Callimachus

‘I’m writing versions of Callimachus’s epigrams’ sounds like ‘I’ve got rabies’ to judge by the way non-classicists react. I think people know Callimachus in one of three ways: a) not at all; b) inadvertently, via William Johnson Cory’s translation of epigram 2, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead…’; c) because they are classicists, although he is not hard-wired into the syllabus.

He preached the gospel of Reader’s Digest – cutting improves. Posterity misinterpreted this, and most of his works are lost or fragmentary; the Fourth Crusade was devastating for what had remained until then. He advised writers to take the road less travelled by, and to avoid sloppy pastiche of the epic (but this is not to diss Homer). Where the bee sucks (at the pure holy source), there suck I; the Euphrates carries trash. Also attributed to him is ‘mega book, mega cock-up – mega bibilíon, mega kakon; μέγα βιβλίον, μέγα κακόν.’

Like many of his readers, I encountered him first via the Romans, loitering in footnotes. He occupies a good deal of Catullus’s negative space – the vital bits you look for when drawing – and influenced Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Propertius (who called himself ‘Callimachus Romanus’). He was colonised, translated into Latin in a different time, place and political set-up from his own.

He himself did PR, as a Hellenistic poet-librarian can, for the colonisers who were his employers, the second and possibly third Ptolemy. Their dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great’s Mycenaean generals, they declined ...