Callimachus and Latin Poetry Clausen, Wendell Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Fall 1964; 5, 3; ProQuest pg. 181

Callimachus and Latin Poetry 
Wendell Clausen 

THE POETIC TRIUMPH of Callimachus-I borrow my metaphor 
from the poet who styled himself the "Roman Callimachus"­
took place, long after his death, in Rome. It was altogether 

impressive. Cinna, Calvus, Catullus, Gallus, Virgil, Propertius-their 
imaginations were captivated by Callimachus; but for his poetry and 
the esthetic attitudes expressed or implied in it, much of what they 
wrote could not have been written; and Latin poetry would be very 
different. I do not mean to say that Callimachus had been a negligible 
figure in his own time and city. Clearly he had not: he counted for 
something in the Library, though he never became its head, and in the 
Court; he exerted a considerable influence on Euphorion, and some 
influence on two better poets, Theocritus and Apollonius. An im­
portant figure, then, but no literary dictator, as we may be tempted to 
assume from the posthumous ascendancy which he enjoyed in an alien 
literature and from his own acrimonious statements. Callimachus' 
attitude is at once polemical and defensive. The most complete 
apologia for his poetic career he wrote towards the end of his life, 
as a preface to the second edition of the Aetia,l his major work, 
which he must have intended as a kind of substitute for an epic. He 
had been attacked-and violently attacked, if we may judge from the 
violence of his retort-by Posidippus and Asclepiades and some others, 
though apparently not by Apollonius. Now old poets are not passion­
ately disturbed by criticism unless they feel themselves vulnerable to 
it. Callimachus' famous refusal to write an epic surely implies a 
widely held view that poets ought to write epics and perhaps even 
some expectation on the part of those in high places. His opinions had 
no decisive effect on Greek poetry during his own lifetime or after his 
death. For over against the Europa of Moschus and the poetry of 
Parthenius (of which I shall have more to say later) we can set the 
titles and fragments of many epics: epics about monarchs or war-

1 See R. Pfeiffer, Hermes 63 (1928) 339. 
181 



182 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

lords, epics on mythological themes, epics concerning the history of a 
people or a region, T(X MWU7JvLaKa. T(X 'AxatKa. or the like.2 

My chief purpose in this paper is to explain-in so far as that can be 
done simply; for the subject is not a simple one-the sort of influence 
Callimachus had on Latin poetry, and especially on the poetry or 
poetic career of Virgil. But first I must give some account of Callima­
chus himself, not because I can say much that is new about him, but 
because, in do not, some part of what I have to say about Latin poetry 
may be unclear. 

I 
Callimachus' view of poetry is stated (as I have already remarked) 

most completely and maturely in the elegant and rancorous de­
nunciation of his enemies-Telchines, literary troglodytes or worse­
which he prefixed to the second edition of his Aetia. I paraphrase: 

The Telchines murmur against me because I have not written 
a continuous poem in many thousands of verses about kings 
and heroes. But the shorter poems of Mimnermus and Philetas 
are better than their long. Let the crane delighting in Pygmies' 
blood fly far, from Egypt to Thrace; let the Massagetes shoot 
their arrows far against the Medes; poems are sweeter for 
being short. Judge poetry by its art, not by the surveyor's 
chain. Thundering belongs to Zeus, not to me. 

And now I translate: 

When first I set a writing-tablet on my knees, Lycian Apollo 
spoke to me: HPoet, raise your victim to be as fat aspossible, but 
your Muse, my friend, keep her thin. 

, ~I , \ {}'" , 
• • • aOLO€, TO fJ-€V VOS' OTTL 1TaXtUTOV 

{}pe!J;at. rryv Mouuav S' dJya{}€ A€1TTaAE'T}v. 

And I tell you this besides: Walk where wagons don't travel; 
don't drive your chariot in the tracks of others or on a wide 
road, but on an unworn way, even though it be narrower." I 
obeyed him;for I singfor those who like the shrill echOing song 
of the cicada, not the braying of asses. 

Z See K. Ziegler, Das hellenistische Epos (Leipzig 1934). 



WENDELL CLAUSEN 183 

Then follow the poignant lines on Callimachus' old age. This 
statement he placed before the original preface or proem to the Aetia, 
which he had written as a young man (apny/.vELOs. according to the 
Florentine scholiast): his famous Hesiodic dream of being initiated a 
poet on Helicon. Here is a personal, retrospective statement, deeply­
felt: a poet's testament. 

