Kathleen Kidder, University of Houston
Rivers course through the verse of the Hellenistic period. Just as Callimachus (third century BCE) often depicts rivers in his poems (e.g., Hymns), so too does his successor Lycophron (early second century BCE) saturate the Alexandra with streams. While this preponderance in both authors reflects a wider Hellenistic fascination with geography (e.g., Callimachus’ prose treatises on the subject, Suda κ 227), rivers also serve as metapoetic symbols, as in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (108–112).
To date, scholars have focused on Lycophron’s reworking of Callimachus’ path imagery, another metapoetic symbol favored by the earlier poet (Durbec 2006, McNelis and Sens 2016, Nelson and Molesworth 2021). In this paper, I propose that rivers are similarly fertile areas for appreciating Lycophron’s adaptation of Callimachus. Like Callimachus, Lycophron presents the image of a river as a nourishing “source,” but he heightens the association between rivers and displacement. This association corresponds to the Alexandra’s themes of difficulty and wandering, as can be seen in the poem’s numerous nostoi and colonization narratives (Alex. 417–1282).
To demonstrate this association between rivers and displacement, I compare Lycophron’s portrayal of three rivers (Nile, Inopus, and Pactolus) to their depiction in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos. In Callimachus, the Nile supposedly allows the Inopus on Delos to flow (4.207–208) and is the site of a future Ptolemaic victory against the invading Galatians (4.185–187). The Inopus provides Leto with a place to rest (4.208) and give birth to Apollo. Finally, Callimachus casts gold-bearing Pactolus as the source of the swans who serenade the island at Apollo’s birth (4.249–255). In each case, a river nourishes and enables productivity, either of a god, gold, song, or Ptolemaic military glory.
Lycophron also treats the purported connection of the Nile and the Inopus (Alex. 576), when describing King Anius’ promise to feed the Greeks during the Trojan War, provided they remain “wandering” (ἠλάσκουσιν, 575) on Delos for nine years. Yet the potential nourishment of the Greeks by the Inopus would coincide with their separation from their goal of Troy and – by extension – glory. Callimachus’ Inopus, by contrast, alleviates Leto’s wandering and allows the birth of Apollo. Similarly, the Pactolus appears in the context of displacement in the Alexandra. Lycophron lists this river as a place abandoned by the “falcons” (Tyrrhenus and Tarchon) for their conquest of Etruria (1351–1361). Lycophron’s reworking of his predecessor is particularly obvious in the parallel use of bird imagery (swans and falcons) and even similar verbs (λιπόντες, 4.250; ἐκλελοιπότες, 1351). Lycophron transmutes a river generating gold and swans into one that produces wandering and conflict.
While rivers nourish in both authors’ works, the rivers of Lycophron simultaneously support and separate. Streams embody the displacement of characters from their homelands, either when nourishing them in new locations or when recalling their abandoned lands. In this way, Lycophron makes rivers an apt metaphor for his adaptation of Callimachus. Despite drawing from Callimachus as a source, Lycophron, like a river, displaces his poetics from those of his predecessor.