CHAPTER VIII .

ALEXANDRIAN LITERATURE

I.

ALEXANDRIA AND ALEXANDRIAN SCHOLARSHIP

THE literary historian who attempts a survey of the century which followed the death of Alexander is handicapped by the fragmentary nature of his material. That writers abounded as never before in the history of Greek literature is proved by the many names that have survived, but only too often these are indeed nominum umbrae. Hellenistic Prose paid the price for adaptation to the multifarious demands made upon it as the ordinary medium of expression by becoming slovenly, and in consequence, except for meagre excerpts, has failed to withstand the assaults of time. Poetry—or at any rate that poetry (and it is the characteristic type) which was written by the few for the few—has been more fortunate. But in prose and poetry alike the gifts of fortune have been scanty and capricious. This fact and the exigencies of space compel the historian to thrust certain authors into a prominence perhaps undeserved, and the reader is to remember that by their side were other writers who may well have exemplified with a difference the literary tendencies which these authors represent. All that is possible here is to mark out the main lines, to depict the main figures of Greek literature in the early Hellenistic age.

Alexandria has been called the literary capital of the Greek world in the third century BC—and with justice, so long as one remembers that the predominance of a capital does not exclude the existence of provincial centres and even of outlying districts, where possibly some forms of literature flourish more vigorously than in the metropolis itself. At any rate it is true to say that during this period there is practically no form of poetry—except Comedy and certain kinds of moralizing verse—to which Alexandria does not give the tone. By the middle of the century that influence has become so strong that even a poet like Euphorion, who seems to have spent his life in Old Greece and Syria, is as much subject to it as any writer who resided in the Egyptian capital. In prose Alexandria never exerted her authority so strongly. Philosophy remained the speciality of Athens. Though individual philosophers, chiefly Peripatetics, found their way to Egypt, the atmosphere was generally unfavourable to this form of intellectual activity; it is significant that the lectures of Hegesias, the apostle of pessimism, were suppressed by royal decree as detrimental to public morals. Neither apparently were Oratory and Rhetoric of great importance at Alexandria, though a good many school-declamations have turned up of late among the papyri discovered in Egypt. The diminished prestige, of Oratory reflects the new political conditions, but even the indirect influence of Rhetoric is least observable in works of Alexandrian origin. It was in fact the technical sciences (geography, mathematics, physics, medicine, natural history, philology) which chiefly engaged the Alexandrian prose-writers.

The long years of war which followed the death of Alexander were less unfavourable to literary production than might have been expected. Poets indeed, except for the writers of the New Comedy at Athens, seem far from numerous; the form of verse most cultivated is the Epigram—a hardy plant, little affected by material conditions. On the other hand some branches of prose are better represented in this period than later, partly because Oratory continued to flourish in the transition period of the Diadochi, and partly because the exciting events of these years and those just past inspired a good deal of historical writing. Literature, nevertheless, had to live from hand to mouth, and it is the great merit of the Ptolemies that, being the first Hellenistic monarchs to establish a stable dynasty, they set the example of providing Letters and Science with a firmer footing. The Greeks were not unaware of their debt to Alexandria, for Athenaeus cites with approval the statement that ‘it was the Alexandrians who educated all the Greeks and barbarians, when general culture was tending to disappear owing to the continuous disturbances in the age of the Diadochi.’ Athenaeus and his authorities may perhaps be considered partial, but the importance of the Ptolemaic patronage of literature may be measured by comparing it with that available at this epoch in other regions of the Greek world.

As regards Macedonia, the circle of Antigonus, described elsewhere, was short-lived, and in general the rulers of this kingdom may well have regarded Athens, which was usually under their control, as an adequate representative of learning within their territory. The Seleucids did more for literature. Occasional patronage, such as that of Aratus and Simonides of Magnesia by Antiochus Soter, meant little, but Antiochus the Great established a library at Antioch and put Euphorion in charge. That such encouragement was not in vain is shown a century later by the appearance of Meleager and other poets of the Phoenician school. But the only dynasty whose interest in Letters is at all comparable with that shown by the Ptolemies is the Pergamene. The patronage of the Arts, particularly sculpture, by the Attalids is well known; they also promoted the cause of literature by inviting scholars to their court and by forming a splendid library. Though there is little to be said for the view that this library tended to concentrate on prose, while that at Alexandria paid more attention to verse, it is true that few of the literary men, whom the Attalids patronized, were poets. The reason lies partly in the fact that Hellenistic Poetry had passed its zenith before Pergamum became important, and partly in the classicist tastes of the dynasty, which, being Greek rather than Macedonian, prided itself on keeping in touch with Athens and particularly with the Attic schools of philosophy. In consequence the most notable figures among the litterateurs of Pergamum are Antigonus of Carystus, sculptor and biographer; Crates of Mallus, the Stoic grammarian; Polemon of Ilium and Demetrius of Scepsis, the antiquarians.

To turn back to Alexandria, ancient authorities are not agreed which Ptolemy, Soter or Philadelphus, founded the Library and Museum, but the undoubted connection of Demetrius of Phalerum with the origin of these institutions strongly supports the claims of the first Ptolemy, since Demetrius fell from favour under Philadelphus. In all probability Soter took the first steps towards the foundation of the Museum and Library round about 290 BC.

Both institutions continue at Alexandria the tradition of Aristotle. The Museum is clearly modelled on the Athenian schools of philosophy, in particular the Academy and Lyceum. Demetrius, as governor of Athens, had secured the legal existence of the Peripatetic school by organizing it as a religious community formed to worship the Muses. At Alexandria, though the legal necessity no longer applied, the fiction was maintained. Such institutions are conservative, and we may therefore use Strabo’s account for times before his own. ‘The Museum too,’ he says, ‘is part of the Royal Quarter; it contains a promenade and arcade, and a large building in which is the common dining room of the scholars who are members of the Museum. This association has a common fund, and a priest in charge ot the Muses’ shrine, formerly appointed by the kings, but now by Caesar.’ We note that the Museum is definitely under state control. Alexander had been content to offer a subsidy to the Academy and Lyceum; Soter, who was founding a new institution, naturally retained the direction in his own hands. It is not clear what branches of knowledge were represented by the members. Strabo speaks vaguely of ‘scholars’ (philologoi); Timon of Phlius, one of the two writers of the third century to mention the Museum (the other is Herodas), refers to philosophers in his caustic verses:

In the thronging land of Egypt,

There are many that are feeding, 

Many scribblers on papyrus 

Ever ceaselessly contending, 

In the bird-coop of the Muses.

Probably ‘philosophy’ in this connection is to be widely interpreted, and we may fairly assume that a place was found for all branches of scientific research. Strabo says nothing of lecture rooms or residential quarters, and though lectures were certainly delivered and definite ‘schools,’ e.g. of medicine and mathematics, formed at Alexandria, it is probable that such instruction was given in public halls and the like. The discussions at the Museum were ‘for members only.’ In short, the nearest modern parallel is such a body as the British Academy, with the not unimportant difference that the members of the Museum were subsidized.

Strabo expressly cites the example of Aristotle as having given the Egyptian kings the idea of forming a library. The collecting of manuscripts was doubtless begun under Soter, but Philadelphus may have been the first to construct the actual library, since, to begin with, the rolls were housed in certain buildings ‘in heaps.’ The main library was, like the Museum, in the Royal Quarter, but there was also a smaller library near the temple of Sarapis in the south-west quarter of Alexandria. This, known as the ‘daughter’ library, was founded after the larger one, but not later than the reign of Philadelphus; possibly it contained modern copies for the use of the general public. As to the size of the libraries, the evidence is conflicting, and this is not surprising, since it is seldom clear to what precise epoch our authorities refer and whether they are describing the contents of both libraries or only of the larger. The most credible statement is that of the Byzantine scholar Tzetzes, who says that the outer library contained 42,800 volumes  while that within the Palace contained 400,000 ‘mixed’ and 90,000 ‘unmixed and simple’ volumes, and adds that catalogues of the books were made later by Callimachus. The last remark seems to justify us in assigning Tzetzes’ figures to an early period in the history of the libraries. As regards his distinction between the ‘mixed’ and ‘unmixed’ volumes, the most reasonable view is that by the latter are meant papyrus-rolls containing a single work of small dimensions or a section of a larger work (as divided into ‘books’ by the Alexandrians); the ‘mixed’ volumes were the bigger and more cumbrous rolls, containing either two (or more) single works of smaller size or several sections of a longer work (not yet divided into ‘books’). The number of the ‘mixed’ volumes was gradually reduced by transcription into rolls of more convenient size and by other methods. This system became general, so that, when Antony presented Cleopatra with the Pergamene library to replace the books burned at Alexandria, we are expressly told that the gift consisted of 200,000 ‘simple’ volumes.