One cannot read very much of Callimachus without being im­
pressed, or perhaps depressed, by his learning. But it would be a 
mistake to dissociate his poetry from his pedantry. Callimachus was 
not a poet and a scholar; he was a poet because he was a scholar, a 
ypalLlLanICos, a man whose business was literature. And such, I think, 
must have been Callimachus' own view; for in his treatise against 
Praxiphanes he praised Aratus ens TTOAVlLaOfJ ICa~ ap£uTov TTO£7Jn7V [fro 
460 Pfeiffer]. The earlier literature of Greece had now been collected 
in the great library at Alexandria, and men came to know the ex­
quisite delight of writing books about books. Now a scholar-poet 
could con and compare texts; pluck a aTTat out of Homer and define it 
in a context of his own making, perhaps to spite another scholar-poet; 
employ an obscure variant of a myth or legend, the while deftly 
signaling to an alert reader his awareness of other variants as well; 
subtly modify an admired metaphor or simile; set an old word and a 
new one together in an elegant collocation. As Callimachus, for 
example, does, in Hymn 1.90, mhos aV'T]v EICOAOV(7as. EV€KAanUas S€ 
ILEVO£V~V: a-V7] occurs in Aeschylus, Sept. 713, IL€VOW~ in Apollonius, 1.894; 
the chiastic arrangement calls attention to what the poet has done, to 
his cleverness. Earlier Greek poets had made use of their predecessors, 
too-that is, after all, what we mean by a literary tradition-but not 
in quite the same way. Sophocles, for example, intended his allusions 
to the Choephoroe to be intelligible to everyone who saw the Electra; 
for otherwise something of the force of his own play would be lost. 
Earlier Greek poetry supposed a large group of hearers rather than a 
small group of readers. The poetry of Callimachus and others like him 
could be appreciated by only a very few readers as learned or nearly 
as learned as themselves. Theirs was a bibliothecal poetry, poetry 
about poetry, self-conscious and hermetic. 

It is easy enough to understand why these umbratile poets were 
drawn to the composition of didactic poetry. For in such poetry they 
had everywhere the chance to show off their erudition and to dem­
onstrate by how much their manner excelled their matter. Hence 



184 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

their choice ofinert or apparently intractable subjects to versify. Their 
aim was to shine, not to persuade; and in their poetry breathed no 
Lucretian fire. The Aetia is didactic in character; and to the Phaenomena 
of Aratus, written (Callimachus asserts, Epigr. 27) in the style of 
Hesiod, ·HUL080v TO T' aELup.a Kat 0 Tp07TO~ he gives his unstinting 

I I , '1" 'A I 'f3" I approva ; XaLpETE I\E7TTaL pT)aLE~, PT)TOV UVP. OI\OV aypV7TVLT)<;; so 
might he have praised his own poetry. The attitude of Callimachus 
to Hesiod and Homer has sometimes been misunderstood: for 
Callimachus Hesiod was imitable, Homer inimitable. Callimachus 
did not condemn Homer, though apparently Parthenius did (it is 
not unusual for a disciple to be more extreme than his master); 
rather Callimachus condemned those who imitated Homer, who 
copied the epic form, not realizing that it was by now empty and 
obsolete, and who slavishly repeated Homer's phrases: poets like 
Creophylus of Samos in an earlier time, for whom to be mistaken for 
Homer was the highest possible compliment [Epigr. 6]: 

'0 I e:- \ ,~ !-'1JpELOV OE KaI\EV!-'UL 

ypa!-'p.a· KpEwgn)Acp, ZEU c/>tAE, TOUTO !-,lya. 

Callimachus was determined not to be mistaken for anybody else, not 
even for Hesiod. To later poets Hesiod was the exemplar of didactic as 
Homer was of epic poetry; and Callimachus found Hesiod more to his 
liking. Hesiod's poems were relatively short as, in Callimachus' 
judgment, poems should be; and they recounted no long, involved 
tales of heroes and battles. Perhaps Callimachus took the cryptic, 
bitter words of the Muses to the shepherds [Theogony, 26-8]: 

I JI \ ) '\ I I 1" 
7TOL!-,EVE~ uypUVI\OL, KUK EI\EYXEU, YUUTEpE<; OLaV, 
"e:- .1. Ie:- , " " " • A LO!-'EV '{-'EVOEU 7TOI\I\U I\EYELV ETV!-'OLULV O!-'OLU' 
"e:- ~. OS" '() I, " ()' I () LOP.EV U ,EVT E EI\WP.EV, al\T) Ea YTJpvuau aL-

perhaps Callimachus took these words as a criticism of epic poets, 
notoriously careless of the truth. The Theogony-and I think it was the 
Theogony that most interested Callimachus-dealt with the truth, or 
with the true causes of things (aina); it was learned, if naively so-but 
its very naivete would have appealed to Callimachus' sophistication; 
above all, as Wilamowitz has remarked, Hesiod's was a personal 
voice. It was Hesiod who provided Callimachus with a means of 
describing his own source of inspiration, a matter of deep concern to 
so late and self-conscious a poet. While keeping his flock under 



