Roman Callimachus

Roman Callimachus
ALESSANDRO BARCHIESI
Callimachus was read in Italy through the entire late republican and the imperial period, and his
poems were influential,1 but in the context of our Companion it is more important to mention that
his work is relevant to scholars of Roman poetry in a way that goes beyond measurable borrowings
and allusions.2 This is because the appropriation of Callimachean models is constantly enmeshed
with the problems and dilemmas of Roman poetics: how to define, express, and control
Hellenization; the relationship between poetry and politics or power; poetic careers, patronage, and
public; the harmony and tension between programmatic statements and the poems themselves, as
they are dynamically experienced and then remembered by readers. In the Augustan age, the effect
of those allusions is enhanced by the fact that those Latin poets form a literary society and are likely
to allude to their colleagues’ recent manipulations and revisions of Callimachus as well as to the
1I am grateful to the editors and to Marco Fantuzzi and Filippomaria Pontani for their comments.
The best guides to the influence of Callimachus on Latin texts are the different approaches of
Wimmel 1960; Clausen 1964; Newman 1967; Zetzel 1983; Hopkinson 1988: 98–101; Alan
Cameron 1995: 454–83 and passim; R. F. Thomas 1993 and 1999 passim; Hunter 2006a; Acosta-
Hughes and Stephens forthcoming, chapter 4 (made available to me by the authors). Heyworth 1994
is shorter and selective but also very stimulating. On the imperial age, see McNelis 2007, with the
bibliography there, and also below on Persius and Martial.
2 As the temporal distance from the great papyrus discoveries of the early 1900s increases, it is
important to remember that the programmatic approach would not have been possible before the
discovery of the Prologue to the Aetia; it is interesting to compare the image of Callimachus in
Latin studies before and after the discovery, and Benedetto 1993 is useful for Latinists as well as for
Hellenists.
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Greek texts as we have them. Indeed, one of the main reasons (besides the obvious ones) why we
talk about an Augustan age in literature is this mix of cross-reference and reciprocal canonization.
The use of Callimachean poetics typically raises questions about patronage, political agendas, and
relationship to power that cannot really be addressed in the context of a short chapter and, in any
case, are best discussed in a social and cultural framework,3 not through close readings of individual
passages. In this chapter, we will try to address some formal and poetic aspects, apart from
consideration of the wider social setting of Roman poetry.
What we discover, on a formal level, is not so much reproduction as creative reuse. As a
model to imitate, Callimachus is more difficult (note the implications of Statius Silvae 5.3.156–58;
note also, from a Greek point of view, Pollianus AP 9.130)4 than any other major Greek author,
except for choral lyric, where the fading away of original musical scores and performance
conventions increased the sense of a rift. This difficulty in a way intensified an aura of prestige:
Catullus and Propertius are particularly proud of being able to handle him as a model. More
important, Callimachus was a mentor about creative appropriation through his own operations on
Greek models such as Homer, the theater, philosophy, and early lyricists:5 those were canonical
texts for the Romans, and they were able to recognize his art of variation and surprise. This way
Callimachus became a poet’s poet for the Roman community of literati.
Propertius as the New Callimachus
Therefore some of the best Callimachean poetry in Latin is unruly, close to our notion of avantgarde,
and even dares to test on him intertextual techniques that he himself practiced on earlier
3 For recent discussions of the big picture, see, e.g., Conte 1986; P. White 1993 (with Feeney
1994); Lyne 1995; Citroni 1995.
4 See Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 248.
5 On those intertexts, see, e.g., Acosta-Hughes 2010a; Fuhrer 1992; Acosta-Hughes and
Stephens forthcoming.