Such sorting-out and division was the first task of the men appointed by the Ptolemies to posts in the Library. Alexander Aetolus and Lycophron of Chalcis dealt with the Dramatists, Alexander taking Tragedy and Lycophron Comedy, while Epic and possibly Lyric Poetry fell to the lot of Zenodotus of Ephesus, who was also the first Chief Librarian. The real catalogue, we have seen, was made by Callimachus. This, his celebrated Pinakes in 120 books, included short lives of the chief authors and was divided under at least eight headings, viz. (1) Dramatists, (2) Epic and Lyric Poets, (3) Legislators, (4) Philosophers, (5) Historians, (6) Orators, (7) Rhetoricians, (8) Miscellaneous. A document, discovered some years ago in Egypt1, appears to give the following succession of Chief Librarians after Zenodotus—Apollonius Rhodius, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius the Eidograph, Aristarchus, Cydas ‘one of the Bodyguard.’ The last was apparently a purely political appointment by Ptolemy Physcon. Since Zenodotus, Apollonius Rhodius, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus all taught the children of those Ptolemies who were contemporary with them, it is a fair conclusion that the Chief Librarian was ex officio tutor to the Royal Family.

To estimate the services rendered to Greek literature by the Alexandrian scholars is not altogether easy. It is their work on the Homeric Poems which is best known today, but our present vulgate of Homer is pre-Alexandrian and a comparatively stable text had been achieved before Zenodotus and his successors published their ‘editions.’ It is probably in regard to Lyric Poetry and the Drama that these scholars have the greatest claims on our gratitude. In the Classical period readers were content with such texts of any author as came their way, and there is little to show that these were too unsatisfactory; they at least gave an intelligible version, though eccentric copies were not uncommon. Still, mere lapse of time was continually corrupting the texts, and the process was accelerated by the decay of the polis and the superficial extension of the Greek reading-public; the efforts of Aristophanes of Byzantium at the beginning of the second century to check this degeneration of the texts were not made a moment too soon. It is necessary then to make a distinction between the editions of Homer which were produced by the Alexandrians and the work of these scholars on the rest of Greek literature. The former were not trade-editions (some even doubt if they were published by the author in book-form), but were intended for a small public of pupils and other connoisseurs of textual criticism. This explains why they failed to affect the vulgate, and why uncertainties soon arose in regard to readings and even as to the number of editions. On the other hand the editions of the Lyric and Dramatic Poets were an attempt to provide the general public with a good text and to collect works hitherto only procurable separately; it is this practical purpose which explains the attention paid to punctuation and accents in these editions.

The Alexandrian scholars conceived it their duty in dealing with any author, firstly to establish the text, and secondly to explain the language and subject-matter. The successive editions of Homer by Zenodotus, Rhianus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus give us the best idea of their methods. This evidence shows a constant advance in critical scholarship. Manuscript material accumulated and the very variety of readings made for caution in conjecture; at the same time with the multiplication of critical signs it became easier for an editor to indicate his opinion. Aristarchus’ Commentaries on Homer followed the text line by line; special problems were reserved for separate brochures which were often polemical. The critical skill acquired in these studies was applied by Aristophanes and his successors to other kinds of Poetry and in a lesser degree to Prose. In Drama and Lyric Poetry the Aristophanic text seems to have won general acceptance, so that later scholars confined themselves mainly to exegesis. After the criticism and exposition of texts came the study of grammar for its own sake, much assisted by Stoic speculations on the origin and development of language. The first Greek Grammar was compiled by a pupil of Aristarchus, Dionysius the Thracian.

II.

PROSE

The chief reason for the disappearance of so much Hellenistic Prose is to be found in its lack of attention to style. It was on this count that the so-called ‘Atticist’ reaction, which began to show its strength about 100 BC, and found a powerful representative in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a contemporary of Augustus, pronounced a damning verdict against the chief prose-writers of the period 300—100 BC. Though later authors continued to draw their material from these writers, the general public was content to know them at second-hand, and in consequence the original works dropped out of circulation and eventually disappeared altogether. Style apart, Hellenistic Prose was subject to two influences, which contrast rather sharply with each other, and it is the failure to bridge this difference which accounts for the second-rate quality of all this literature. The first, that of the Peripatetics, may be summed up as the cult of the ‘Memoir’ (hypomnema), i.e. the passion for recording facts as such. This produced on the one hand a large number of reports by first-hand witnesses, but on the other the collections of Mirabilia anecdotes, et hoc genus omne, which fill a disproportionate space in the literary activity of the time. The other influence came from Isocrates, and showed itself most plainly in the composition of history. This was treated ‘rhetorically,’ that is to say, truth was sacrificed for dramatic effect, or facts were perverted to point a moral. Still the ineptitudes of the compilers should not blind us to the fact that there was a good deal of grain among their chaff, and we are certainly not justified in endorsing without reservations the hard words of Polybius about the historians who immediately preceded him.

Oratory and Rhetoric: There was no room in the Hellenistic monarchies for the political oration which had been the glory of Demosthenic Athens; even in Old Greece the controversies of the hour found expression in party-pamphlets and tendentious histories, not in public harangues. Ancient critics accepted Demetrius of Phalerum as the last of the Attic Orators, but the most remarkable thing about Demetrius is his versatility. The composer of philosophic dialogues, declamations on imaginary topics, a history of his regency; the collector of fables and apophthegms, must have regarded his public speeches as only one form of his literary activities. An agreeable and flowery manner led critics to apply to his treatment of Oratory the dictum of Eratosthenes regarding Bion and Philosophy: both had prostituted the science with which they were concerned. Demetrius is credited with the invention of a new type of speech, composed to put the case of a state as favourably as possible before an all-powerful friend. Such oratory seems to have been a speciality of the philosophers, as being the most notable citizens that Greek states could now put forward on these occasions. Judicial oratory lost the prestige which it had temporarily acquired. The last orator of this type whose works were deemed worthy of preservation was Charisius. An imitator of Lysias, he became in turn the model of Hegesias of Magnesia, the butt of so much Atticist criticism as the chief exponent of the Asianic style. This style dominated the only form of oratory which continued to enjoy undiminished popularity, viz. the purely epideictic, though traditions of Attic sobriety may have survived at Rhodes.

The term ‘Asianic’ covers two quite different perversions of the classical style. The one is the manner of Hegesias, whom critics like Dionysius represent as an affected and pretentious writer in whose works strained metaphors, play upon words, and false antitheses concealed or failed to conceal an absence of real thought. He abandoned the periodic style of the Attic school as involving too great a strain on the concentration of his audience, and substituted short epigrammatic sentences such as we find so often in Seneca. It is doubtful if this type of Asianism was so popular as the other, the bombastic and flamboyant, an example of which survives in the curious inscription of Antiochus of Commagene from the first century BC, the very time when all Asia, according to Cicero, practised this sonorous and rolling oratory. During the supremacy of the Asianic styles the professional rhetoricians seem to have troubled little about the principles underlying their art; it was left for philosophers, chiefly Peripatetics and Stoics, to write on this subject. But some sort of technical training must have been available for aspiring speakers, and in the second century an ambitious effort to formulate an Art of Rhetoric was made by Hermagoras of Temnos. Though important for the technique of oratory, he apparently contributed nothing to the discussion of style and language. These problems were left to the critics of Pergamum and Rhodes and the classicist reaction.

History: The writing of history had travelled a long way since Herodotus and Thucydides, the one the heir of the Epic, the other himself a man of action and a political thinker as well. Apart from Xenophon, the most notable among Thucydides’ successors were Philistus of Syracuse, the historian of the two tyrants Dionysius, and Cratippus, for whom some scholars claim the authorship of the important historical fragment known as the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. Whatever their merits— and Cicero calls Philistus a ‘miniature Thucydides’—neither writer attracted a large public, but they were followed by two historians, Ephorus of Cyme and Theopompus of Chios, whose vogue both in their own age and afterwards was very considerable. Both men were products of Isocrates’ ‘workshop,’ but their temperaments were in sharp contrast, Ephorus, according to his teacher’s famous remark, needing the spur, Theopompus the bridle. The Hellenica of Ephorus exhibits several novelties. The first Universal History produced by a Greek, in the sense that it embraced the history of all the Greeks from the Return of the Heracleidae down to 340 BC, it consisted of thirty Books (the last added by the author’s son), of which each was a unity in itself. The arrangement was according to subject-matter, with possibly some application of the annalistic method in the later Books. Ephorus’ reading had been large, and some of the fragments show that he was not devoid of critical sense, but his precept was better than his practice. He made many mistakes in topography and geography, while the unreality of the harangues which he inserted into his battle-descriptions became proverbial.

Theopompus was a more interesting, but hardly, it seems, more trustworthy writer. His earlier work, the Hellenica in twelve Books, probably covered the period 410-394 BC, thus continuing the narrative of Thucydides. Considerably more famous was his Philippica in fifty-eight Books. Like Ephorus, Theopompus had been affected by Isocrates’ ideas of national unity, but, more practically-minded than his fellow-historian, he applied these ideas to contemporary politics, and grouped his story round the rise of Macedon, as illustrated by the career of Philip. Polybius finds fault with Theopompus for his pro-Macedonian bias; a commoner charge is that of exaggerated severity in the appraising of character and assignment of motives, so that Nepos, for instance, calls him scriptor maledicentissimus. In his fondness for psychological analysis he anticipated Tacitus. The Philippica abounded in digressions—among them a description of a completely imaginary land of wonders, called Meropis. Though he had roved about the world, Theopompus was not exempt from the pedantry which marks the Isocratean school, and, like Ephorus, he was weakest when dealing with matters of fact (for example, battles) which called for a certain amount of technical knowledge. Still he had the advantage of being contemporary with the events which formed his main theme, and the loss of his chief work has robbed us of a valuable supplement to the Athenian account of the Demosthenic age.

