Hellenistic Literature and Culture

Alexandrian Poetry
 Cultural Patronage of the
Ptolemies
• Library of Alexandria
– Founded by Ptolemy I early in the 3rd cent. BC
– Ambitious collection of all Greek literature
– Catalogued by Callimachus
• Museum (Mouseion)
– A home for scholar-poets
– famous for its intellectual culture
Literary Culture in Alexandria

Many are feeding in populous

Egypt, scribblers on papyrus,
ceaselessly wrangling in the
bird-cage of the Muses.
— Timon of Phlius fr. 786 SH
 Greek literature in crisis

Blessed was the man skilled in

heroic song at that time, the
servant of the Muses, when the
meadow was still untouched; but now
when all things have been
apportioned, the craft has reached
its limits, we are left out of the
race, in last place, nor is there
any way that a man, looking
everywhere, can approach a newly
yoked chariot.
 Critical Hostility to Alexandrian Poetry
• The tendency to see Hellenistic literature merely
as a transition from Classical Greece to Augustan
Rome
• The distaste for poetry that appears to be the
product of royal patronage
• The lack of appreciation of the poetry’s self-
conscious ‘intertextuality’
• The preference for Aristotelian unity and
consistency, which many Alexandrian works do
not possess.
 Alexandrian Poetry
• Obscure mythical subjects
• Interest in unusual language (rare words,
etc.)
• Preoccupied with other texts
(‘intertextuality’)
• Emphasis placed on learning
• Why did Alexandrian form develop as it
did?
– Shift from orality to literacy?
 The Alexandrian manner

exiguo sermone fores nunc, Ilion, et tu

Troia bis Oetaei numine capta dei
— Propertius 3.1.31-32
“Ilion, you would be little talked of, and you too,
Troy, twice captured by the power of Oeta’s
god.”
 The major Alexandrians
• Callimachus
– fl. ca 260
– credited with 800 books (!)
– Aetia
– Hecale
– Hymns
– Epigrams
• Apollonius of Rhodes
– fl. 3rd cent. BC
– Argonautica in 4 books
• The story of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece
• Theocritus
– fl. early 3rd cent. BC
– from Syracuse
– Idylls (pastoral poetry)
– a model for the Roman poet Vergil’s Eclogues,
and so the beginning of the tradition of
European pastoral