Callimachus

“ CALLIMACHUS. A curse on me! And on you, Fortunatus, who led me on and urged me to this infamy. Wretch, may you die from the serpent's bite! Terror and remorse are killing me.
SCENE VIII
JOHN. Come, Andronicus, let us go to Drusiana's tomb, and commend her soul to Christ in prayer.
ANDRONICUS. It is like your holiness not to forget one who trusted in you.
JOHN. Behold! The invisible God appears to us, made visible in the form of a beautiful youth. ”

“ This day shall be kept as a festival in thanksgiving for the wonderful conversion of Callimachus. Men shall long speak of it, and of his resurrection from the dead, and of Drusiana, on whom his love brought misery. Let us give thanks to God, that just and penetrating Judge Who alone can search the heart and reins and reward or punish fairly. ”

“ The old Greek civilisation was rotting swiftly down; while a fire of God was preparing, slowly and dimly, in that unnoticed Italian town of Rome, which was destined to burn up that dead world, and all its works.
Callimachus’s hymns, those may read who list. They are highly finished enough; the work of a man who knew thoroughly what sort of article he intended to make, and what were the most approved methods of making it. Curious and cumbrous mythological lore comes out in every other line. The smartness, the fine epithets, the recondite conceits, the bits of effect, are beyond all praise ”

“ Callimachus was in fact one of those erudite poets and wise men of letters whom the gay Alexandrians who thronged the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus called "The Pleiades." Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus, Theocritus, Lycophron, Nicander, and Homer son of Macro, were the other six. From his circle of clever people, the king, with whom he had become a prime favorite, called him to be chief custodian over the stores of precious books at Alexandria. ”

“ Though you believe, O Callimachus, in the nativity of Zeus, you do not believe in his sepulchre; and whilst you think to obscure the truth, you in fact proclaim him dead, even to those who are ignorant; and if you see the cave, you call to mind the childbirth of Rhea; but when you see the coffin, you throw a shadow over his death, not considering that the unbegotten God alone is eternal. For either the tales told by the multitude and the poets about the gods are unworthy of credit, and the reverence shown them is superfluous (for those do not exist, the tales concerning whom are untrue) ”

“ In Callimachus, Abraham, and Paphnutius, Roswitha sets out to describe the war between the flesh and the spirit, and the long penance which must be done by those who have allowed the flesh to triumph. It is not enough for them to be converted and to realise their crime against the infinite beauty and goodness of God. They are called on to take practical measures to cleanse themselves. Callimachus is the first of these plays, and by no means the best, although it timidly sounds a note of passion, rare, if it exists at all, in medieval literature. ”

“ Among the ancients, it was a favourite, and they adorned their furniture, vases, and costly dresses, with its elegant leaves. When any obstacle obstructs the growth of the Acanthus, it puts forth fresh force and grows with additional vigour. Thus genius is strengthened by the difficulties which it cannot overcome. Callimachus, an ancient architect, derived the idea of the Corinthian capital, from seeing the leaves of an Acanthus surrounding a basket which had been set upon the ground, and impeded the regular growth of the plant. ”

“ These traits are more prominent in Callimachus than in Apollonius, but they are certainly to be seen in the latter. He seems to have written the Argonautica out of bravado, to show that he could write an epic poem. But the influence of the age was too strong. Instead of the unity of an Epic we have merely a series of episodes, and it is the great beauty and power of one of these episodes that gives the poem its permanent value—the episode of the love of Jason and Medea. ”

“ Apollonius, then only eighteen, gave in the 31Mouseion a public reading of the preliminary draft of his poem. A violent quarrel was the result, Apollonius was expelled, and Callimachus wrote a satire called the Ibis, in which his rival’s legs and other deficiencies were exposed. The friends of Apollonius retorted with equal spirit, and the tranquillity of the Mouseion was impaired. Callimachus won, but his victory was not eternal; after his death Apollonius was recalled to Alexandria, and in time became librarian there in his turn.
The Epic Apollonius insisted on writing has survived. ”

