(Third Century B.C.)
Callimachus, the most learned of poets, was the son of Battus and
Mesatme of Cyrene, and a disciple of Hermocrates, who like his more
celebrated pupil was a grammarian, or a follower of belles-lettres, says
Suidas. It is in this calling that we first hear of Callimachus, when he
was a teacher at Alexandria. Here he counted among his pupils Apollonius
Rhodius, author of the 'Argonautica,' and Eratosthenes, famous for his
wisdom in science, who knew geography and geometry so well that he
measured the circumference of the earth. 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. These
libraries, we may recall, were the ones Julius Caesar partially burned by
accident a century later, and Bishop Theophilus and his mob of Christian
zealots finished destroying as repositories of paganism some three
centuries later still. The collections said to have been destroyed by
Caliph Omar when Amru took Alexandria in 640 A.D., on the ground that if
they agreed with the Koran they were superfluous and if they
contradicted it they were blasphemous, were later ones; but the whole
story is discredited by modern scholarship. The world has not ceased
mourning for this untold and irreparable loss of the choicest fruits of
the human spirit.
Of all these precious manuscripts and parchments, then, Callimachus was
made curator about the year B.C. 260. Aulus Gellius computes the time in
this wise:--"Four-hundred-ninety years after the founding of Rome, the
first Punic war was begun, and not long after, Callimachus, the poet of
Cyrene in Alexandria, flourished at the court of King Ptolemy." At this
time he must have been already married to the wife of whom Suidas speaks
in his 'Lexicon,' a daughter of a Syracusan gentleman.
The number of Callimachus's works, which are reported to have reached
eight hundred, testifies to his popularity in the Alexandrian period of
Greek literature. It contradicts also the maxim ascribed to him, that "a
great book is a great evil." Among the prose works which would have
enriched our knowledge of literature and history was his history of
Greek literature in one hundred and twenty books, classifying the Greek
writers and naming them chronologically. These were the results of his
long labors in the libraries. Among them was a book on the Museum and
the schools connected with it, with records of illustrious educators and
of the books they had written.
It is his poetry that has in the main survived, and yet as Ovid
says--calling him Battiades, either from his father's name or from the
illustrious founder of his native Cyrene--
"Battiades semper toto cantabitur orbe:
Quamvis ingenio non valet, arte valet."
(Even throughout all lands Battiades's name will be famous;
Though not in genius supreme, yet by his art he excels.)
Quintilian, however, says he was the prince of Greek elegiac poets. Of
his elegies we have a few fragments, and also the Latin translation by
Catullus of the 'Lock of Berenice.' Berenice, the sister and wife of
Ptolemy Euergetes, who succeeded his father Philadelphus in B.C. 245,
had sacrificed some of her hair, laying it on the altar of a temple,
from which it was subsequently stolen. In his poem, Callimachus as the
court poet sang how the gods had taken the tresses and placed them among
the stars. The delicate and humorous 'Rape of the Lock' of Alexander
Pope is a rather remote repetition of the same fancy.
We have also from Callimachus's hand six hymns to the gods and many
epigrams, the latter of which, as will be seen by the quotations given
below, are models of their kind. His lyric hymns are, in reality, rather
epics in little. They are full of recondite information, overloaded
indeed with learning; elegant, nervous, and elaborate, rather than
easy-flowing, simple, and warm, like a genuine product of the muse. Many
of his epigrams grace the 'Greek Anthology.'
Among the best editions of Callimachus is that of Ernesti (1761). The
extant poems and fragments have been in part translated by William Dodd
(1755) and H. W. Tytler (1856). His scattered epigrams have incited many
to attempt their perfect phrasing.