Another regrettable loss is that of the Hellenica of Callisthenes, the philosopher of Olynthus; it covered the years 387-357 BC, and comprised ten Books. Callisthenes’ earliest work had been a monograph on the Third Sacred War; his Hellenica exhibited sympathy with the pretensions of Macedon, and it is not surprising to find him accompanying Alexander as the self-appointed chronicler of his campaigns. His account, entitled The Deeds of Alexander, a work abruptly terminated by his execution, exercised great influence at the time of its publication, and on the later vulgate about Alexander.

Theopompus and Ephorus set the fashion, and nearly all the historical works of larger scope written in the early Hellenistic age betray the influence of rhetoric, the notable names being Cleitarchus of Colophon, Timaeus of Tauromenium, Duris of Samos, Phylarchus, and the notorious Hegesias. The most rhetorical of these is Cleitarchus, whose History of Alexander held the field till Arrian went back to more sober authorities . The leading idea of his work seems to have been the gradual demoralization of Alexander, intoxicated by success and Eastern luxury. Cicero cites Cleitarchus as an example of the rhetorician’s privileged mendacity in history. Timaeus on the other hand was not a professional rhetor, and his great History of Sicily must have possessed many good qualities. The son of a small tyrant driven out by Agathocles, whom he could never forgive, Timaeus established himself at Athens and devoted his life to research and writing. Polybius derides him as a stay-at-home pedant and bookworm, but Timaeus was something more. His indiscriminate collecting of odds and ends of information gained him the nickname of ‘the old rag woman,’ but not all his material came from books, and the scholars of Alexandria were quick to recognize its value. For his love of passing moral judgments he was christened Epitimaeus (the Censorious) by Istrus. Traces of rationalism which crop up in the fragments are hard to reconcile with the numerous proofs of his superstition, for example, his belief in the importance of coincident dates or his explanation of military disasters as due to acts of sacrilege by the losing side. Sometimes he appears hardly serious, as when he says that the fact that Nicias (the man of victory) was against the Sicilian Expedition portended its failure, or pretends that Hermes used Hermocrates to punish the Athenians for the mutilation of the Hermae! These puerilities seem part of the Asianic style which we find more fully developed in Hegesias, and, though there is too little material to reconstruct the latter’s History of Alexander, one may conjecture that it showed Timaeus’ vices but lacked his virtues.

Duris of Samos, a pupil of Theophrastus, became the tyrant of his native island about 300 BC. He was the author of many works, among them a Chronicle of Samos, a History of Greece from 3 70 to 281 BC (or later), a biography of Agathocles, and numerous compilations (About Laws, About Athletic Contests, About Painters). These last reveal the Peripatetic and prepare us for the similar works of Callimachus and his school. Duris found fault with contemporary writing of history as deficient in realism (mimesis), and tried to remedy this by exactitude in detail (especially of costume), emphasis on apparently unimportant particulars, anecdotes about his characters’ private lives and the like. Tragic or pathetic scenes were his forte, and we catch a glimpse of his powers in passages of Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, who used him as a source. But his passion for vividness was greater than his love of truth. Phylarchus, whose Histories covered the period 272-220 BC, gave a lively account of the attempts at reform in Sparta by Agis and Cleomenes. As an ardent supporter of Cleomenes, he is denounced by Polybius, who favoured Aratus, and even Plutarch admits his bias and love of theatrical devices, but at least he has managed to make his hero stand out sharp and clear against the background of his time.

With History thus delivered over to Rhetoric, it was a fortunate thing that men were found who ‘had first lived through or played a part in the thing they wrote, and afterwards wrote down the thing they knew.’ Such were Ptolemy Soter and Aristobulus, the chief authorities for Arrian’s account of Alexander. There were others, besides these two, who seem to disprove Strabo’s sweeping assertion that all the companions of Alexander preferred the marvellous to the true, for example Chares of Mytilene, the Royal Chamberlain; Baeton and Diognetus, Alexander’s route-measurers; Nearchus, his admiral. With a larger canvas, but on the same basis of fact and personal experience, Hieronymus of Cardia, perhaps the greatest of Hellenistic historians, told the story of the Diadochi and their successors. His work has vanished, but we know enough of his personality and of the great advantages which he enjoyed by having access to the Macedonian archives to suspect the extent of our loss.

Two fields of historical writing much cultivated at this time were the local history and the history of foreign countries. Some authors like Duris and Neanthes, the annalist of Cyzicus, combined local with general history. The accounts of Attic history (Atthides), which first appear in the fourth century and culminate in the great work of Philochorus (ob. 262 BC) were rather chronicles than formal histories. Rich in details on institutions, ritual, and topography, they were ransacked for information by the Alexandrians. The history of Sparta too attracted many students; these were chiefly philosophers, who saw their ideals realized in the Spartan type. Local history had always been popular in the islands and among the Greeks of Asia Minor; the type prevalent there seems to have included a larger element of fiction than that found on the mainland, and the debt of the poets to this source was correspondingly greater. Yet these records were often taken seriously, as is proved by the arbitration of the Rhodians between Priene and Samos, when, besides Theopompus, four Samian and two Ephesian local historians were cited as witnesses, and the evidence of the Milesian chronicle of Maeandrius was rejected as that of a forgery.

Though it is probable that in the various countries which now came under Macedonian or Greek sway the new rulers and their Greek subjects acquired only a very meagre knowledge of the native cultures, still the large number of historical and geographical works dealing with foreign lands shows a certain increase in curiosity. Three countries attracted attention above the rest; Egypt, Babylonia, and India. For Egyptian history the most trustworthy guide was Manetho, high-priest at Heliopolis, who dedicated to Philadelphus an Aegyptiaca in three books, based on the hieroglyphic records. A similar history of Babylon dedicated to Antiochus Soter by Berosus, priest of Bel in Babylon, found, though not immediately, a wider public. Comparison of his statements with the cuneiform inscriptions shows that he followed his native sources fairly closely. The great Hellenistic authority on India was Megasthenes, who on several occasions between 302 and 291 BC was sent as envoy of Seleucus to the Indian king Sandrakottos. He was a curious observer of lands and peoples, and gave much useful information on the flora and fauna, on the caste-system, and generally on the habits of the natives. Eratosthenes and Strabo denounce him as a liar, but modern scholars, finding his evidence corroborated by contemporary Indian records, are content to charge him with nothing worse than credulity.

Autobiographies were surprisingly scarce, and, save for that of Aratus of Sicyon, comparatively unimportant. But if these were rare, biographies were numerous. Under this heading the Greeks included not only the narration of an individual’s life, but also the description of national or other types. The third century produced nothing so scientific as Dicaearchus’ Life of Greece, a history of Greek civilization; for a work of Clearchus of Soli, in which he described the lives of various races and of different types—the glutton, the parasite, and so on—seems to have been marked by all the failings of the later Peripatetics. This school had practically a monopoly of such writing, as of biography proper. The latter starts with the researches of Aristoxenus into the life of Pythagoras, and is continued by Chamaeleon at the beginning and by Satyrus and Hermippus at the end of the third century. These later writers took little trouble to sift the true and false elements in the popular tradition; in fact they often added inventions of their own. Enough survives of Satyrus’ Lives of the Dramatists, composed in the form of a dialogue, to show that these biographies were intended primarily as light reading. Chamaeleon and the rest concerned themselves with the ancients; it is the exception to find a writer who describes the life of his contemporaries, though the career of such a man as Agathocles provoked a literary warfare soon after his death. But luckily there was one man who thought it worth while to note down his reminiscences of the great men whom he had known. This was Antigonus of Carystus, whose Lives of the Philosophers, as excerpted by later authors, is our most valuable source for the intimate life of the third century.

Geography: Alexander’s conquests and the subsequent intercourse of the Diadochi with the states lying beyond their boundaries led to 1 great increase in the geographical knowledge of the Greeks. We have seen the Seleucid monarchy in communication with India. The Ptolemies for their part were naturally interested in the little known lands situated south of Egypt; Philadelphus, in particular, furthered the opening-up of Ethiopia, partly to facilitate his supply of elephants, and partly in order to obtain new medicinal herbs. His agents sent back reports, and the description by his admiral Timosthenes of the harbours of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean was long a standard work. Exploration was no monopoly of the monarchies; mercantile communities sought out new avenues for trade. On the basis of the information thus acquired, and with the help of astronomy and mathematics, Eratosthenes produced his great system of scientific geography.

Among the original explorers three figures stand out more clearly than the rest. Nearchus, who commanded Alexander’s fleet on its voyage down the Indus and across the Indian Ocean to the Euphrates, wrote an account of his experiences distinguished by accuracy of observation and sound judgment, as may be seen from his story, preserved in Arrian, of the shoal of whales encountered on his journey. Patrocles explored the Caspian for Seleucus I, and was responsible for the mistaken idea that this sea was a gulf of the all-encircling Ocean. Most notable of all, Pytheas late in the fourth century sailed from Marseilles through the Straits of Gibraltar and up the coast of Spain and France to the limits of Britain. Some of the observations attributed to Pytheas may represent the deductions of later geographers drawn from the information which he furnished, but it is beyond doubt that he was possessed of more scientific knowledge than the average explorer of his day. He was the first Greek to note the influence of the moon on the tides, as he was the first to give anything like an accurate account of Britain and its inhabitants. He discovered the existence at least of Thule six days sail northwards from Britain on the Arctic Circle. His travels were recorded in a book called About the Ocean, to which Eratosthenes was indebted for much valuable information.

