wealth. She describes the arrival from Aphnidae of what must be her husband. He was godlike in appearance and dressed in a rich mantle (Fr. 285.8-12 S.H. = Fr. 253.8-12 Pf.). Hecale talks about her two sons, whom she reared in an abundantly rich household, with slaves, in all probability, to bathe them in warm baths (Fr. 287.1-6 S.H.). She says that the two of them grew up like towering poplars beside a river, … (Fr. 287.7-9 S.H.). This is a clear reminiscence of Thetis' words about Achilles, doomed to die, at Iliad 18.56f.: 'he shot up like a sapling; I nursed him, like a tree in the rising ground of an orchard' … Hecale is now being compared with one of the noble personages of traditional epic, and the pathos of her situation is greatly enhanced by the comparison. After another gap, we find her bewailing the death of her younger son; the death of the older (Fr. 287.12f. S.H.) was probably described in the lacuna. Apparently, this son was killed by the robber, Cercyon, in his horrid wrestling-matches (Fr. 287.18 S.H.). She wishes that she might pierce Cercyon's eyes with thorns while he is still alive and eat his raw flesh (Fr. 287.24-6 S.H.). There seems to be a connection between the fates of Hecale and Theseus, for Theseus killed Cercyon and presumably told Hecale that her son's death had been avenged. And again Hecale is compared with grand characters from the Iliad. Her refusal to die 'when death had been calling for a long time' (Fr. 287.12 S.H.) recalls Hector's recognition that 'the gods have called me deathward' (II. 22.297) and her threat of cannibalism reminds us of Hecuba's wish to eat Achilles' liver for the death of her son (11. 24.212f.). Thus in her description of the death of her remaining son, on whom she had concentrated all her hopes, the pathos of her characterisation is deepened by association with figures of intense suffering from traditional epic.

It is clear, then, that Callimachus' depiction of Hecate's misfortune is movingly serious, and that in her grief she is raised to the stature of the grand people of the epic tradition. Yet this is the woman whom the poet has evidently wished us to view in terms of a Eumaeus and a Eurycleia. She is, like them, a phaulos, despite the fact that she came from a rich family, but her fall from prosperity is described with far greater pathos than Homer depicts those of Eumaeus and Eurycleia (or, for that matter, than Euripides does in the case of the Farmer). And in this important respect she is markedly different from her earlier counterparts. The New Comedy may have been influential here with its recurrent motif of the kind-hearted stave, menial or prostitute who turns out to be of noble birth. Again, as with Eumaeus, Eurycleia and the Farmer, it seems likely that Callimachus tries to some extent to account for Hecale's generosity by appeal to traditional Greek thought on the matter, but her present position in society, illustrated so amply, remains that of a phaulos from whom such nobility was not normally to be expected. In any case, it looks as if the poet is more intent upon extracting the pathos inherent in the motif than in using it to account for his heroine's unexpected moral goodness.

After their conversation, Theseus and Hecale retire, and Hecale says that she will sleep in the corner of the room where there is a bed ready for her (Fr. 256). In this way she once more resembles Eumaeus, who prepares a bed for Odysseus near the fire while he himself goes to his usual bed near the pigs to be able to keep guard over them (Od. 14.518-33). When Theseus rises she is already awake (Fr. 257). Thus Callimachus depicts Hecale in her treatment of Theseus as generous and considerate, while reminding us throughout of her lowly literary antecedents.

Fr. 288 S.H. (= Fr. 260 Pf.), which relates the puzzling conversation between two birds, probably a crow and an owl, closes with the description of the dawn of Theseus' return to Hecale, in which Callimachus indulges in further genre-painting, as we have seen, with his reference to robbers, lanterns being lit, water carriers singing, wagons with squeaking axles, and blacksmiths or other people fetching fire for the day (Fr. 288.64-9 S.H.). If, as is likely, the conversation of the birds occurred near Hecale's hut, then the poet is again sketching in the details of her milieu, and using his pictorialist skill for the purpose.

