Callimachus was arguably the most important poet of the Hellenistic
age, for two reasons: his engagement with previous theorists of
poetry and his wide-ranging poetic experimentation. Of his poetic
oeuvre, which exceeded what we now have of Theocritus, Aratus,
Posidippus, and Apollonius combined, only his six hymns and around
fifty of his epigrams have survived intact. His enormously
influential Aetia, the collection of Iambi, the Hecale, and all of
his prose output have been reduced to a handful of citations in
later Greek lexica and handbooks or papyrus fragments. In recent
years excellent commentaries and synthetic studies of the Aetia,
the Iambi, and the Hecale have appeared or are about to appear. But
there is no modern study in English of the collection of hymns. And
while there are excellent commentaries in English on three of the
hymns (Apollo, Athena, Demeter), the commentaries on Zeus and on
Delos are limited in scope, and there is no commentary at all on
the Artemis hymn. Synthetic studies in English for the most part
treat only one hymn, not the collection, and tend to focus on
Callimachus' intertextual relationships with his predecessors
and/or his influence on Roman poetry. Yet recent work is requiring
scholars to broaden their perspective and to consider Callimachus'
religious, civic, and geo-political contexts much more
systematically in attempting to understand the hymns. A further
incentive is that apart from the Homeric and Orphic hymns,
Callimachus' are the only other hymns that have survived intact;
those written in earlier periods are now reduced to fragments. For
these reasons a study of the six hymns together is a desideratum.
An additional reason is that Callimachus' collection of six hymns
is very likely to have been an authorially arranged poetry book,
quite possibly the earliest such book that we have intact;
therefore, it allows a unique perspective on the evolution of the
form. This volume offers a text and commentary of all six hymns for
advanced students of classics and classical scholars, as well as
interpretive essays on each hymn that integrate what has been the
dominant paradigm-intertextuality-into a broader focus on
Callimachus' context. Her introduction treats the transmission of
the hymns, the potential for and likelihood of the Homeric hymns as
models, the hymns as a poetry book, their language and meter
(especially in light of recent work done on this topic),
performance practices, and their relationship to cult, court, local
geographies, and panhellenic sanctuaries. For each hymn Stephens
presents the Greek text, a translation, and a brief commentary
containing important information or parallels for interpretation.
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