Eratosthenes himself is the most characteristic figure of Alexandrian Prose. Born at Cyrene, probably in 276—5 BC, he was first Callimachus’ pupil at Alexandria, and then studied at Athens until he was recalled about 246 BC by Euergetes to succeed Apollonius Rhodius as Chief Librarian. His versatility was proverbial and earned him the nicknames of Beta and pentathlos (the latter because athletes who competed in this kind of contest were not usually first-class in any one branch). Actually his published works embraced poetry, philosophy, grammar and philology, chronology, geography. His writings on the last two subjects were more important than his learned verse or the many dialogues of which Suidas speaks or even his magnum opus on the Old Comedy. In chronology his chief work was his Chronographiae in at least nine Books. About a century later his system was adopted by Apollodorus of Athens as the basis of a versified treatise on the subject, and so exerted a lasting influence. Eratosthenes began with the capture of Troy, which he placed in 1184 BC, and went down to the death of Alexander. It has been doubted whether he claimed absolute truth for his dating of events earlier than 776 BC, i.e. the first Olympian contest for which the names of the victors were preserved; certainly in the fragments he distinguishes between the mythical and historical periods. For the earlier period he seems to have chosen the lists of the Spartan kings as his guide; for the later he adopted the system introduced by Timaeus of reckoning by Olympiads, and on this subject he wrote a monograph. The fragments contain some evidence of his method; thus we find him inferring the priority of Homer to Hesiod from the difference in their geographical outlook, and pointing out that Homer must have preceded the Ionian migrations since he shows no knowledge of such things as the Panionia.

As a geographer Eratosthenes owed his eminence to the fact that he was no mean mathematician; a method of finding the sequence of prime numbers was called after him, and he invented a mesolabe. Accordingly, it is not surprising to find him in correspondence with Archimedes, who as a young man dedicated one of his works to him. Eratosthenes’ most important contributions to geography were contained in two works, a special treatise called On the Mensuration of the Earth and a Geographica in three Books. In the former he calculated the circumference of the earth to be about 28,000 miles, arriving at this result by means of observations of the position of the sun at noon in Alexandria and Syene at the time of the summer-solstice; the close approximation to the correct figure (24,860 miles) has been often admired. In Book 1 of the Geographica he traced the history of Greek geography from Homer to the historians of Alexander. His attitude to the Homeric Question was notable and in sharp contrast with the allegorical interpretation made popular by the Stoics. Regarding the poems, like all poetry, as primarily intended to charm rather than to instruct, he denied among other things that it was possible to fix exactly the route of Odysseus’ wanderings. ‘To find the route followed by Odysseus’ he said, ‘you must first discover the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds.’ In Book II he stated his own views on the shape and size of the earth, and on the nature and extent of the Ocean. Book in gave a descriptive geography of the world in accordance with his map, on which the oecumene or inhabited world was divided by a line, running from Gades to the middle of Asia, into a northern and southern half, each of which was cut up into segments. By this division Eratosthenes restored, while bringing it up to date, the old Ionian scheme of two continents (Asia and Europe). In fact, despite his criticism of earlier geographers, it would be a mistake to regard Eratosthenes as a radical innovator; how far his theories had been anticipated by his immediate predecessors, particularly Dicaearchus, remains uncertain, but some of his conclusions did in fact represent a compromise, and it was this weakness that drew down upon him the strictures of a later and more severe scientist, Hipparchus of Nicaea. As treated by the latter and his followers, geography became too technical a subject for the layman, while on the other hand writers like Polybius and Strabo, by their emphasis on its practical utility, unduly minimized the importance of its scientific basis.

Popular Prose-Works: There was a great demand in the Hellenistic age for books that were intended merely to amuse or were adapted to convey information in not too austere a manner. Even History, as we saw, was affected by this demand; the work of such a writer as Cleitarchus was little better than a historical novel, and the historical dialogues (for example on Peisistratus, on Antipater and Olympias) which have come to light among the papyri show the same tendency to popularization. Philosophy underwent the same process; hence the Diatribe of Bion and the rest, as also the tracts on self-help and good manners, the numerous symposia, the collections of philosophical apophthegms and anecdotes. How far such frames as these were employed for the treatment of non-philosophical themes, is uncertain; we have as yet no Alexandrian equivalent of the Cena Trimalchionis, but it is quite possible that Menippus of Gadara, for instance, had anticipated Petronius. Certainly the Chriae, i.e. the collections of acts and remarks from which a moral could be extracted, had a lighter counterpart in the writings of Lynceus of Samos, the author of an Art of Shopping which advised a niggardly friend how to deal with the ‘murderous fishmongers’; of letters in which he described to his acquaintances the superb dinner-parties given by the demi-monde and visiting royalties at Athens; and of anecdotes and bons mots attributed to courtesans and flatterers.

Another much favoured type of compilation was that of the so-called Paradoxa, wonders or peculiarities in nature such as strange animals, plants, or rivers. Curiosity about these things becomes more marked from the fourth century onwards. Historians inserted such marvels to add colour to their narrative, while philosophers either tried to explain them scientifically or used them to demonstrate the existence of Providence. Hellenistic collections of Paradoxa were many, both in prose and verse; one by Antigonus of Carystus is extant, Callimachus and his pupils wrote others.

Another form of composition which separates itself off from History in this age and approximates to the novel is Mythography. Collections of myths were made later for two purposes, either for use in schools or elsewhere, or occasionally to provide poets with their subject-matter; in the Hellenistic age a more definitely rationalizing treatment was in vogue, if we may judge by the works of Palaephatus and Euhemerus. The latter came from Messana in Sicily and was employed by Cassander on distant embassies in the South and East. In his book, The Sacred List, he told how, setting out from Arabia into the Indian Ocean, he arrived at the three islands of Panchaea, of which the capital was called Panara. On a golden pillar in the shrine of Zeus Triphylios at Panara he claimed to have found an inscription which commemorated the deeds of Ouranos, Cronos, and Zeus, formerly kings of Panchaea. Arguing from this, Euhemerus proposed a similar origin for the other Greek gods and goddesses; his explanation of Aphrodite as the first courtesan is typical of his method. The deification of Heracles and Dionysus afforded a parallel to the development imagined by Euhemerus, but his disciples (the most famous is Ennius) were much outnumbered by his critics, among whom Callimachus and Eratosthenes were the earliest. Euhemerus did not regard all gods as having a mortal origin; some—for example, the sun, moon, stars, winds— he explained as personified powers of nature. He seems to have borrowed some of his ideas from a writer who was slightly earlier, Hecataeus of Abdera. In a book dealing with Egypt, Hecataeus described the Egyptians as the originators of civilization, and commended their political institutions and religious beliefs. His ideal constitution was apparently a paternal despotism. The element of fiction was less veiled in another work, Concerning the Hyperboreans, in which he represented this people as living in the bliss of innocence on an island off north-west Europe, and remarkable for their friendliness to the Greeks.

The names of other writers of such romances are known to us, for instance Amometus who described the Utta Kourou of the Himalaya, Antiphanes of Berga in Thrace (whose birth-place gave its name to a verb meaning ‘to lie like Munchausen’), and finally Iambulus. The excerpts of Diodorus from the narrative of the last-named show that Iambulus provided plenty of incident —some of it perhaps based on actual experiences of himself or contemporaries—during the course of his story, how he went as merchant to the Cinnamon country, was captured by pirates and then by Ethiopians, and turned adrift with other captives on a ship which eventually reached a Blessed Isle inhabited by amiable natives. The description of this island, by some identified as Ceylon, of its natural wonders, of its strange and fortunate inhabitants, occupied the greater part of the book. After living there seven years the narrator and his companions were sent away as failing to reach the islanders’ high standard of virtue. After suffering shipwreck on the Indian coast Iambulus alone reached Palimbothra, whence he returned to Greece with the assistance of the local king who, like the Hyperboreans, was a philhellene. Though the tendencious element is less conspicuous in Iambulus’ romance than in those of Hecataeus and Euhemerus, it is plain that he belongs to the same school of writing. It does not appear that anything on the lines of the later Greek Novel was composed in this age (the earliest example of such literature is the fragmentary Story of Ninus, which is thought to belong to the first century BC), but no doubt the exercises of the rhetorical schools contained the germ of such works of fiction; in Imperial Rome, as we see from the works of the elder Seneca, some of the themes set to pupils in rhetoric were quite romantic, and the medieval story-teller drew several novels from this source.

III.

