Callimachus: The Epigrams

Recent decades have seen a flourishing of interest in Hellenistic epigram (short poems usually in elegiac couplets), an interest fostered in part by the appearance of several ground-breaking new studies of these poems and the history of their collection, as well as by the publication in 2001 of a newly found papyrus, P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, that preserves over 100 epigrams of Posidippus of Pela. Missing hitherto in this proliferation of new scholarship on epigram is an edition and commentary in English on the epigrams of Callimachus, one of the leading and most widely imitated creative figures of this period, an artist who composed in a wide variety of poetic genres, one of which was epigram. Callimachus' epigrams adumbrate a broad selection of types, among them sepulchral, dedicatory, epideictic and erotic poems; the poems are brilliant artworks themselves and are among the most illuminating examples of this poetic genre. Scholarship on Callimachus tends to favor the fragmentary poems (the Aetia, the Hecale, the Iambi etc.) over the extant; our study seeks to redress this imbalance, and to cast a new interpretive light upon these glittering gems, which came to be widely admired and imitated in both later Greek and Latin poetry.