Callimachus was esteemed by all antiquity as the finest elegiac poet of Greece, or at least as next in merit to Mimnermus. He belonged to the poetic school which flourished at Alexandria from the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus to that of Ptolemy Physcon, and which still sheds a lustre over the dynasty of the Lagides, in spite of the crimes and personal deformities with which their names have been sarcastically associated.
After the partition of the Greek empire among the successors of Alexander, the city to which he had given name became the capital of the literary world; and arts and learning long continued to be protected even by the most degenerate of the Ptolemies. But the school which subsisted at Alexandria was of a very different taste and description from that which had flourished at Athens in the age of Pericles. In Egypt the Greeks became a more learned, and perhaps a more philosophical people, than they had been in the days of their ancient glory at home; but they were no longer a nation, and with their freedom their whole strength of feeling, and peculiar tone of mind, were lost. Servitude and royal munificence, with the consequent spirit of flattery which crept in, and even the enormous library of Alexandria, were injurious to the elastic and native spring of poetic fancy. The Egyptian court was crowded with men of erudition, instead of such men of genius as had thronged the theatre and Agora of Athens. The courtly literati, the academicians, and the librarians of Alexandria, were distinguished as critics, grammarians, geographers, or geometricians. With them poetry became a matter of study, not of original genius or invention, and consequently never reached its highest flights. Though not without amenity and grace, they wanted that boldness, sublimity, and poetic enthusiasm by which the bards of the Greek republics were inspired. When, like Apollonius Rhodius, they attempted poetry of the highest class, they rose not above an elegant mediocrity; or when they attained perfection, as in the instance of Theocritus, it was in the inferior and more delicate branches of the art. Accordingly, these erudite and ornate poets chiefly selected as the subjects of their muse didactic topics of astronomy and physics, or ob[pg 312]scure traditions derived from ancient fable. Lycophron immersed himself in such a sea of fabulous learning, that he became nearly unintelligible, and all of them were marked with the blemishes of affectation and obscurity, into which learned poets are most apt to fall. Among the pleiad of Alexandrian poets, none had so many of the faults and beauties of the school to which he belonged as Callimachus. He was conspicuous for his profound knowledge of the ancient traditions of Greece, for his poetic art and elegant versification, but he was also noted for deficiency of invention and original genius:—
“Battiades semper toto cantabitur orbe,
Quamvis ingenio non valet, arte valet[507].”
The poem of Catullus has some faults, which may be fairly attributed to his pedantic model—a certain obscurity in point of diction, and that ostentatious display of erudition, which characterized the works of the Alexandrian poets. The Greek original, however, being lost, except two distichs, it is impossible to institute an accurate comparison; but the Latin appears to be considerably more diffuse than the Greek. One distich, which is still extant in the Scholia on Apollonius, has been expanded by Catullus into three lines; and the following preserved by Theon has been dilated into four:—
“Ἡ δε Κονων μ’ ἐβλεψεν εν ῆερι τον Βερενικης
Βοστρυχον, ὁν κεινη πασιν ἐθηκε Θεοις[508]”
“Idem me ille Conon cœlesti lumine vidit
E Bereniceo vertice cæsariem,
Fulgentem clare; quam multis illa Deorum,