In this book, leading Greek scholars explore the rich and diverse poetry and prose of the long Hellenistic period. Chapters focus on the poets of Alexandria such as Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, and Posidippus and on prose texts written in Greek in the Roman Empire. This volume demonstrates the versatility of this literature and examines its multiple cultural affiliations. The Hellenistic writers emerge from this volume as complex, playful, and politically engaged figures, interested in the relationship between culture and society, and far removed from the stereotype of them as distant or elitist. This book makes a major contribution to the study of Hellenistic Greek culture. Susan Stephens is the Sarah Hart Kimball Emerita Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, USA. Her contributions to the study of Hellenistic literature and culture are immense. She is the author of over fifty articles and the author or editor of ten books. Many of these publications have made a significant impact on the study of the ancient world. Her research on the poets of Alexandria and on ancient Greek prose fiction is widely regarded as path-breaking. She is an inspiring and influential teacher who guided and mentored generations of students and is closely associated with Stanford, where she obtained her undergraduate and doctoral degrees and where she taught from 1978 until her retirement.

A central, much-studied feature of the poetry of 3rd cent. BCE Alexandria is the artistic treatment of the cultural past, the reception of earlier Greek poetry and artwork in the artistic creations of a new, Greco-Egyptian world deracinated both geographically and temporally from the heroes and models of Archaic and Classical Greece. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes has devoted a 30+ year professional scholarly career to the study of this reception, one of both imitation and variation, which took place concurrently with the massive collection and categorization of earlier Greek literature in the work of the scholars gathered under royal patronage at the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria, a truly revolutionary new effort of cultural memorialization. The poets of this period, among them Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius and Posidippus, vied in their efforts to compose works that at once celebrated their poetic heritage and at the same time marked their own poetry as original artistic creation and as critical commentary upon their earlier models. This collection will be of interest not only for readers of Archaic and Hellenistic poetry, but also for readers interested in the later reception of the Alexandrians at Rome.

Now in a riveting new verse translation Jason and the Argonauts (also known as the Argonautica), is the only surviving full account of Jason's voyage on the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece aided by the sorceress princess Medea. Written in third century B.C., this epic story of one of the most beloved heroes of Greek mythology, with its combination of the fantastical and the real, its engagement with traditions of science, astronomy and medicine, winged heroes, and a magical vessel that speaks, is truly without exact parallel in classical or contemporary Greek literature and is now available in an accessible and engaging translation. Apollonius of Rhodes published his first version of the Argonautica sometime in the middle of the third century B.C. At the end of his life he was director of the famous Library of Alexandria, which was the principal storehouse of all literature and learning at the time. Aaron Poochigian, born in 1973, is a poet and an associated lecturer in Classics at The Ohio State University and has translated the Penguin Classics edition of Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments by Sappho, as well as works by Aeschylus and Aratus. He lives in New York City. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes is Professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. He is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Arion's Lyre: Archaic Lyric into Hellenistic Poetry.

"Arion's Lyre" examines how Hellenistic poetic culture adapted, reinterpreted, and transformed Archaic Greek lyric through a complex process of textual, cultural, and creative reception. Looking at the ways in which the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides was preserved, edited, and read by Hellenistic scholars and poets, the book shows that Archaic poets often look very different in the new social, cultural, and political setting of Hellenistic Alexandria. For example, the Alexandrian Sappho evolves from the singer of Archaic Lesbos but has distinct associations and contexts, from Ptolemaic politics and Macedonian queens to the new phenomenon of the poetry book and an Alexandrian scholarship intent on preservation and codification.

A study of Hellenistic poetic culture and an interpretation of some of the Archaic poets it so lovingly preserved, "Arion's Lyre" is also an examination of how one poetic culture reads another--and how modern readings of ancient poetry are filtered and shaped by earlier readings.