WENDELL CLAUSEN 185 

Helicon, Hesiod met the Muses; they gave him an olive branch (the 
visible symbol of poetic inspiration) and breathed into him the divine 
power of song, that he might sing of things that had been and would 
be, and of the gods who are forever. While still a young man Callima­
chus dreamt he had been wafted to Helicon and there met the Muses, 
who told him of the causes of things (aL-na). (The details of the scene 
are uncertain, because only a fragment of the text survives.) The old 
bard of Ascra seems to describe an obvious encounter with the 
Muses-strange things do happen to shepherds in lonely places; but 
one verse [10], €wVXLCXL ar€tXov 7T€pLKa>J..l.cx oaaav L€LacxL, suggests 
nighttime, and the meeting was later interpreted &AATJyOpLKw~, as a 
dream. At any rate, Callimachus, drowsing perhaps in a suburb of 
Alexandria, could only dream of encountering the Muses on Helicon. 
This scene served as an introduction to the Aetia: what did it signify? 
That Callimachus challenged comparison with Hesiod-of what use 
is a model that cannot be surpassed?-and that Hesiod, not Homer, 
was the poet to emulate. A personal, allusive, polemical introduction; 
in a word, Callimachean. 

II 

A poet writing in the style of Homer may be expected to begin as 
Homer did, with an invocation to the Muses and an epitome of the tale 
he means to tell. Ennius did not: he began his Annales with the descrip­
tion of a curiously personal experience, a dream in which Homer's 
ghost appeared to him. Homer expounded the Pythagorean doctrine 
of metempsychosis: his soul (he informed Ennius) had once passed 
into a peacock's body, but had now passed into Ennius' body; and 
Ennius awoke, alter Homerus, capable of unfolding the epic story of 
Roman greatness. So much, or rather so little, is certain; for only a 
few fragments of this initial scene have been preserved. Where did the 
scene take place? On Helicon? On Parnassus? (Ennius had accompanied 
Fulvius Nobilior on his Aetolian campaign in 189, and Nobilior, 
Roman-like, had brought the Muses home with him.) Or-and this 
has been suggested-in Ennius' rooms on the Aventine hill? Did 
Ennius meet the Muses or merely invoke their aid? Did he drink of 
Hippocrene? 

Most scholars have seen in this introduction to the Annales an 
allusion to the proem of the Aetia, but a few have denied this, most 



186 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

recently an Italian scholar,3 anxious to vindicate the Italian character 
of Ennius' genius. Now nothing that Callimachus wrote was better 
known than his dream of poetic initiation on Helicon: a ,Llya. Ba.7'TLa.8a.o 
uocpofJ TT€ptTTVU7'OV DV€La.p ••• [Anth. Pal. 7.42.1]. Ennius was a literary 
man, a philologist-dicti studiosus he called himself [Ann. 216]; he 
had grown up in a Greek-speaking part of Italy, and was concerned 
his whole life through with Greek poetry: he could not have begun his 
Annales as he did without having the famous dream of Callimachus 
in mind. To imagine that he could is, as Otto Skutsch has remarked,' 
CCto imagine that a modern literary man could write of a scholar's 
pact with the devil, without being aware of Goethe's Faust." In all 
that has been written about the initial scene of the Annales-and 
there is very much 5-1 miss an essential question. It is this: why 
should Ennius allude to Callimachus' dream at the beginning of the 
Annales, 7'd: tpW/La."iKeX, a long discursive epic about the vicissitudes of a 
people, about kings and battles? Was this not precisely the sort of 
poem Callimachus had condemned? Ennius' purpose, I believe, was 
polemical and anti-Callimachean: he designed to confute Callim­
achus, alter Hesiodus, in something like Callimachus' own oblique 
style. Ennius was as self-conscious a poet as Callimachus, and as 
preoccupied with his art. Ovid's facile judgement on the two­
[Battiades] quamuis ingenio non ualet, arte ualet [Am. 1.15.13-14]: 
Ennius ingenio maxim us, arte rudis [Trist. 2.424]-is unfair to both, but 
more unfair to Ennius than to Callimachus. Ennius stands at the 
beginning of a poetic tradition, a tradition which he helped to shape­
not, like Callimachus, near the end of one; if his art is rude, it is so 
mainly because he was struggling with a language that had not, like 
Greek, been long subdued to the uses of poetry. It may seem odd that 
Ennius began his Annales as he did, with a cryptic, literary polemic. 
Perhaps it is; but in the introduction to Book 7, to the next part of the 
poem that he published, we find him similarly engaged with literary 
polemic [Ann. 213-15J: 

scripsere alii rem 
uersibus quos olim Fauni uatesque canebant, 
cum neque Musarum scopulos ... 

3 G. Marconi, Riv. di Cult. Class. e Medievale 3 (1961) 224-245. 
4 The Annals of Quintus Ennius (London 1953) p. 10. 
i For a convenient summary see J. H. Waszink, Mnem. Ser. IV, 3 (1950) 214-240; see also 

the same author's "retractatio," Mnem. Ser. IV, 15 (1962) 113-132. 



WENDELL CLAUSEN 187 

Apparently Ennius did not mention the poet he was attacking, 
Naevius, by name. This is the tone, as Leo long ago remarked,6 that 
we know from Callimachus; and, as Leo acutely observed, the words 
Musarum scopulos refer to the dream at the beginning of Book l. 

