Hellenistic Poetry

The Repentant Rapist: A Menandrian Strategy of Characterization in Callimachus’ Acontius and Cydippe (frr. 67–75 Pf.)

I argue for a metapoetic reading of the Talos episode in which Medea annihilates a stand in for Theocritus’ Polyphemus, the bucolic hero who had found a pharmakon to cure love-sickness.  This makes Medea a kind of anti-Galatea, who, rather than fleeing to the sea from a giant or coyly pelting him with apples, sends not love, but death from afar.

Female Vocational Education in Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis

Embodied Divinities and Divine Kings: Callimachus’ Subversive Portrayal of Zeus in the Hymn to Zeus and Hymn to Delos

This paper will argue that Callimachus intentionally confuses the geometric discoveries of Thales, Pythagoras, and Euphorbus in Iambus 1 in order to force the audience into the role he wants them to play: scholars arguing over preeminence.

In recent decades scholars have significantly reevaluated the social status of Hellenistic poets. Scholar-poets in Alexandria, for instance, were not isolated in the Museum writing only for other scholars; instead, the court offered important and prestigious venues for their works to be performed and/or discussed, like the royal symposium (Weber [1993], 122–84 and [2011]; Cameron [1995], 71–103; Acosta-Hughes/Stephens [2012], 130–40).

Two near contemporary epigrams have not been examined together until now though they share the same subject, the ruins of Corinth. One is in Latin, written by Marcus Antonius (grandfather of the triumvir), while the other belongs to an obscure Greek poet, Polystratus. Polystratus' piece takes an ambivalent posture towards Roman hegemony after the Sack of Corinth. Antonius' foray, on the other hand, epitomizes how eager the Roman aristocracy was to compete in a new genre, even on Hellenic home turf and as early as the late second century BCE.

This paper analyzes two of Simias of Rhodes’ “technopaegnia,” or shape poems, proposing new hermeneutic strategies that take fuller advantage of the expressive potential of this distinctive poetic form. The Greek shape poems constitute a small “microgenre” of epigram (Palumbo Stracca 113–114) in which the poet manipulates the meter and, in some cases, the alignment of the text, such that the lines are arranged to form the silhouette of an image (Palumbo Stracca 118; Luz 327; d’Alessandro 135).

The memorable analogy of the honeyed cup of wormwood (1.936-50 ≈ 4.11-25) surely ranks among the most enduring images in De rerum natura (DRN). Indeed, Lucretius’ blending of the medicine of Epicureanism with the sweetness of poetry continues to exercise scholars by virtue of the clearly programmatic implications of the image (Gale 1994, Clay 2003, Buchheit 2004, Kyriakidis 2006, Menghi 2006, Comte-Sponville 2008, Mastandrea 2014-2015, Nethercut 2019).

In scholarly discussions of Theocritus’ Idyll 11 (Payne 2007, Hordern 2004, Hunter 1999, Far 1991) Philoxenus’ lost dithyramb on the Cyclops is seen as the model of Theocritus’ poem (fr. 9 Page). It remains unnoticed, however, that the topos of poetry as both a remedy for and a product of painful love, as influenced by Philoxenus, is also the main theme of a preserved fragment from Hermesianax’s elegiac Leontion (fr 7 Powell), which narrates the love stories of famous poets.