“ Lycophron immersed himself in such a sea of fabulous learning, that he became nearly unintelligible, and all of them were marked with the blemishes of affectation and obscurity, into which learned poets are most apt to fall. Among the pleiad of Alexandrian poets, none had so many of the faults and beauties of the school to which he belonged as Callimachus. He was conspicuous for his profound knowledge of the ancient traditions of Greece, for his poetic art and elegant versification, but he was also noted for deficiency of invention and original genius ”

“ But in such sorrows, O Hortalus, nevertheless I
send you these translated poems of Callimachus,
lest you think that your words, entrusted in vain,
have slipped perhaps from my mind to vagrant winds,
as an apple sent by a fiancé's secret tribute,
runs out from the maiden's chaste lap
because placed under the poor forgetful girl's soft robe,
when she jumps with her mother's arrival, it's cast out,
and in a prone hurry, headlong drives that thing
guilty blush springs from this sad one. ”

“ Compassion and horror and loathing may be aroused, but not hunger. Ovid has not been sparing of this element of the horrible in the picture of Famine; while both he and Callimachus, [166] in their description of Erisichthon’s starvation, have laid chief emphasis upon the loathsome traits. After Erisichthon has devoured every thing, not sparing even the sacrificial cow, which his mother had been fattening for Vesta, Callimachus makes him fall on horses and cats, and beg in the streets for crumbs and filthy refuse from other men’s tables. ”

“ An epic poem entitled Ἑκάλη, which was the name of an old woman who had received Theseus hospitably when he went out to fight against the Marathonian bull. This work was likewise paraphrased by Marianus, and we still possess some fragments of the original. The works entitled Γαλάτεια and Γλαῦκος were in all probability likewise epic poems. It appears that there was scarcely any kind of poetry in which Callimachus did not try his strength, for he is said to have written comedies, tragedies, iambic, and choliambic poems. ”

“ The lament for his brother's death is a most touching outburst of genuine grief, while the elegy which immediately follows, on the transformation of Berenice's hair into a constellation, being avowedly a translation or close imitation of Callimachus, is a curious and valuable specimen of the learned stiffness and ingenious affectation of the Alexandrian school. It is impossible not to admire the lofty tone and stately energy which pervade the Peleus and Thetis ”

“ It would be also in keeping with the over-subtlety of a class of poets who owed more to learning than to inspiration, to combine apparently incongruous parts into one whole by some obscure link of connexion. Thus Catullus may have intended, in imitation of Callimachus or some other Alexandrian, to paint two pictures of the love of an immortal for a mortal,—the love of Thetis for Peleus, and of Bacchus for Ariadne,—and to heighten the effect of each by the contrast presented in the pendent picture. ”

“ He also drew up select lists of epic and lyric poets. Soon afterwards a classified catalogue of dramatists, epic and lyric poets, legislators, philosophers, historians, orators and rhetoricians, and miscellaneous writers, with a brief biography of each, was produced by the scholar and poet Callimachus (fl. 260) . Among the pupils of Callimachus was Eratosthenes who, in 234, succeeded Zenodotus as librarian. Apart from his special interest in the history of the Old Attic comedy, he was a man of vast and varied learning; the founder of astronomical geography and of scientific chronology ”

“ In Latin Catullus had already taken Callimachus for a model, and transplanted the elegy to Rome. But it was the group above-named who in turns imparted to such compositions a specially Roman character in respect of exacting rules of form. The elegy in early Greece found various themes in martial and social exhortations, moral sentiments, and advice, [88] or in the expression of personal feelings in different moods. If at Alexandria its matter consisted most frequently of the thoughts and moods of the lover, the modification was due to altered social conditions. ”