Ennius, then, knew the poetry of Callimachus, or at least some part 
of it-I suspect that Virgil was the only Roman poet who ever read the 
Aetia all the way through. And Ennius alluded to the proem of the 
Aetia for his own reasons, private reasons, one is tempted to think; for 
he could hardly have expected his Roman readers to grasp the sig­
nificance of his allusion. But Callimachus had little or no influence on 
Latin poetry until the generation of the New Poets. Ennius in his 
Saturae and Lucilius owe something to his Iambi, it has been argued,7 
and Lucilius something besides to his poetic example; but evidence 
for these claims is slight and inconclusive; and the Iambi was, in Latin 
poetry, one of Callimachus' least consequential works. Sometime 
before he committed suicide in 87 B.C., Lutatius Catulus rendered one 
of Callimachus' epigrams (41) into Latin; but this, the diversion of an 
idle hour, should not be taken as evidence of any serious interest in 
Callimachus' major poetry or in his esthetic views. Catulus was a 
Roman aristocrat with a taste for Greek poetry, an elegant amateur. 
He would have read many Greek epigrams; one, by Callimachus, 
pleased him especially, and he made a version of it. Meleager's 
Garland had been published a few years before the death of Catulus; 
he could have read the epigram there, or it might have been shown 
him by a Greek friend like Antipater of Sidon, himself an epigram­
matist. In all probability Catulus had never read any of the Aetia; had 
he tried to do so, he would have liked it little enough and found the 
oblique polemic all but incomprehensible. There is, besides, no 
reason to suppose that Catulus felt any aversion to old-fashioned epic; 
his literary circle included a certain Furius, a writer (so it would seem) 
of such poetry, Annales. 

It is a mistake, not uncommon in our literary histories, to employ 
the terms "Hellenistic," "Alexandrian," "Callimachean" inter­
changeably. The poetry ofCatulus, Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, 
and Laevius might be called Hellenistic; but it had little to do with 
the New Poetry, which is Callimachean in its inspiration. Callimachus 
was brought to Rome, I am quite convinced, by Parthenius of Nicaea, 

6 Geschichte der romisclten Literatur (Berlin 1913) 164-165. 
7 By M. Puelma Piwonka, Lucilius lind Kallimachos (Frankfurt/M. 1949). 



188 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

and arrived there with all the force and charm of novelty. I do not 
mean necessarily that no Latin poet had heard of Callimachus, or 
that there were no manuscripts of his poetry in Rome, though perhaps 
there were none; I mean rather that Parthenius made Callimachus 
important to some Latin poets. The main source of our knowledge of 
Parthenius is Suidas. Parthenius was taken prisoner when the 
Romans defeated Mithridates, and became the property or prize of 
Cinna-£lA~g>lJ7J tJ1TO Ktvva Aag>vpov; and was later freed because of his 
learning-S,a 7rat8£vow. Presumably Parthenius came to Rome not 
long after 73 B.C., the year the Romans captured Nicaea; and presum­
ably the Cinna who is not further identified was a relative of Helvius 
Cinna, author of the Zmyrna; or perhaps there is some conflation of 
details in the account given in Suidas. Parthenius: mentor or friend 
ofCinna and Gallus and Virgil, and very likely ofCatullus and Calvus 
as well, literary epigone of Callimachus and Euphorion-I do not 
understand why those who have written recently on the New Poetry 
make so little of him: Quinn in his The Catullan Revolution (1959), 
Wimmel in his Kallimachos in Rom (1960), Fordyce in his edition of 
Catullus (1961), unless I am mistaken, do not even mention him. 
Otis in his Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (1964) does recognize his 
importance. It may be that literary young men of the time began to 
read and appreciate Callimachus on their own with no prompting. 
But the suddenness and intensity of their interest would be hard to 
explain; and I doubt that even a Cinna or a Catullus could have under­
stood Callimachus without some tutoring. 

Cinna labored for nine years to be as obscure as Euphorion, and 
apparently succeeded; Catullus greeted his Zmyrna on publication 
with Callimachean enthusiasm (95). 

Zmyrna mei Cinnae nonam post denique messem 
quam coepta est nonamque edita post hiemem, 

milia cum interea quingenta Hortensius uno 

Zmyrna cauas Satrachi penitus mittetur ad undas, 
Zmyrnam cana diu saecula peruoluent. 

at Volusi Annales Paduam morientur ad ipsam 
et laxas scombris saepe dabunt tunicas. 

The art of this poem is minute. There are, or rather were, eight 



WENDELL CLAUSEN 189 

verses, divided into two sections of four verses, each section beginning 
with the tide of Cinna's poem. I confine my remarks to the second. 
Two rivers are named, the Satrachus and the Po: Satrachi stands 
immediately before the caesura in the first hexameter, Paduam 
immediately after the caesura in the second; and both hexameters 
conclude with similar phrases: mittetur ad undas, morientur ad ipsam. 
And in the second pentameter there is an echo, intended I think, of 
the first: 

Zmyrnam cana diu saecula peruoluent 
et laxas scombris saepe dabunt tunicas. 

