Contexts and Paratexts of Hellenistic Poetry

In this paper, I argue that Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis was written in honor of the princess Berenike, daughter of Berenike II and Ptolemy Euergetes in 239 or 238 BCE. This identification makes the Hymn to Artemis Callimachus’ latest datable work and could push back the presumed date of Callimachus’ death, which is usually placed around 240-238 BCE. My argument is based on evidence from a trilingual inscription from 238 BCE known as the Canopus Decree (OGIS 56) as well as intertextual ties to Callimachus’ twelfth Iambus.

Although intertextual and reception studies have largely been the bread and butter of Callimachean scholarship for several decades, comparatively little has been said about the poet’s literary representations of his engagement with actual, physical texts. As the scholar charged with categorizing the Great Library’s collection, and as a poet immersed in the burgeoning book culture of Alexandria, Callimachus lived in an academic environment dependent upon the arrival and availability of physical texts.

Hipparchus’ second century BC commentary on Aratus’s Phaenomena has been acknowledged as the earliest extant ancient commentary, and yet scholarship has neglected its value as a locus for early discussion of reading strategies that we find practiced in the later commentary tradition. Instead, the focus has been on its value for reconstructing the history of astronomical knowledge (Neugebauer 1975; Lloyd 1987; Evans 1998) and, most recently, the commentary’s function of establishing a method of “doing” and “writing” science (Tueller and Macfarlane 2009).

In Book 2 of Apollonius’ Argonautica, as the Argonauts sail past the southeastern coast of the Black Sea, the poet describes the customs of three tribes who inhabit this region: the Mossynoikoi, the Tibarenoi, and the Chalybes (2.1000-1029; cf. 2.351-81). Remarkably, the voyage of the Argonauts past these three tribes anticipates and mirrors another epic journey, this time a historical one: the passage of the Ten Thousand through the lands of these same tribes, as narrated by Xenophon in the Anabasis (5.4-5).

The Phaeacians’ appearance in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (Argo.4.538-551, 992-1223) is their second longest in Greek literature, surpassed only by Odyssey. The length of this treatment and Apollonius’ well-known practice of alluding to Homeric poetry have led scholars such as West (2005) and Dyck (1989) to conclude that Apollonius’ Phaeacians are simply a calque of Homer’s.