POETRY: GENERAL FEATURES

While the Prose of the Hellenistic age was a natural development from that of the fourth century, its Poetry, if we except Comedy and the Epigram, exhibits no such continuity of tradition. The Athenians had exalted Drama at the expense of other departments of poetry; it was still written, but the new conditions called for something more intimate, less dependent on popular support. A revival of non-dramatic forms of verse is first visible, about 300 BC, in the cities along the south-western coast of Asia Minor and on the adjacent islands, the chief figures being Philetas of Cos, Asclepiades of Samos, and Simias of Rhodes. The first two at any rate gathered pupils and associates round them, so that we find Hermesianax of Colophon, Theocritus of Syracuse, and Zenodotus of Ephesus connected with Philetas, while Poseidippus of Pella and Hedylus of Samos (or Athens), slightly junior to Asclepiades, share his society and collaborate with him in the production of a ‘Garner of Epigrams.’ In those days it was an easy step from Cos or Samos to Alexandria, and while the older poets remained attached to their native soil, the younger usually found their way to Egypt. The coterie-spirit in which they had been bred throve in the atmosphere of the Museum; a remarkable facility of intercourse between men of letters extended these traditions over the Greek world. The poets of this period write for each other and a limited public of cultured amateurs; they form an exclusive society, in which mutual admiration and detraction have every opportunity for display. Poetry itself was becoming more and more a matter of the word written to be read, not heard; authors like Theocritus and Callimachus may have given preliminary recitations of their compositions to a select audience of intimates, but oral delivery before a large public must have been confined to the popular productions recited at city festivals and similar gatherings, and these were apparently the work of second-rate poets. For the Alexandrians the conditions of literary production were already almost the same as those prevailing later at Rome; they reached their public through the bookseller. Theocritus probably ‘published’ his pieces separately, and the stray poems were not gathered together till the first century BC, but a collected edition, arranged by the author, is possible for Callimachus and more than likely for Herodas. Apollonius was perhaps the first writer to publish an epic poem carefully divided into ‘books.’ These innovations brought with them gain as well as loss, for, while they favoured a ‘bookish’ and rather artificial poetry, in certain departments—notably Lyric and the Epigram—the writer now enjoyed a liberty of manoeuvre previously denied to him.

In form this poetry was marked by a reaction against the standards and fashions of the later Athenian period. This is true even of Alexandrian Drama—or at any rate Tragedy. The members of the once famous Tragic Pleiad at Alexandria seem to have gone back beyond Euripides to Phrynichus and Aeschylus; their versification exhibits archaic strictness, while their liking for historical subjects recalls the Capture of Miletus and the Persae. The Satyr-play came into vogue again, either as a frame for themes which belonged to Pastoral Poetry, or adapted—as by Lycophron in his Menedemus—for playful satire of contemporaries. Of native Alexandrian Comedy we know very little, but its existence seems to be attested by comic fragments found in Egypt which contain references to local officials and institutions; we have further the name of Machon, a Peloponnesian resident in Alexandria, praised by a later poet for having transplanted the spirit of the Old Comedy to the banks of the Nile, a boast not confirmed by the fragments, which smack of the New.

The poetic forms most favoured by the Alexandrians were the Epic, the Elegy, the non-choral Lyric, the Iambus, and the Epigram. In the opinion of most, exact reproduction of the earlier types was neither possible nor desirable. Epic on the grand scale involved difficulties which seemed insuperable; hence the greater number favoured the short epic poem which it is the fashion to call the Epyllion, or the looser structure of compositions modelled on the Hesiodic catalogue-poetry and didactic verse. In an earlier age Epic had been confined in the main to narrative, but it is characteristic of the Alexandrians to disregard the frontiers which had previously separated the departments. The Epyllion in consequence borrowed some details of treatment from the Elegy and Lyric Poetry, while the Elegy itself, after the example set by Antimachus of Colophon in the fourth century, was chiefly employed for purposes of narrative, though Callimachus at least turned it into a sort of maid-of-all-work. Lyric Poetry, shaking off the trammels of its musical accompaniment—the Alexandrians despised the popular dithyramb, in which sense was subordinate to sound—showed a versatility which is impressive even in the sparse fragments that survive. Old metres (those of Sappho and Alcaeus) were revived by Asclepiades and Theocritus; new metres were introduced and developed, for instance, the Hendecasyllabic by Phalaecus, the Galliambic by Callimachus. The debt of Horace in his Odes to these poets, though we cannot check it, must have been considerable. The Scazon, i.e. ‘limping,’ Iambus had been the weapon of the Satirist Hipponax in the sixth century; in this age Phoenix and Callimachus used it for popular fables and to air their views on morals and literature, while Herodas adapted it for dramatic scenes which drew much of their subject-matter from Sophron’s Mimes, written in rhythmical prose. Theocritus too, at any rate in his mimes of town-life, owed something to Sophron, but preferred hexameters as his medium. The Epigram, unlike the forms of poetry mentioned above, had been cultivated throughout the period of Athens’ literary supremacy; the development of its two earliest types, the epitaph and the dedication, had been accelerated by the Persian Wars, and in the fourth century the collection of epigrams from the stones into books had paved the way for the book-epigram. In this field the Alexandrians continued the work of their immediate predecessors.

In view of the Hellenistic attitude to Poetry it is not surprising that certain traditional sources of inspiration were closed to these writers. Religion for instance, as a serious motive, plays no part in Alexandrian Poetry. Aratus, it is true, professes the Stoic doctrine of Divine Providence, but his fellow-poets left such things to the philosophers. Cleanthes’ fine Hymn to Zeus and the poem of Callimachus which bears the same title have one thing only in common—the fact that they were composed in the same age. For the Alexandrians religion spelt mythology. The Olympians were on the same level as the heroes and heroines of Greek story, interesting figures whose biographies, rich in varied detail, gave the poet excellent opportunities for parading his erudition, but nothing more. Like the heroes they could be reduced to the ordinary scale of bourgeois existence, and this is the favourite method of Callimachus, who, for instance, makes the infant Artemis address Zeus as ‘papa,’ when she is coaxing him to increase her privileges. Apollonius caught the infection and uses this style in the scene from the Argonautica, where Hera and Athene visit Aphrodite to secure her intervention with Eros. The easy manner of Cypris in undress, her reproaches for the tardiness of their call, her complaints about her naughty son recall the Mimes of Theocritus and Herodas. At times, no doubt, and particularly by Apollonius, the gods are treated with more dignity, but the emotion then excited can hardly be called religious.

Yet Callimachus can create a religious atmosphere—or a very good substitute for one. The opening of his Hymn to Apollo is effective:

“How the laurel branch of Apollo trembles! How trembles all the shrine! Away, away ye sinners! Hark! Phoebus knocketh at the door with his fair foot.... Of yourselves now, ye bolts, be pushed back, of yourselves, ye bars! The god is no longer far away!”

Similarly in the ‘holy story’ of Demeter’s starving of Erysichthon, despite the mocking realism—‘he ate the race-horse and the war charger and the cat at which the little vermin trembled ’—not everything seems caricature.

Patriotic poetry in the manner of earlier Greece was not to be expected in this age, but cities and peoples were interested in their past. Hence in verse, as a pendant to the prose-chronicles, arose the encomia of towns and districts, and on a larger scale the tribal epics, of which the most famous was Rhianus’ Messeniaca, a sort of bandit-romance with Aristomenes for its hero. A sentimental enthusiasm for their homeland occasionally colours the poetry even of expatriated Alexandrians, such as Theocritus and Callimachus, but the only representative of a sterner patriotism is Alcaeus of Messene, who in the second century assailed Philip V of Macedon with biting epigrams.

If religion and patriotism were too remote, natural science, another possible theme, was perhaps too near. The Alexandrians were not tempted to celebrate the scientific achievements of the colleagues whom they met at the Museum. Aratus is no real exception, for the prose-authors whom he versified belong to the fourth century and his astronomical knowledge was hardly up-to-date. Eratosthenes himself wrote a poem about the stars, but this composition, with its story of the amour of Hermes and Aphrodite, was little more than an epyllion staged in the heavens. Other writers of didactic verse chose topics so repellent that their lack of success is easy to understand. A much more gifted poet than Nicander might be excused failure when dealing with ‘Antidotes to Poisons’ and ‘Snake-bites.’

But there was one field of knowledge in which the Alexandrians were intensely interested. This was the record of the Greek nation’s infancy, contained in a mass of information—mythological, historical, geographical, religious—which had been handed down from the earliest times, and now, as collected in the great libraries, was accessible to the exploring student. At the end of the fifth century the epic poet Choerilus had complained that the themes of poetry were exhausted; the Alexandrians showed that such despair was premature. Leaving the repetition of Pan-Hellenic saga to others, who foolishly ‘cackled in vain against the Chian bard,’ they devoted themselves to the poetic treatment of the less-known stories and particularly of the so-called Local Legends, to which the popular fancy of early Greece had given birth in such abundance, but which the literature of the Classical period had scarcely noticed. The purpose of these stories was generally to explain some local custom or ritual or feature of the country-side, and it was this ‘aetiological’ element which chiefly commended them to the Alexandrians, but it is remarkable that the explanations offered very often traced things back to a love-affair (usually unhappy) between two mortals or between a mortal and a god or goddess. It was for this reason that Parthenius, the teacher of Gallus and Virgil, included so many of these narratives in his collection of ‘Tragic Love-Stories,’ which is still extant. The material was promising, and with it the Alexandrians might have produced a genuinely romantic poetry, but they were fatally hampered by two defects, excess of learning and lack of heart.