A polemical poem in the Callimachean style was not meant to be 
merely a confutation; it was meant to be simultaneously a dem­
onstration of how poetry ought to be written. Catullus wrote one 
other such poem, also attacking the wretched Volusius and his 
Annales: 36, Annales Volusi cacata carta, which has not quite been 
recognized for what it is. The Zmyrna-to return to 95-will be read 
by the banks of the distant Satrachus and live for many ages: the 
Annales of Volusius will provide much wrapping-paper for mackerel 
and perish by the mouth of the Po. (Volusius must have come from 
nearby: otherwise the emphatic reference would have no point, 
Paduam . .. ad ipsam; and the name is common on inscriptions from 
that part ofItaly.) Catullus pays his friend an elegant compliment, as 
commentators have noticed: his poem will be read even by the remote 
river which it celebrates. But there is, I think, a piquancy commentators 
have not noticed in the oblique comparison of the two rivers: the 
broad familiar Po with its mud and flotsam, the exotic Satrachus, 
deep-channelled, swift and clear-such is the implication of the 
adjective cauus; Lucan (2.421-2) applies it to the Tiber and its tributary 
the Rutuba where they flow swiftly down from the Apennines. 
Callimachus had used a similar metaphor for long and short, or bad 
and good, poetry at the end of Hymn 2. Envy (CPe6vo~) sidles up to 
Apollo and whispers an anti-Callimachean opinion into his ear; 
Apollo kicks Envy, and replies (108-12): 

'A' ~ I " '\\ \ \ \\' UUVpLOV 7TOTa/LO to 1J,f:ya~ pOO~, al\l\a Ta 7TOl\I\a 
\ I ~ \ \ \ \ '.1..' <Ie:- .I.. \ "\ 
IlV/LaTa YTJ~ Kat 7TOI\I\OV €'f' VOa'TL UVp'f'€TOV €IlK€t. 
A ~ e:-' , " \ "e:- .I.. I 1\ 

.tJTJOL 0 OVK a7TO 7TaVTO~ VOwp 'f'OP€OVUL /L€lltUCTat, '\" ., e I \' I , , 
al\l\ TJ 'TL~ Ka apTJ T€ Kat ax.paaVTO~ aV€p1T€L 

Ie:- 'c f ~ '\ , \ f3'" " 1TLOaKO~ €s L€PTJ~ OIlLYT} Ill, a~ aKpov aWTOV. 



190 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

What was the Zmyrna about? The incestuous passion of Smyrna or 
Myrrha for her father Cinyras, her metamorphosis into a tree, and the 
subsequent birth of Adonis from her, or its, trunk. Precisely the sort 
of tale-erotic, morbid, grotesque-that appealed to Parthenius, as 
we may guess from the fact that he wrote Metamorphoses, and as we 
can tell from his IIEpt epW'TLKWV 1TafJTjI-UY:TWV, the helpful collection of 
stories he put together for Gallus. One of these 1TafJrJl.J.aTa, 11, deals 
with Byblis and her incestuous passion for her brother Caunus, which 
Parthenius himself had written about. He quotes, as a teacher might, 
his own verses: six verses, two of them U1TOVowxtoVTES', with an at'TLOV 

at the end: KaMtf-Laxov T6 T' a€Wf-La Kat 0 Tp61TOS'. These are the verses, 
which have been curiously neglected by literary historians: 

~ 0' OT€ o~ // OAOOLO KaOtY~ToV v60v EYVW 
,~ ,~ I~ ()' Of , , \ (3' 

Kl\atEV aTjOOVWWV af-LtVWTEpOV, aL T EVL TjOOT/S' 
n() I , I I "l' 
~L OVLctJ KOVpctJ1TEpt f-LVPWV aLCt.sovuw· 

I < , J.. , ~ 't:::' I I 
KaL pa KaTa UTV'f'EI\OLO uapwvwos CtvTLKCX f-LLTpTjV 
< • I, ' ~ , , ()' , r:::' , " I a'f'af-LEVTJ U€tpTjV €VE TjKaTO, Tat 0 €1T €KEWT/ 

{3EVOEa 1TCXp()EVLKCXt MLATjuto€S' €pp~gavTo. 