“ The Alexandria of the Ptolemies was not the nurse of a great literature, though the age was undoubtedly one of considerable literary activity. Scholastic learning and poetic imitation were rife; the rehandling of Greek masterpieces was a fashionable pastime. For serious and original composition, however, the conditions were not favourable. That the age produced no great epic was less due to the disparagement of the form indulged in by Callimachus, chief librarian and literary dictator, than to the inherent temper of society. ”

“ He was enrolled as a citizen at Miletus when he came thither with Neleus, who had been banished from Phœnicia; but a more common statement is that he was a native Milesian, of noble extraction.
II. After having been immersed in state affairs he applied himself to speculations in natural philosophy; though, as some people state, he left no writings behind him. For the book on Naval Astronomy, which is attributed to him is said in reality to be the work of Phocus the Samian. But Callimachus was aware that he was the discoverer of the Lesser Bear ”

“ For Apollonius, anxious to establish his own reputation, and jealous of his master's, had depreciated those more numerous, but lighter productions, in which the Muse of Callimachus excelled; epigrams, hymns, and elegies.
It will be no improper introduction to the following poem to trace the subject of it to its source; nor can we expect to be guided through its intricacies by a safer clue, than that which the ancients have afforded us. ”

“ In some of the temples women officiated, who were denominated from the Deity they served. The Scholiast upon Callimachus calls the chief of them Upis; and styles her, and her associates, Κορας [384] Ὑπερβορεους, Hyperborean young women. The Hyperboreans, Alazonians, Arimaspians, were Scythic nations of the same family. All the stories about Prometheus, Chimæra, Medusa, Pegasus, Hydra, as well as of the Grupes, or Gryphons, arose, in great measure, from the sacred devices upon the entablatures of temples. ”

“ The travail of nature has been transformed into the pangs of the human mother; and the poet dwells much on the pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making [25] Dionysus, as Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out among its enemies, motherless. And as a consequence of this human interest, the legend attaches itself, as in an actual history, to definite sacred objects and places, the venerable relic of the wooden image which fell into the chamber of Semele with the lightning-flash, and which the piety of a later age covered with plates of brass ”

“ Catullus has taken this name from the legend of Tereus (see Harper's Classical Dictionary, 'Tereus') , while he has followed the myth as it appears in Odyssey, 19. 518 ff., where the plaintive song of the nightingale is represented as the lamentation of Aedon for her child Itylus, whom before her transformation into the nightingale 'she slew unwittingly with the bronze.' 15. haec expressa carmina Battiadae: these verses translated from Callimachus. Callimachus of Cyrene, 'the son of Battus,' was a Greek poet of the Alexandrine school. ”

“ On the other hand, Callimachus, who was very learned in all the school-divinity of those times, in his hymn to Delos, maketh Peneus, the great Thessalian river-god, the father of his nymphs: and Ovid, in the fourteenth book of his Metamorphoses, mentions the Naiads of Latium as the immediate daughters of the neighbouring river-gods. Accordingly, the Naiads of particular rivers are occasionally, both by Ovid and Statius, called by patronymic, from the name of the river to which they belong. ”

“ And Aristotle, in the fifth book of his Parts of Animals, calls them sardines. And Callimachus, in his Names used by different Nations, writes thus—"The encrasicholus, the eritimus, are names used by the Chalcedonians; the trichidia, the chalcis, the ictar, the atherina." And in another part, giving a list of the names of fishes, he says—"The ozæna, the osmylnion, are names used by the Thurians; the iopes, the eritimi, are names used by the Athenians." ”

“ His whole ambition was to become the Roman Callimachus, whom he made his model. He abounds with obscure Greek myths, as well as Greek forms of expression, and the same pedantry infects even his versification.
P. OVIDIUS NASO, usually culled OVID, was born at Sulmo, in the country of the Peligni, on the 20th of March, B.C. 43. He was descended from an ancient equestrian family, and was destined to be a pleader; but the bent of his genius showed itself very early. The hours which should have been spent in the study of jurisprudence were employed in cultivating his poetical talent. ”