This colloquium volume celebrates a new Hellenistic epigram collection attributed to the third-century B.C.E. poet Posidippus, one of the most significant literary finds in recent memory. Included in this collection are an unusual variety of voices and perspectives: papyrological, art historical, archaeological, historical, literary, and aesthetic. These texts are considered as individual poems and as collective artifact, an early poetry book. The volume will be of interest to readers of Greek and Latin epigram, students of the Hellenistic period, and all readers interested in the aesthetics of poetry collection and the evolution of the poetry book in antiquity.

Scholarly reception has bequeathed two Callimachuses: the Roman version is a poet of elegant non-heroic poetry (usually erotic elegy), represented by a handful of intertexts with a recurring set of images slender Muse, instructing divinity, small voice, pure waters; the Greek version emphasizes a learned scholar who includes literary criticism within his poetry, an encomiast of the Ptolemies, a poet of the book whose narratives are often understood as metapoetic. This study does not dismiss these Callimachuses, but situates them within a series of interlocking historical and intellectual contexts in order better to understand how they arose. In this narrative of his poetics and poetic reception four main sources of creative opportunism are identified: Callimachus' reactions to philosophers and literary critics as arbiters of poetic authority, the potential of the text as a venue for performance, awareness of Alexandria as a new place, and finally, his attraction for Roman poets.

"In this important new study of Callimachus' enigmatic Iambi, Acosta-Hughes displays a range of talents which qualify him as a true modern interpreter of this difficult Hellenistic poet. Functioning by turns as historian, commentator, and critic, Acosta-Hughes gives readers of Callimachus a fresh perspective on both the archaic models for the Iambs and the novel ways Callimachus deploys and organizes his reactions to his predecessors. Especially noteworthy (and something which distinguishes this study from earlier work on the Iambi) is the focus on groups of related poems, allowing the author to explore different facets of the Iambic tradition in some detail. This book does for Callimachus' Iambs what Hunter's 'Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry' did for the Idylls."--Nita Krevans, University of Minnesota

"Acosta-Hughes, in this newest appraisal, has bypassed the initial handicap posed by the physical state of the Iambi through substantial exploration of the tradition of Callimachus' motives (the story of their uses, meanings, and contexts). As a result, our knowledge of the poems as whole entities is much improved. Acosta-Hughes organizes the units of his book not poem by poem but thematically. The output is splendid: it is indeed as if Callimachus had paved the way for his implied reader to read the Iambs diagonally. Acosta-Hughes's "dispositio" manages to 'regulate' Callimachus' polyeideia by pointing out the main interests underlying the Iambs and providing them with coherence and self-referentiality. At the same time it also highlights the fact that Callimachus shares the 'strong' interests of his iambic verses with his declared model Hipponax, far more than has beenusually assumed. Rediscovery, no less than renovation, proves once again to be the key issue underlying even the most unconventional Hellenistic poetry."--Marco Fantuzzi is the author (with Richard Hunter) of "Muse e Modelli: la poesia ellenistica da Alessandro Magno ad Augusto

"Long neglected by modern critics, The Book of Iambs is a central text in Callimachus' "sweet competition" (fr. 202.45 Pf.) with the Hellenic past. This patient and brilliant exercise in reconstruction offers many new insights on the fragments and explains the importance of the work in Graeco-Roman literary history. "--Alessandro Barchiesi, author of "The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse

Scholarly reception has bequeathed two Callimachuses: the Roman version is a poet of elegant non-heroic poetry (usually erotic elegy), represented by a handful of intertexts with a recurring set of images - slender Muse, instructing divinity, small voice, pure waters; the Greek version emphasizes a learned scholar who includes literary criticism within his poetry, an encomiast of the Ptolemies, a poet of the book whose narratives are often understood as metapoetic. This study aims to situate these Callimachuses within a series of interlocking historical and intellectual contexts in order better to understand how they arose. In this narrative of his poetics and poetic reception four main sources of creative opportunism are identified: Callimachus' reactions to philosophers and literary critics as arbiters of poetic authority, the potential of the text as a venue for performance, awareness of Alexandria as a new place, and finally, his attraction for Roman poets.