Six verses, divided into two sections of three verses, each section 
ending with a U1TOVO€Latwv. ~ 0' OT€ o~ p' OAOOLO in verse 1 is answered 
by Kat pa KaTCt. OTVc/>EAOLO in verse 4; ()af-LwWT€pOV in verse 2 is balanced 
by €V€()~KaTo in verse 5, a word of the same metrical quality in the 
same position, and both words are followed by similar phrases: 

., ,'\ {3 , \ "-' , " I Th n () , aL T EVL TjUarJS', TaL U €1T €K€WT/. ere are two proper names: ~L OVLctJ 

at the beginning of verse 3 and MLATjutO€S' immediately after the 
caesura in verse 6.8 I would not go so far as to say that Catullus had 
these verses in mind when he was writing 95-there is, after all, no 
way of dating Parthenius' poem precisely; but I do think it likely that 
the technique of 95 owes something to the example of Parthenius, if 

8 E. Rohde failed to appreciate the symmetry of Parthenius' verses or the delicacy and 
restraint of the narrative, and supposed that some words were lost after E,,€8~KaTO (Der 
griechische Roman3 , p. 102. n.): "noch hat man nicht einmal gehort, class die B., nachdem sie 
'an eine feste Eiche den Curtel knupfend, ihren Hals hineingelegt hane: auch wirklich 
gestorben sei ... " There is a passage which resembles this in a poem written by one of 
Parthenius' pupils. Virgil, Georg. 4.457-61: 

ilia quidem. dum te fugeret per jlumina praeceps, 
immanem ante pedes hydrum moritura puella 
seruantem ripas alta non uidit in herba. 
at chorus aequa/is Dryadum c1amore sllpremos 
implerunt montis ... 



WENDELL CLAUSEN 191 

one may judge from these verses. And what could be more appropri­
ate, if Parthenius, as I suspect, did inspire Cinna? 

The Satrachus (or l:hpaxo~) occurs only four times in ancient 
poetry: in Lycophron (448), which hardly matters; in Nonnus (13.459), 
who connects it with the legend of Adonis, as Haupt long ago pointed 
out (Opuse. 1.73); in Catullus, alluding to Cinna's poem; and in 
Parthenius (fr. 24 Martini). I translate part of the note in the Ety­
mologicum Magnum: 

' ... there was a mountain named Aoion, from which two 
rivers flowed, the Setrachus and the Aplieus; and one of these 
[Setrachus] Parthenius called Aoos.' 

Aoos was another name for Adonis; and it appears from fro 37 that 
Parthenius had written about Adonis. This coincidence can hardly be 
fortuitous. It seems likely, to me at least, that Parthenius suggested 
the story of Smyrna as suitable for treatment in an epyllion, much as 
he later suggested stories for Gallus to use in his elegies. 

Callimachus I have already discussed briefly; about Euphorion, 
Callimachus dimidiatus, I can be even briefer: so pitifully slight are the 
remains of his poetry. Evidently he modelled himself on Callimachus: 
he had Callimachus' interest in local legends, aetiology, geography, 
mythology, and more than Callimachus' interest in the epyllion. 
Euphorion, according to one scholar,9 "popularized the criminal 
love-story, and concentrated interest on the heroine." This is plausible. 
There is an indicative fragment lO that survives to us-Apriate, being 
pursued with lustful intent by the hero Trambelus, delivers herself of 
an erudite and disdainful speech, and then in a single hexameter hurls 
herself into the sea. The poet is not interested in narrative detail; he is 
interested rather in obscure mythological allusions and in the emo­
tional state of his heroine; and his narrative style is consequently 
abrupt and elliptical, like that of Catullus in 64 or Virgil in the 
Aristaeus epyllion. Then there are Latin poems that do not survive to 
us, except for a few verses: the Zmyrna of Cinna, the 10 of Calvus. 
Cinna and Calvus, cantores Euphorionis-for Cicero must have been 
referring to them, among others, poets who owed an excessive debt 
to Euphorion. And Cicero would have known: he had been a student 

9 A. M. Duff in the OeD, s.v. EPYLLION. 

10 Easily accessible in Select Papyri III, ed. D. L. Page (Loeb Classical Library), pp. 494-
497. 



192 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

of Hellenistic poetry in his youth. Euphorion was important to these 
poets because Parthenius made him so; it was Parthenius, I think, 
who introduced his friends and pupils to Euphorion. 

In his note on Bucohcs 6.72, Servius gives some account of the 
Grynean Grove, and then adds: hoc autem Euphorionis continentcarmina, 
quae Gallus transtulit in sermonem Latinum. It may well be that Par­
thenius suggested the subject to Gallus for an aetiological poem, as he 
suggested subjects to him for his elegies. Parthenius himself had 
written a poem on a similar subject, the Delos. StephanusofByzantium 
(rpVVOt) preserves three fragments of this poem. One of these is 
curious and relevant. rpVVOL (Stephanus notes) is the name of a small 
town; the €()VLKOV. or adjective, is rpVJ/€V~ or rpvVYJt~ in the feminine; 
but he also knows of the form rpVV€LO~ in Parthenius' Delos: MY€'Tat 
Ka2 rpVV€LO~ 'A7TOAAWV W~ napeEVLO~ L1~A<p. This is the form Virgil used 
in the sixth eclogue, 72: his tibi Grynei nemoris dicatur origo; and he 
later translated the phrase rpVV€tO~ 'A7TCJAAWV in Aeneid 4.345, Gryneus 
Apollo-commentators seem to have overlooked this-as (so Gellius 
13.27 and Macrobius 5.17.18 tell us) he translated, or rather adapted, 
a verse of Parthenius in Georgics 1.437, Glauco et Panopeae et Inoo 
Melicertae: rAavK<p Ka2 NYJpfjt Ka2 ']vw<p (€lvaAt<p Gellius) M€AtKEprn. 
According to Macrobius-and his information must be from an earlier 
source-Parthenius tutored Virgil in Greek. 