Callimachus in his Aetia rebukes himself for almost blurting out a disrespectful anecdote about Zeus and Hera with the words: ‘Verily much knowledge is a grievous ill for him that controls not his tongue: surely such a man is like a child with a knife.’ The lines furnish an apt comment on the abuse of erudition which characterizes so much Alexandrian Poetry. Had these writers trusted more to their imagination and less to their authorities, had less observance been paid to Callimachus’ principle, ‘I sing nothing for which I cannot produce evidence,’ they would have achieved far greater things. The defect was perhaps inherent. Antimachus, fore-runner of the Alexandrians, had been the first Greek scholar-poet; Philetas and Simias were not unworthy successors. The appointment of poets to deal with the treasures of the Alexandrian Library, which is explained by this tendency, gave fresh impetus to it. Callimachus, Apollonius, Lycophron, all produced works of solid scholarship in prose. As the years pass, the poet yields to the savant; Aristarchus, a scholar pure and simple, represents the inevitable conclusion of this development.

While the learned men of letters at Alexandria still wrote verse, it was natural that it should serve to display the fruits of their reading, but in this matter they went far beyond the bounds of good taste. Callimachus’ lengthy extract of Cean history from the prose-chronicle of Xenomedes effectually shatters such illusion as has been achieved by the preceding recital of the love-story of Acontius and Cydippe, a tale taken from the same source; Phanocles’ lines on the murder of Orpheus possess some charm, but the aetiological excursus on the tattooing of Thracian women is, where it stands, simply ridiculous; even Theocritus sins in this way, when he concludes his story of the infant Heracles and the snakes with the bald list of the demi-god’s instructors. In these instances the poet is over-anxious to convey information; in others he teases the reader by concealing it. The vocabulary of Alexandrian Poetry consists largely of ‘glosses,’ that is obscure words (many of them already obsolete in Homer’s day), which Aristotle in his Poetics had recommended as an ornament of poetry and which Philetas and Simias had collected into dictionaries. Further, some writers definitely cultivated an enigmatic or riddling style. In the Pattern-Poems, an invention of Simias, written or originally supposed to be written on the object described, as an egg, or a shepherd’s pipe, such a form of expression was the rule. The Alexandra is one vast riddle; Euphorion affected the same obscurity. Callimachus too does not spare his audience on occasion. Thus in his elegiac Victory of Sosibius, he refers to the victor on the strength of his Isthmian and Nemean successes as ‘twice-crowned hard by both children, the brother of Learchus and the infant who was suckled with Myrine’s milk.’ A hard nut to crack without a mythological dictionary.

The Alexandrians have been charged with unrestrained indulgence in sentiment, but their narrative poetry at any rate certainly errs in the opposite direction. Love between the two sexes plays, as we have seen, a great part in such poetry, but the Medea of Apollonius is the only instance of real passion vividly described. Alexander Aetolus, in his Apollo, told the story of Cleoboea’s guilty love for Antheus, her husband’s guest; how, repulsed, she asked the young man to descend into a well to fetch a golden pail which she had dropped there, and then crushed him to death with a heavy stone: after which she hung herself. Alexander’s narrative is almost as bald as the summary given above. Even in the more personal poetry of the Alexandrians— Epigram, Lyric, Pastoral—emotional treatment of love between the sexes is the exception. The love-epigrams of Asclepiades are more sincere than those of later poets, such as Meleager, but the artifices of erotic poetry are already there. Only one of Callimachus’ epigrams is addressed to a woman; it is a conventional plaint by an excluded lover. Theocritus’ Simaetha in Idyll n is a unique figure, and the resemblances with the Alexandrian Erotic Fragment suggest that the vividness of Theocritus’ picture comes in some degree from contact with the popular art of the Mime set to music. Apart from this, it is only in some epigrams of Callimachus and in certain poems of Theocritus, inspired by their boy-loves, that we find heart-felt emotion expressing itself.

It is well known that the Alexandrians show a greater interest in the life and scenery of the country than their predecessors, and it is claimed that this interest is a natural reaction from the artificial conditions which prevailed in great cities like Alexandria. This claim is confirmed in part by passages such as Callimachus’ description of dawn in the Hecale:

“Come, no longer are the hands of thieves in search of prey: for already the lamps of dawn are shining. The water-carrier is singing his song at the well, and the axle creaking under the wagon wakes the dweller by the highway, and many smithy slaves are tormented by the deafening din.”

In such circumstances it was natural for a man to dream of some quiet country-side; contemporary Art made a similar attempt to create a rus in urbe, as may be seen from the Campanian wall paintings. But this is not the whole story. Cos was no metropolis like Alexandria, and even before the Coan school set to praising and mimicking a rustic life, Peloponnesian epigrammatists had sung the charm of landscapes and seascapes. Further, urban existence was no novelty. Athens, not to mention the great cities of Ionia and Magna Graecia, had anticipated Alexandria. The Hellenistic attitude towards Nature can only be explained by a definite change of outlook. Previously condemned as a weakness of the indolent, such emotions were now, in an age which interpreted the civic obligations of the individual far less rigorously, not only pardoned but cultivated. Yet, save occasionally in Theocritus, the lack of variety in these ‘idyllic’ descriptions renders their sincerity rather suspect.

IV.

THE FORERUNNERS

Theocritus in his seventh Idyll hails Philetas and Asclepiades as the masters of the new art of poetry. The latter, though he has given his name to several lyric metres, is to-day only appreciable as an epigrammatist. Philetas was a writer of wider activities. In verse Suidas credits him with ‘epigrams, elegies, and other works.’ The fragments vouch for a narrative elegy, the Demeter; collections called Paegnia and Epigrams; an epic poem, entitled Hermes, which described Odysseus’ sojourn at the court of Aeolus and his intrigue with the Aeolid Polymela. There is more evidence for Philetas than for any other Alexandrian as the author of a body of verse addressed to a woman in the manner of the Roman Elegists. We know the name of his lady-love—Bittis, and we hear from Hermesianax that after Philetas’ death the Coans erected a bronze statue of him under a plane-tree, because Philetas had sat there and made verse in honour of Bittis. But we know nothing about the form of the Coan’s love-poetry. Probably Paegnia and Epigrams were alternative titles for one work of mixed content, and Philetas’ amatory pieces formed part—when collected—of this volume. Though they are written exclusively in elegiacs, there is nothing to prove that the poems were elegies of the Roman type. Simias, roughly contemporary with Philetas (whose life may have extended from about 340 to 285 BC), was the author of four Books of ‘Various Poems’—Hymns, Epyllia, Epigrams etc.—and a thorough modern in his literary tastes. His metrical innovations were copied at Alexandria, but Rhodes, his birthplace, lay outside Ptolemaic influence, and the Thebaid of its poet Antagoras, the flight of Apollonius thither, the opprobrious nickname which Callimachus in the Aetia bestows on his critics (he calls them Telchines, the legendary inhabitants of Rhodes) all suggest that the islanders preferred the unfashionable long epic.

Hermesianax was slightly younger than the two poets just mentioned. His chief work was the Leontion, a narrative elegy in three Books, named after his mistress and actually addressed to her; by this device Hermesianax tried to link together a series of more or less unconnected tragic love-stories, thus imitating Antimachus who had consoled himself for the loss of his wife or mistress, Lyde, by composing an elegiac narrative of ‘heroic misadventures’ which bore her name. The long fragment cited from the Leontion by Athenaeus can scarcely be typical of the whole poem; it comes from the last of the three Books, and is in fact a summing-up of the power of Love, as exemplified in the most famous Greek poets and philosophers. The matter is drawn partly from literary tradition, which had already credited Orpheus, Alcaeus and Anacreon (rivals for the affections of Sappho) with affairs of the heart, and partly from history, for instance the tale of Mimnermus’ love for Nanno; but much is mere invention and silly invention at that. Thus Homer is the lover of Penelope, Hesiod of an Eoie, eponymous of the heroines of the Hesiodic Eoiai! Like the Peripatetic biographers, Hermesianax met the prevailing demand for personal detail about the great figures of the past by impudent fabrication.

Phoenix of Colophon, a contemporary and compatriot of Hermesianax, was a writer of another stamp; interesting as a link between Hipponax and the Alexandrians who used the Choliambic metre, and because he and Cercidas of Megalopolis, who fifty years later may have excerpted Phoenix’ Iambi for an anthology of moralizing verse, are today the chief representatives of Hellenistic Satire. Cercidas and two other versifying moralists of this age, Crates of Thebes and Menippus of Gadara, were Cynics, but Phoenix belongs to no definite school. His verse reflects the man in the street, poor but honest, with a taste for traditional things and a profound dislike for the nouveaux riches of the time. The lines from his ‘chough-song,’ supposed to be spoken by the begging-procession at the house-door, have a pleasant ring: I, as

I wander over vale and hill, 

Keep my eyes fixed upon the Muses still, 

And be you churl or noble, at your wicket 

More blithely will I sing than any cricket.

V.

 THE GOLDEN AGE

For contemporaries the chief figure in Alexandrian Poetry was Callimachus; yet his supremacy was far from being undisputed. If, as now seems probable, Apollonius succeeded Zenodotus as Chief Librarian, Callimachus at the zenith of his career was faced with the opposition of a man who was officially his superior. That Apollonius had once been Callimachus’ pupil and that he had laid the works of his teacher under contribution for his own, only made matters worse. The end came soon after Euergetes’ accession (246 BC). Apollonius lost his post and left Egypt, an event jubilantly celebrated by his rival at the end of his Hymn to Apollo. Though political and social factors played a part in the quarrel, there was of course a literary question involved. Callimachus’ dictum ‘big book—big evil’ is sometimes cited to show that he objected above all to length in a poem. But it is possible that he was protesting more as a cataloguer than a poet, and it is certain that the Aetia, measured by the verses that it contained, was a ‘big book.’ What Callimachus really abhorred was the ‘one continuous poem’ which dealt at length with a single theme such as the Voyage of the Argo. No poet of the third century, however modern he was determined to be, could quite avoid the ‘cyclic’ manner, once he was embarked on such an enterprise. Callimachus’ own counsel was either to select a single subject of small compass or in works of larger scope to pass rapidly from one story to another. In vigorous polemic he compares his own poetry with the clear note of the cicada, that of his opponents with the noise of asses. ‘Let another bray after the very manner of the long-eared beast, but let me be the dainty, the winged one.’

