CALLIMACHUS

born c. 305 BC, Cyrene, North Africa [now Shahhat, Libya] died c. 240 Greek poet and scholar, the most representative poet of the erudite and sophisticated Alexandrian school. Callimachus migrated to Alexandria, where King Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt gave him employment in the Library of Alexandria, the most important in the Hellenistic world. Of Callimachus' voluminous writings, only fragments survive, many of them discovered in the 20th century. His most famous poetical work, illustrative of his antiquarian interests, was the Aitia (Causes), probably produced about 270. This work is a narrative elegy in four books, containing a medley of recondite tales from Greek mythology and history by which the author seeks to explain the legendary origin of obscure customs, festivals, and names. The structure of the poem, with its short episodes loosely connected by a common theme, became the model for the Fasti and Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid. Of his elegies for special occasions, the best known is the Lock of Berenice, a polished piece of court poetry later freely adapted into Latin by Catullus. Callimachus' other works include the Iambi, 13 short poems on occasional themes; the Hecale, a small-scale epic, or epyllion, which set a new poetic fashion for concise, miniaturistic detail; and the Ibis, a polemical poem that was directed against the poet's former pupil Apollonius of Rhodes, whose grand-scale epic Argonautica marked a rebellion against his master's canon of taste. Callimachus himself insisted on the exercise of consummate literary craftsmanship and virtuosity within poems of relatively short length. In the Hymns, Callimachus adapted the traditional religious form of the Homeric Hymns to an original and purely literary use. The Epigrams, of which some 60 survive, treat a variety of personal themes with consummate artistry. Of his prolific prose works, certainly the most famous was the Pinakes (Tablets) in 120 books. This work consisted of an elaborate critical and biographical catalog of the authors of the works held in the Library of Alexandria. Discoveries in the 19th and 20th centuries of ancient Egyptian papyruses confirm the fame and popularity of Callimachus; no other Greek poet except Homer is so often quoted by the grammarians of late antiquity. He was taken as a model by many Roman poets, notably Catullus. flourished 5th century BC Greek sculptor, perhaps an Athenian, reputed to have invented the Corinthian capital after witnessing acanthus leaves growing around a basket placed upon a young girl's tomb. Although no sculptures by Callimachus survive in the original, he was reported to have carved the golden lamp that burned perpetually in the Erechtheum (completed in 408). Callimachus was noted and criticized by his contemporaries for the overelaboration of draperies and other details in his sculptures. Viewed in this light, the elaborate carving that characterizes the Corinthian capital may well be his invention. Modern scholars have attributed to Callimachus the Aphrodite Genetrix, a Roman replica of which is in the Louvre. He has also been linked with a series of reliefs of dancing Maenads, such as the Roman copy now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, which are notable for their sensuously modeled limbs set off by voluminous, rippling draperies.