Now (it may be asked) could a single Greek professor have made 
such a difference to Latin poetry? The question is more easily asked 
than answered. Weare concerned with only a few poets, pupils or 
friends of Parthenius; and he may well have been a forceful and per­
suasive teacher: he won his freedom OUX 7TalO€vutv. But (it is only fair 
to add) Parthenius' teaching alone could not have produced such a 
renovation-some have called it a revolution-in Latin poetry: he 
spoke to listening ears. No significant poetry had been written in 
Latin for several decades; and young poets-Cinna, Calvus, Catullus­
living in a turbulent and rebellious age were not minded to write an 
old-fashioned epic about Roman history, Annales. Ennius, whatever 
his virtues, could only seem crude and outmoded to a generation 
conversant with the elegance of Hellenistic poetry and ambitious of 
rivalling it. They could not, like Callimachus, look back to a classical 
poetry in their own language; they had rather to look to Greek for 
that. Perhaps they felt some artistic kinship with Callimachus; they 
could appreciate his experiments with language, his technical refine-



WENDELL CLAUSEN 193 

ments, his passion for elegance; and like Callimachus, they were in a 
defensive position. Their objection to epic poetry was not, I think, 
merely esthetic, as it had been for Callimachus; it was moral as 
well. 

I have put this matter rather crudely; perhaps I can explain what I 
mean by commenting briefly on Virgil's poetic career and especially 
on the sixth Eclogue. 

The Liber Bucolicorum is one of the few perfect books: each Eclogue 
is enhanced somehow by its position-this effect was achieved, I have 
no doubt, by a certain amount of rewriting; and, taken together, the 
ten have an additional beauty and sense. For his own profession of 
poetic faith Virgil reserved a place of prominence: the sixth Eclogue 
introduces the second half of the book and defines the character of 
the whole book. It has an obvious connection with the tenth Eclogue, 
and a less obvious, but perhaps more important, connection with the 
first (1-5): 

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi 
siluestrem tenui musam meditaris auena, 
nos patriae finiS et dulcia linquimus arua. 
nos patriam fugimus: tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra 
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas. 

Meliboeus notices Tityrus, relaxed under a beech-tree, carelessly 
meditating his thankful muse. They talk; and their talk is of the 
violence and disorder of civil strife, the possibility of reconciliation, 
and the infinite sadness of exile. A strange introductory poem, 
recognizably Theocritean in manner, but yet quite unlike anything 
Theocritus wrote: a suave and beautiful poem about a harsh and ugly 
experience that Virgil had shared with his fellow-countrymen. 

The sixth Eclogue also begins with a reference to war. Virgil 
declines to praise the military record of Varus in epic style. The refusal 
is Callimachean, translated into pastoral terms (3-8): 

cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem 
uellit et admonuit: "pastorem, Tityre, pinguis 
pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen." 
nunc ego (namque super tibi erunt qui dicere laudes, 
Yare, tuas cupiant et tristia condere bella) 
agrestem tenui meditabor harundine musam. 



194 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

No attentive reader can miss the echo of the first eclogue: siluestrem 
tenui musam meditaris auena; and commentators duly notice it. But 
surely it needs a word of explanation? For I do not suppose that Virgil 
was simply trying to unite the two halves of his book with this device. 
Why should Virgil remind his readers of the first Eclogue at the 
beginning of the sixth, in a Callimachean context? To write a Roman 
epic a poet had to celebrate war; he had to accept war as heroic. 
Virgil could not, at least not then; and his refusal to write about it­
tristia condere bella-was not merely esthetic, it was also (as the 
reminiscence of the first Eclogue intimates) moral. Callimachus knew 
nothing of war; he knew only the vast, stagnant peace of the Ptolemaic 
empire; for him refusing to write an epic was a stylistic decision. But 
for Virgil and his contemporaries it was, I feel, something more: they 
knew what war was. Propertius 1.22.1-5: 

Qualis et unde genus, qui sint mihi, Tulle, penates 
quaeris pro nostra semper amicitia. 

si Perusina tibi patriae sunt nota sepulchra, 
Italiae duris funera temporibus, 

cum Romana suos egit discordia ciuis ... 

In the first Eclogue the adjective tenui is ornamental, necessary 
rather to the balance of the verse than to its sense-siluestrem tenui 
musam meditaris auena; the involved word order is suggestive of 
Hellenistic elegance. But in the sixth Eclogue tenui is more than 
ornamental-agrestem tenui meditabor harundine musam; it implies a 
concept of style; it is the Latin equivalent of "€7TTbS" or "€7TTaMoS": 

fwvaav ... "€7T7'aMr;v, "€7TTat / p~at€S". His pastoral poetry, Virgil thus 
obliquely asserts, is Callimachean in character. Failure to recognize 
this has impaired the quality of much that has been written about the 
Eclogues. 