Born about 310 BC, Callimachus soon migrated from Cyrene to Alexandria, and is first discovered as a schoolmaster in the suburb Eleusis. The Epigrams, which mostly belong to this period, perhaps brought him to the notice of the Court; at any rate he was given some post in connection with the Library. In middle age mainly occupied with the preparation of the Pinakes, he was still writing verse at the end of his life under Euergetes. Of the 800 books mentioned by Suidas little enough survives today; of the prose we have nothing intact, of the poetry only the Epigrams and Hymns. In five of the latter (Hymn V, the Bathing of Pallas, is written in elegiacs) Callimachus follows the model of the Homeric Hymns, but modernizes, invents, and in at least two instances gives a political turn to the whole. The Hymn to Zeus has been described as a pamphlet on the divine right of kings; that to Apollo seems intended to reconcile Cyrene to the overlordship of Euergetes. While devoid of genuine religion, the Hymns abound in brilliant descriptions and highly-coloured pictures: Artemis visiting the smithy of the Cyclopes; Leto seeking a refuge in which to give birth to Apollo, while islands, mountains, and rivers flee from the wrath of Hera; Iris couched like a hound before Hera’s throne.

Callimachus’ most important poem was his Aetia or ‘Causes,’ a miscellany of information about history, geography, mythology, dictated to the poet by the Muses in the manner familiar to us from Ovid’s Fasti, but containing personal touches—retorts to criticism, a description of a dinner-party, and the like—not found in the Latin poem. Further, the Aetia lacked the connecting-thread which serves to give the Fasti an appearance of unity; the author passed from one topic to another as the whim seized him, exhibiting a preference for the primitive and uncouth which explains his acknowledgment (in preface and epilogue) of a debt to Hesiod, from whose Theogony he has adapted the revelation made to the poet by the Muses of Helicon. The Hecale, an epyllion containing about 1000 lines, represents Callimachus’ ideal of epic narrative. The heroine was the old woman at whose hut Theseus spent the night before his encounter with the Bull of Marathon. After his triumph Theseus returning to thank his hostess finds her dead and the funeral in progress. The longest episode, the scene in Hecale’s hut, illustrates the Alexandrian fondness for realistic pictures of the heroic age; the details of the homely menu, the polite dispute over the single truckle-bed still retain a piquant charm.

The fragments of Callimachus’ Lyrics show a striking variety of metre and subject. The most imposing is the Funeral Ode for Arsinoe, in which the poet abandons his usual tone for one of impressive pathos. The abrupt beginning in which he describes the passage of Arsinoe’s soul to the stars, and the later episode where Charis, after her vigil on Athos, reports to the anxious Philotera, Arsinoe’s deified sister, that the murky clouds which cover the sky come from the Queen’s funeral-pyre in Egypt, where a whole nation mourns its loss, are effective even in their present mutilated condition. The Iambi contained tales from folklore, such as the Quarrel of the Olive and Laurel, which were perhaps too popular to find a place in the Aetia, and other matter of a more topical nature. Finally, as semi-official Poet Laureate, Callimachus wrote many elegies of the occasion; the best known is the Lock of Berenice, which Catullus has adapted, if not translated.

Apollonius, called the Rhodian but originally of Naucratis or Alexandria, was the only Hellenistic poet of the first rank to be born in Egypt; hence Callimachus compared him to the ibis, an Egyptian bird of uncleanly habits. In several poems on the foundations of cities Apollonius followed the fashion; in his master-piece, an epic running to 5,835 lines, he defied it. As an epic, the Argonautica suffers from weakness in characterization and lack of unity. Its hero Jason is a very colourless figure—the poet’s favourite word for him is ‘helpless’!—and, except for his achievements in the ordeal of the Bulls and the Earth-born, of less account than several of his crew. Medea is marvellously drawn in Book in, but the Medea of Book IV is the wronged queen of Tragedy, a type of cold resolution that has little connection with the earlier character. The action of heroes and heroine is controlled at every turn by higher powers, either Fate or the Olympians. The lack of unity is not so visible, since Apollonius shows considerable skill in welding together his heterogeneous material (the way in which he conflates the divergent stories of the return is a master-piece of eclecticism), but the epic has no central idea. The geographical and aetiological details clog the narrative, and at times give the poem the air of a ‘conducted tour.’

Yet the Argonautica has many merits. The most striking is the power of psychological analysis, shown in the portrayal of Medea’s love and of the struggle between it and her affection for home and family. There is more of primitive passion in Theocritus’ Simaetha, but Apollonius has excellently rendered the first love of a younger and more bashful maid, who, complimented by Jason, ‘cast her eyes down with a smile divinely sweet; and her soul melted within her, uplifted by his praise, and she gazed upon him face to face; nor did she know what word to utter first, but was eager to pour out everything at once.’ Notable too is Apollonius’ treatment of nature and natural phenomena. An epic poet is constantly embarrassed to find ways of indicating the time of day. Apollonius not only avoids repeating himself, but even, making a virtue of necessity, creates pictures of dawn, of dusk, of night, which are remarkable for their intrinsic beauty. In other passages he exhibits a surprising power of seizing the atmosphere of such strange regions as the ‘Black Country’ of the Chalybes, or the gloomy waste of the Syrtes with the desert behind. Though tarred with the brush of Callimachus, Apollonius was indeed a ‘romantic born out of due season.’

In the literary controversy of the third century Theocritus sided with Callimachus; his works reveal the versatility and preference for short poems which the Master inculcated. Born at Syracuse, Theocritus seems to have gone early in life to Cos (whence his grand-parents may have migrated to Sicily in the days of Timoleon), and to have formed one of Philetas’ circle there. Soon after 275 BC we find him again at Syracuse and soliciting the patronage of Hiero. Disappointed here, he was attracted to Alexandria, where he composed the Syracusan Women and a panegyric of Philadelphus, possibly also the fragmentary Berenice. But Theocritus was not meant for courts and libraries, and before long he is back in Cos or its neighbourhood, to enjoy for the rest of his life the society which he has so attractively described in his Harvest-home. Some idylls and epigrams belong to this last period of his career, but, with the exceptions mentioned above, the rest of the pieces, including Idyll VII itself, were apparently composed during his first visit to Cos. Idyll XXVIII, written to accompany the gift of a distaff to Theugenis, the wife of the poet’s friend Nicias, and a precious illustration of the refinement possible in the social intercourse of these times, may have been delivered when Theocritus called at Miletus en route from Sicily to Egypt.

The ‘Father of Pastoral Poetry’ was no mere pastoralist. Besides the ‘ bucolic ’ pieces, his collected works contain examples of mimes, of epyllia, of encomia; in addition an epithalamium, the Aeolic poems in lyric metres, and the epigrams. There is variety even in the genus; thus of the two encomia, one addressed to Hiero and the other praising Philadelphus, the former is a personal document and draws its inspiration from Classical Lyric Poetry with touches of the Mime and Pastoral; the latter is a rather frigid production on purely conventional lines.

There is little homogeneity in the bucolic poems themselves, save that all (with the dubious exception of Idyll VIII, which contains elegiacs) are written in hexameters and in a dialect which may be called literary Doric. Though Theocritus borrowed some conventions (for example, the singing-match, the refrain) from the practice of rustics in all ages, and though he displays much acute observation of country life and manners, it was apparently literary influences which first led him to pastoral poetry. We have noted bucolic motives in Hellenistic epigram and satyr-play; these had been anticipated in the dithyramb of the fourth century. But the chief impulse must have come from Philetas’ circle and its cult of love, song, and bucolic masquerade. Theocritus shows this influence in two ways; at times he accepts—with a smile—the affectations of his contemporaries, at others he reacts against the current mode and goes back to the real simplicity of the countryside. Idyll X is the best example of this latter mood. Milon’s version of the ‘Reaping-song of Lityerses’ is certainly taken from life; even Boucaeus ’ ditty about Bombyca is not beyond the powers of a peasant in love. Next in realism come Idylls iv and v, interesting also for the reminiscences of the poet’s youth in Magna Graecia, but these contain topical allusions out of place on the lips of South Italian rustics. In the Serenade of Amaryllis (Idyll III) the tone is different. The amorous goat-herd who prays to be metamorphosed into a bee, who declares Love was suckled by a lioness, and finally threatens to jump over the cliff, is no figure of real life, but a caricature of the love-sick swain of contemporary verse. Theocritus strikes the same note in Idyll XI. Here the character of Polyphemus amans lends itself to the poet’s jesting, but Theocritus cannot help feeling some sympathy for the distressed giant, and so, while he makes him repeat the usual phrases of love la mode, he also credits him with sentiments which show real passion. In the Thyrsis (Idyll I) Theocritus idealizes the folkstory of Daphnis’ love and death, a theme already treated by Hermesianax; in the Harvest-home the influence of Cos is more obvious. The ‘bucolic songs’ in which the masquerading goatherd Lycidas and Simichidas-Theocritus try their powers are actually songs about boy-loves. Their tone of gallantry  and the erudition, a rare feature in Theocritus, suggest that these songs represent the poet’s tribute to his friends’ tastes. But the description of a country scene in late summer, with which the idyll ends, comes from the writer’s heart:

“There we reclined on deep beds of fragrant lentisk, strewn on the ground, and lay rejoicing on newly stript leaves of the vine. High above our heads waved many poplars and elms, while hard by the sacred water from the cave of the Nymphs murmured as it welled forth. On the shady boughs the brown crickets were busy with their chatter, and from far away came the low note of the tree-frog in the thick thornbrake. The larks and finches were singing, the turtle moaned, the yellow bees were flitting about the spring. Everything smelt of the rich summer, smelt of the season of fruits.”

