Callimachus of Cyrene

by

Dee Clayman

Introduction

Callimachus of Cyrene was a central figure in the literary and scholarly community that flourished in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE. His poetry was greatly admired by the best Roman poets, who embraced his stylistic principles, and by ancient grammarians, metricians, and lexicographers, who mined his work for examples of rare forms and usage. Of his prodigious body of work, only six Hymns and sixty-three Epigrams have survived intact, though parts of his Aitia, Iambi, and Hecale have been recovered from papyrus fragments and quotations in later authors. The rest are known by title, a few fragments, or not at all.

Biography

The only account of Callimachus’s life to come down from antiquity is found in the Suda, K 227 (formerly called Suidas), a Byzantine encyclopedia from the 10th century, which associates him with Ptolemy (II) Philadelphus (reigned 282–246 BCE) and Ptolemy (III) Euergetes (246–221 BCE). He was born in Cyrene, a Greek city on the north coast of Africa in modern Libya, and emigrated to Alexandria as a young man. He may have spent some time teaching school before taking his place as a prominent poet and scholar. For a discussion of his life in English, see Pfeiffer 1968, pp. 123–125, and in German, Herter 1973, pp. 185–187. A complete compilation of all the ancient testimonia for Callimachus is in Pfeiffer 1985, pp. xcv–cvi.

• Adler, Ada, ed. 1971–1994. Suidas Lexicon. 5 vols. Stuttgart: Teubner.

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  The standard Greek edition (originally published 1928–1938). The Greek text and an evolving English translation are available online.

• Herter, Hans. 1973. Kallimachos aus Kyrene 6. In Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Supp. 13, col. 184–266.

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  A learned survey in German of Callimachus’s life and works, expanding the original article of 1931.

• Pfeiffer, Rudolf. 1968. History of Classical scholarship from the beginnings to the end of the Hellenistic age. Oxford: Clarendon.

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  The best modern study of Hellenistic scholarship. First published in 1949.

• Pfeiffer, Rudolf, ed. 1985. Callimichus: Works II: Hymni et Epigrammata. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

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  Second volume of a two-volume set, the first of which was published in 1949 as Fragmenta.