Although the sixth Eclogue is primarily addressed to Varus, its 
chief figure is obviously Gallus. Because of this some readers have 
detected an awkwardness or lack of unity in the poem. Buchner, for 
example, describes the first twelve verses as Ha detachable proem".u 
The failure in sensibility is not Virgil's; it is the modern reader's: 
unschooled in the Callimachean esthetic, he senses disunity where he 
ought to sense unity. The refusal to write an epic poem implied the 
intention of writing some other sort of poem: the refusal was always 

11 PW, zweite Reihe xv, 1219. 



WENDELL CLAUSEN 195 

made in a poem. Apollo's epiphany as literary critic and the poet's 
initiation on Helicon-these scenes are complementary, the one 
explicitly, the other implicitly, programmatic; and they stood to­

gether at the beginning of the Aetia. Ancient readers would associate, 
not dissociate, the two; and for such readers, and not for us, Virgil 
wrote the sixth Eclogue. Here are Linus' words to Gallus (69-73): 

hos tibi dant calamos (en accipe) Musae, 
Ascraeo quos ante seni, qUibus ille sole bat 
cantando rigidas deducere montibus omos. 
his tibi Grynei nemoris dicatur origo, 
ne quis sit lucus quo se plus iactet Apollo. 

Apollo will be pleased with Gallus' poem about his grove: at this 
point the reader may recall how little pleased Apollo was with 
another sort of poem. Now with a summary qUid loquar, at the begin­
ning of verse 74, Virgil hurries Silenus' song and his own to a close. 
This abrupt phrase has the effect of emphasizing what immediately 
precedes; and the poet speaks again in his own person, as he did at the 
start: cum canerem reges et proelia. 

That the same poet who wrote cum canerem reges et proelia 12 wrote, 
a few years later, arma uirumque cano is one of the surprises of Latin 
literary history, although I do not find that historians of Latin 
literature are at all surprised. The sixth Eclogue, as I have tried briefly 
to show, is an uncompromising, if oblique, statement of the Callima­
chean esthetic; a reader at the time of publication could not have 
anticipated that its author would one day write an epic-a didactic 
or aetiological poem perhaps, or an epyllion, but not an epic. The 
very fact of Virgil's poetry imposes on us and persuades us to see his 
poetic career as an orderly progression from the lesser to the greater 
work; it requires an effort of the imagination to understand that it 
cannot have been so. Only when he was well along with the Georgics, 
I suspect, did Virgil make up his mind, slowly and with some reluc­
tance, to write an epic; and perhaps under some compulsion-I mean 
not the compulsion of an order which he would have to obey, but the 

12 Ancient scholiasts, not recognizing the allusion to Callimachus, took cum canerem 
reges et proelia as a biographical statement and imagined that the youthful Virgil had 
attempted unsuccessfully to write an epic before turning to pastoral; see Vita Donati, 19: 
mox cum res Romanas ineohasset, offensus materia ad Bueolica transiit, maxime ut Asinium 
Pollionem, Aifenum Varum et Cornelium Gallum eelebraret . .. Some modern scholiasts have 
made this same mistake. 

G.R.B.S·-4 



196 CALLIMACHUS AND LATIN POETRY 

even stronger compulsion of hope and expectation which he would 
want to satisfy. 

There is much of Callimachus in the Georgics: its character is 
established by the epyllion and aLT£OV at the end and by the reference 
to Gallus; for I am certain there once was such a reference. But here 
and there one detects un-Callimachean ambiguities, notably in the 
proem to the third book, which begins in Callimachean style, but 
seems unclear, as if Virgil were no longer quite sure of his own 
intentions, or in these verses (2.173-6): 

salue, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, 
magna uirum: tibi res antiquae laudis et artis 
ingredior sanctos ausus recludere fontes, 
Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen. 

Here, in a single period, are joined an almost epic expression of pride 
in Italy and an allusion to Callimachus. (References to Hesiod in 
Virgil and Propertius are really references to Callimachus or his 
conception ofHesiod. You will recall the verses from the sixth Eclogue 
-hos tibi dant calamos (en acdpe) Musae,jAscraeoquos ante seni ... -and 
my comments on Hesiod and Callimachus.) 

The Aeneid, finally, is in many ways a strange epic; and there are 
indications that Virgil was not wholly content with it. He must have 
been out of his mind, he wrote, when he undertook such a task, and 
he wanted to burn it as he lay dying. Most likely it was illness or 
fatigue that caused this ultimate despondency, or an artist's dissatis­
faction with an unfinished work; but, just possibly, some Callima­
chean scruples haunted Virgil to the endP 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

September, 1964 

13 Read at the Fourth International Congress of Classical Studies in Philadelphia on 
August 28, 1964. I have added some footnotes and made a few small changes.