Few figures from Greco-Roman antiquity have undergone as much reassessment in recent decades as Callimachus of Cyrene, who was active at the Alexandrian court of the Ptolemies during the early third century BC. Once perceived as a supreme example of ivory tower detachment and abstruse learning, Callimachus has now come to be understood as an artificer of the images of a powerful and vibrant court and as a poet second only to Homer in his later reception. For the modern audience, the fragmentation of his texts and the diffusion of source materials has often impeded understanding his poetic achievement. "Brill s Companion to Callimachus" has been designed to aid in negotiating this scholarly terrain, especially the process of editing and collecting his fragments, to illuminate his intellectual and social contexts, and to indicate the current directions that his scholarship is taking.

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.

Recent decades have seen a flourishing of interest in Hellenistic epigram (short poems usually in elegiac couplets), an interest fostered in part by the appearance of several ground-breaking new studies of these poems and the history of their collection, as well as by the publication in 2001 of a newly found papyrus, P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, that preserves over 100 epigrams of Posidippus of Pela. Missing hitherto in this proliferation of new scholarship on epigram is an edition and commentary in English on the epigrams of Callimachus, one of the leading and most widely imitated creative figures of this period, an artist who composed in a wide variety of poetic genres, one of which was epigram. Callimachus' epigrams adumbrate a broad selection of types, among them sepulchral, dedicatory, epideictic and erotic poems; the poems are brilliant artworks themselves and are among the most illuminating examples of this poetic genre. Scholarship on Callimachus tends to favor the fragmentary poems (the Aetia, the Hecale, the Iambi etc.) over the extant; our study seeks to redress this imbalance, and to cast a new interpretive light upon these glittering gems, which came to be widely admired and imitated in both later Greek and Latin poetry.

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.

"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

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.

"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.