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Greek models. A short example from Propertius will illustrate this mode of imitation (Prop. 4.8.3–
16):6
Lanuvium annosi vetus est tutela draconis:
hic ubi tam rarae non perit hora morae.
qua sacer abripitur caeco descensus hiatu, 5
hac penetrat virgo (tale iter omen habet!)
ieiuni serpentis honos, cum pabula poscit
annua et ex ima sibila torquet humo.
talia demissae pallent ad sacra puellae,
cum tenera anguino raditur ore manus. 10
ille sibi admotas a virgine corripit escas:
virginis in palmis ipsa canistra tremunt.
si fuerunt castae, redeunt in colla parentum,
clamantque agricolae “fertilis annus erit.”
huc mea detonsis avectast Cynthia mannis: 15
causa fuit Iuno, sed mage causa Venus.
Lanuvium is the ancient protectorate of a snake of many years, there where an hour spent on
such uncommon tourism is not wasted. For the sacred descent is broken by a blind chasm,
where penetrates a maiden (such a journey bears an omen), the honor paid to the hungry
serpent, when he demands his annual feed, and twists hisses from the depths of the earth.
The girls lowered for these rites turn pale when their youthful hand is grazed by the mouth
of the snake. The serpent snatches the food brought for him by the virgin: the very basket
trembles in a virgin’s grasp. If they have been chaste, they return to the embrace of their
parents, and the farmers cry out, “It will be a fruitful year.” It was to this place that Cynthia
drove off with her clipped ponies: Iuno was the cause, but Venus more so.
6 For text, translation, and interpretation, see Heyworth 2007a: 475–77 and 600.
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The poem is unpredictable, the narrator is quirky, the details of local daily life are vivid, all
in the best Callimachean tradition—yet when Callimachus is being visibly used he is also being
subverted. The context of Book 4 of Propertius (see below) represents in general a departure from
subjective love poetry toward a growing engagement with the tradition of the Aetia: thus when the
new poem starts with a rare item of Italian antique lore, the snake ritual at Lanuvium, the readers
easily accept the idea that Propertius is making good on his promise in the prologue to Book 4: a
new Callimachus in the (Propertian more than authentically Callimachean) sense not of amatory
elegy but of a poetic aetiology of Rome and Italy based on a close encounter with the Aetia. The
effect is reinforced by the poet’s love for strange details—the sense of age-old memories, the dark
snake pit, the horrified girls feeding the snake, their shaking baskets, and the test of virginity
destined to the omen of a good year in the countryside (not without a Tibullan touch).7 Even the
considerable amount of sexual innuendo in the ritual description (“penetrat virgo”; the repetition
“virgo . . . virgine . . . virginis” in lines 6, 11, and 12, completed by “si fuerint castae” in line 13) is
potentially a homage to the Aetia. The strange nuptial ritual evoked in Acontius and Cydippe (fr.
75.1–3 Pf.) is not without its surprises, especially when the sentence “and now the boy had slept
with the virgin” turns out to be a reference to a chaste prenuptial rite.
Yet exactly when we think we get the point that this is the long-awaited adaptation of
Alexandrian poetry to the world of Italian antiquities, the poem turns on itself and loses contact
with Callimachus. While Cynthia is in the Latin neighboring community of Lanuvium, Propertius
parties in Rome, in her house on the Esquiline. The details are more lowbrow than in the rather
ascetic and selective tradition of Roman elegy: two strippers, a dwarf providing entertainment,
wine, and a slave in a supporting role. Comedy—or mime—erupts as Cynthia enters the house and
catches the narrator red-handed. In sum, Propertius 4.8 promises Callimachean elegy in the Aetia
7 My mention of Acontius and Cydippe is purely illustrative: one could also think of rituals
involving snakes, virgins, and baskets in the Hecale, and more generally of the trend toward strange
and shocking rituals suggested by the fragments of Books 3 and 4 of the Aetia.
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tradition, but only as a feint, then returns to a particularly humble variant of the love poetry that
Propertius labeled (in a rather tendentious and different sense) a Callimachean opus back in Book 3.
Propertius presumably learned from Callimachus how to ambush models and readers, and here he
used Callimachus as his target. In his earlier books, he was practicing already: he was using
Callimachus to justify something that Callimachus never contemplated—elegiac poetry about the
author’s love affair with a woman.