We possess part of the funeral-speech pronounced over her grave by Theseus or her neighbours. The speaker claims that they 'will often remember [her] hospitable hut, for it was a common shelter for everybody' (Fr. 263). We know that Theseus fully recognised the old woman's goodness and rewarded her by creating a deme named after her and establishing a shrine to Zeus Hecaleios (Dieg. XI.5ff.). Thus the poem began and ended with Hecale and her moral nobility.

Callimachus has indeed given a serious and prominent role to his phaulos. But he has not neglected Theseus, a hero who would in traditional thought have been considered a quite appropriate figure in epic. Frr. 232 and 233 come from the episode in which Medea attempts to poison Theseus. Frr. 234-7 are what remains of the episode in which Theseus unexpectedly appears to Aegeus after being reared in Troezen. Fr. 238.1-14 is part of a conversation between the two, Theseus urging his father to let him go out to face adventures; his impetuosity and bravery seem to have been stressed. As we have seen, the victory over the bull of Marathon was described. Fr. 288.1-15 S.H. (=Fr. 260.1-15 Pf.) describes Theseus' triumphal procession, how no one dared to look straight at the 'great hero and the monstrous beast', but eventually greeted him with a ritual shower of leaves. Here we see the commoners' reaction to the conquering hero. Finally, as we have just observed, his slaying of Cercyon is mentioned and appears to have had bearing on his relationship with Hecale. Theseus is, therefore, presented as a traditional epic hero, a true spoudaios. Apparently, Callimachus means us to regard him as a foil to Hecale, who is a phaulos and yet is elevated to a central role in the epic. Thus, on the one hand, Theseus' gratitude to Hecale and the honours which he posthumously bestows upon her confirm her true moral worth despite her lowly station. On the other, her untraditional status as an epic hero is thrown into sharp relief by juxtaposition with a hero of the traditional type.

Callimachus has brought her and her goodness into remarkable prominence. The seriousness with which he portrays her is striking. In the Victoria Berenices he had created a phaulos, Molorchus, whose goodly but humble life is set in deliberate contrast with the grand myths and events which frame it, and he had put this contrast to comic effect. But this is not at all the case in his portrayal of Hecale. Certainly, there is a deliberate superficial incongruity in the contrast between her lowly social status and the heroic context in which she is placed, but this is given emphasis only to demonstrate that appearances can be deceptive and that in a deeper ethical sense she is entirely worthy of the world of epic. The poet makes her describe her family's fate and her own emotions with evident pathos and presents her moral goodness as seriously as he does Theseus' traditional heroism. She is, of course, unlike Eumaeus and Eurycleia, with whom we are continually invited to compare her, in that she is portrayed as acting in a way which is spontaneously good. The acceptance of the idea that a phaulos might initiate independent moral action had been made possible by developments in Greek thought which we saw evidenced in Euripides' treatment of the Farmer in the Electra. But she is significantly unlike that figure as well in the way in which she is presented. Euripides may have defended the integrity and moral worth of low characters like the Farmer, but he was still precluded by the genre in which he was working from giving them a main role. Here Callimachus has gone one step further than the tragedian. He has given Hecale the central role in his epic and has made her goodness the poem's real point. Thus for the first time in extant Greek poetry the spoudaios has been displaced from the centre stage and is made to share it with a phaulos.

… The implication that by removing the spoudaioi from their traditional central position in epic Callimachus deliberately intended to leave room for everyday and low heroes is borne out by the poet's practice in the Hecale even more strikingly than by that in the Aetia or the Hymns. The poem represents an instance of genre-crossing which is a significant exception to Auerbach's generalisations about the separation of the genres in ancient literature, and its realism in this respect comes quite close to that of modern literature. Because of this the Hecale is one of the poet's most remarkable achievements and one of the most important poems in our inquiry. We should remark, finally, that it is also realistic in a manner that we have come to regard as typical of Callimachus and of the Alexandrian movement as a whole. It attempts to bring the heroic world of myth down to earth and hence help its audiences to relate to their heritage in an arresting new way. But the seriousness of tone with which Hecale is portrayed makes the poem realistic in a sense unique even in Alexandrian poetry.