To turn to the urban mimes, in the Syracusan Women, though a few motives seem traditional (they reappear in Herodas), Theocritus is no mere imitator. Gorgo and Praxinoa are individual and alive; the world in which they move is that of Philadelphus’ Alexandria, not Sophron’s Syracuse. There is less art in the Love of Cynisca, but the story of Aeschines’ misfortunes is graphic and amusing. The last urban mime is Theocritus’ greatest achievement. The setting, women engaged in magic, is taken from Sophron, but Simaetha, it has been aptly said, is a girl in love, not a sorceress. In Theocritus the witchcraft provides an atmosphere of awe and enables the poet to reveal Simaetha’s reactions to her own magic, as she remembers the past. At first indignation masters her, and she cries out on Nature which is at rest, while she is in torment. ‘Lol the sea is silent, and the winds are silent too, but not silent is the heart within my breast.’ Gradually the narrative of her betrayal brings relief; she yields to the spell of the still night; and after one last outburst ends on a note of resignation:

Farewell now, Queen; with blessing, thy car to the Ocean bend

And I will bear my trouble, as I have borne, to the end. 

Farewell, thou shining Moon, farewell, companions bright, 

You train of Stars that follow the wheels of quiet Night.

From this masterpiece it is an abrupt descent to Theocritus’ epyllia, which are interesting but no more than that. In Idyll XIII he tells the story of Hylas in a letter to a friend; in xxiv he depicts a night alarm in a bourgeois family under the pretence of celebrating Heracles’ strangling of the snakes; in XXII, which purports to be a hymn to the Dioscuri, he shows his virtuosity by employing a modern style in the first half of the poem, an archaic in the second.

Herodas, who was possibly a native of Ionia but shows himself well-acquainted with Cos, and may have visited Alexandria, belongs to the same generation as Callimachus (his Mimiambi, i.e. mimes written in the Choliambic metre, were composed between 280 and 260 BC), but for reasons now obscure he was excluded from the charmed circle of his contemporaries. In his eighth Mime, the Dream, he represents his critics as goat-herds; so it seems that he had no sympathy for the devotees of bucolic poetry. Nevertheless Herodas is a child of his age. His pieces are short —they are to Comedy what the Epyllion is to the Epic; his metre and dialect (an obsolete Ionic) are archaic. Thus his work was definitely for the elect, and it seems unlikely that the Mimes were composed for recitation on the stage—even of an ‘intimate’ theatre. They are book-poetry like those of Theocritus. But if the form is artificial, the matter and treatment are ultra-realistic. The most original piece is Mime n, a speech delivered in a court-of-law by a pander against a ship’s captain, whom he charges with assault and the abduction of one of his women. The detailed parody of the conventions dear to Attic Oratory and the naive impudence of Battarus are exceedingly amusing. Even the pieces which follow traditional lines—for example, Mime 1, describing the fruitless visit of the old bawd who tempts Metriche to abandon her absent lover, or Mime VIII, in which the cobbler Cerdon bargains engagingly with his female customers—are full of touches drawn from contemporary life. On the other hand Mime in, the least offensive to delicate ears, makes rather tedious reading owing to the exaggerated complaints of Lampriscus’ mother about his school-boy misdemeanours. In Mime IV, which describes the visit of two women to the famous temple of Asclepius, situated just outside the town of Cos, Coccale’s admiration for the sculptured boy (‘Why, one would say the sculpture would talk’) and for Apelles’ painting (‘Look, this naked boy will bleed if I scratch him’) reflects the author’s preferences for the life-like in Art; he joined issue with the idealists in Art as with the idyllists in poetry.

The Golden Age of Alexandrian Poetry lasted some fifty years only, from about 290 to 240 BC. Bucolic poetry flourished spasmodically down to the first century BC, beginning with the pseudo-Theocritean Lovers’ Talk (Idyll XXVII) and Fishermen (Idyll XXI), both of which belong to the third century and are excellent in their way, and continuing with Moschus, a pupil of Aristarchus, and Bion of Smyrna, who was born not long before 100 BC. Moschus’ epyllion, the Europa, is a pleasing work with a certain plastic quality in the descriptions; Bion’s Lament for Adonis and the Lament for Bion, written by a pupil, bring an Oriental colour into Greek poetry. But Theocritus’ real successor is not a Greek, but a Roman—Vergil. In Epic, Euphorion of Chalcis (c. 220 BC) attained fame by exaggerating the defects of his predecessors and plagiarizing shamelessly from their works. In Catullus’ day the Romans admired this unattractive poet for his erudition, but the fragments of his epyllia and other poems, for instance one in which he collected the most horrible deaths, recorded in myth and history, in order to terrify a man who had stolen his goblet, raise no desire for more. On the other hand Idyll xxv of the Theocritean corpus is a work of considerable originality, and if not written by Theocritus himself comes from some early and talented imitator. The subject, Heracles chez Augeas, is treated in three episodes, and the poem has been called a miniature Heracleid in three ‘books’; the pictures of the dogs at the homestead and of the return of the cattle are particularly successful, while the anatomical details in the description of Heracles’ slaying of the Nemean lion recall Theocritus’ portrait of Amycus, the giant pugilist, in Idyll XXII, and similar features in Hellenistic Art. The notorious Alexandra, a dramatic monologue in 1474 tragic iambics, in which the slave appointed to watch Cassandra reports her prophecies to Priam, is commonly, on Suidas’ authority, attributed to the famous Lycophron, but a later date—probably about 196 BC—seems necessary, in view of the clear reference to the Romans as already supreme on land and sea,

Even the Epigram has few representatives in the second century, though about 100 BC it revives in the hands of Meleager and the other Syrians. These copied, but could not equal, the earlier Alexandrians, among whom Asclepiades, Leonidas of Tarentum, and Callimachus had been most successful in this branch. Life in Samos about 300 BC under the rule of Duris was a gay affair, and this atmosphere is reflected in the epigrams of Asclepiades, Poseidippus, and Hedylus. They extended the use of the genre.) employing it for amatory and humorous pieces, which may have been bandied about the dinner-table (like the Athenian scolia) before they were published in book-form. Asclepiades and Poseidippus seem often to be capping one another’s efforts on the same theme, but each of the three poets has his particular character. Asclepiades is the young man of pleasure, full of wit and fancy and generally in high spirits, though, when gaiety palls, he can cry ‘ I am scarce twenty-two and yet I am weary of living.’ Poseidippus, as befits an ex-pupil of the philosophers, in his sober moments moralizes on life. Hedylus is the satirist of the circle and rails against gluttony and its sequel—gout. These poets contributed more than any others to the transformation of Eros from the somewhat austere youth of earlier times to the mischievous imp who is a commonplace of later Art and Literature, as also to the introduction of the amatory ‘topics’ which fill so much of Roman Elegy. In style and sentiment they differ widely from Leonidas (c. 285 BC), whose wandering life was spent in Magna Graecia and Western Greece. Termed with some justice the ‘Tramp-poet,’ Leonidas gives us a picture of the existence of the common people such as we get nowhere else in Hellenistic Poetry, but his style is disagreeable; the Epigram is no place for verbiage and bombast. Not a few of his epitaphs and dedications seem to be literary tours de force, to judge by the improbability of many details in the former and the frequent resemblance of the latter to a tradesman’s catalogue.

From Callimachus we have some sixty epigrams. The most conventional are the dedications, many of which were apparently written to order for real use. In the epitaphs there is a strange contradiction. When he writes for clients, Callimachus shows a power of sympathy with bereavement which is the more impressive for the simplicity of the language. Examples are his epitaph on Nicoteles:

“Here the father laid his twelve-year old son; here Philippus laid his great hope—Nicoteles’; or his consolation for the death of Saon of Acanthus: ‘Here Saon of Acanthus, Dicon’s son, rests in holy sleep. Say not that the good die”

Alongside such epitaphs we find others where Callimachus parodies the usual type and mocks openly at belief. But it is the intimate poems, dealing with the love-affairs, literary tastes, and day-today experiences of Callimachus’ circle, which give the collection its chief charm. Most of Callimachus’ friends are only names today, but the most famous of his epigrams, in which he records how in company with Heracleitus of Halicarnassus he ‘tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky’ still allows us a glimpse into the scholar’s life as men lived it in the third century at Alexandria.

CHAPTER IX

HELLENISTIC SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS