Callimachea Daly, Lloyd W Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Winter 1975; 16, 4; ProQuest pg. 399

Callimachea 
Lloyd W. Daly 

I. Epigram XLI 

S CHIZOPHRBNIA was a theme not unfamiliar to the ancient erotic 
poets. Catullus' odi et amo (Carm. 85) may be the most familiar ex­
pression of this condition, but for him it was already a topos of 

honorable ancestry, and the changes had frequently been rung on it. 
One variation on this theme involves the poet's assuming the role of 
battle-weary lover who fears a new attack by Eros; he feels the 
stimulus but fears the results of yielding to it. Such is the pose of 
Ibycus in fragment 6 (PMG 287). Eros, with all his charms, threatens 
to cast the poet once more into the toils of Aphrodite, but Ibycus, 
fearing the threatened attack, trembles like an old warhorse at the 
thought of being forced into the fray once more. 

Callimachus' Epigram 41 (Pfeiffer) takes this topos as a point of 
departure. He says that half of his soul is still in the land of the living 
but that the other half is gone; he is not sure whether Hades or Eros 
has carried it off. It occurs to him that it may have found its way back 
to one of his boy-loves, and he indignantly recalls that he had often 
forbade them to shelter the runaway. At this point (line 5) an un­
healed corruption interferes with our understanding of the epigram.1 

pfeiffer presents the last two lines as follows: 

t OVKLCVJlt4>'YJcOJl ' €K€I. C€ yap ~ At86A€VCTOC 
I , ~I ft' ~ ~ 

KHJI'YJ Kat OVC€PWC O£O OTt 1TOV CTp€-yt:TaL. 

The epigram was evidently the basis for one by Q. Lutatius Catulus, 
whose text is given by Gellius (19.9.14= Morel p.43). Catulus is far 
from merely translating Callimachus, for it is his whole animus which 
has run away, and it has taken refuge, he suspects, with a specific 
Theotimus. His last two lines run: 

ibimus quaesitum. verum, ne ipsi teneamur 
formido. quid ago fda, Venus, consilium. 

1 F. Dornseiff's explanation of the text as it stands (SymbOslo 30 [1953] 27-29) seems to me 
hardly to be taken seriously. 

399 



400 CALLIMACHEA 

The ibimus quaesitum suggests ot<p7')cov in the corrupt line of Cal­
limachus, as it did to Jacobs, but none of the emendations proposed 
since the appearance of pfeiffer's text in 1953 seems to me to have 
healed the passage. 

The attempts at emendation known to me are the following: 
Bousquet2 suggests OUK €C au; SlcP7')cov; Cataudella3 OVKOVV cvv . .. ; 
o lcP7')cov , where the points represent aposiopesis; Ferguson' ov 'TLC 

cvvolcP7')cov. The last of these seems promising to me in recognizing the 
compound cvvolcP7')cov although the verb is not found elsewhere, but 
the 00 TLC does not seem to me to function as the sense of the line 
requires. The €KELCE which follows should point to some place already 
mentioned. The place may be the house or haunt of some one of the 
poet's former lovers previously vaguely referred to, but I would 
expect to find a more specific point of reference for the EKE'iCE exactly 
at the locus of the corruption. I would therefore suggest reading 
olKla cvvolcP7')cov· €KELCE KTA. The word olKla seems to be a graphical 
possibility, and it is used twice elsewhere by Callimachus as the first 
dactyl in a line (fr.66.9 and Hymn 4.282). 

My understanding of the line as emended would be: «Help me 
search (their) houses, for I know that lovesick scapegrace is lurking 
there somewhere." That the person to whom the call for help is 
addressed is not identified does not seem to me to require explanation 
in an epigram any more than we need to know who the speaker is. 
Catulus shows the same vagueness in his ibimus, which is addressed to 
an otherwise unidentified person, the auditor or reader of the epigram. 

II. Epigram XLIV 

The last line of this epigram is blemished by a corrupt beginning and 
appears in pfeiffer's text as: 

t ooroc oc€tYCt.plITJc t Eic TOV EpwrCt. f3&ATJ. 

If the epigram is to carry through the thought of its opening couplet, 
as it seems to me it should, the corrupt line ought to continue the 
figure of undermining there introduced. Bentley may have been 
aiming at this when he proposed 0 CLYEP7T7}C on the basis of the 

I J. Bousquet, "Callimaque, epigramme 41," REG 68 (1955) 121-23. 
3 Q. Cataudella, "Tre epigrammi di Callimaco," Maia 19 (1967) 356-62. 
• J. Ferguson, "The Epigrams of Callimachus," G&R 17 (1970) 78-79. 



LLOYD W. DALY 401 

Hesychius gloss etYEp7TTJc' /l.aOpOOaK'TTJc, but the gloss seems to suggest 
that etyep7TTJc is a compound invented to describe a stealthy dog or 
other animal, and etYEp7TTJC would thus mix the figure of the epigram 
further and weaken, rather than sharpen, the effect. 

The epigram opens with an oath by Pan and Dionysus that there is 
"some fire hidden here beneath the ashes," the same figure that 
Horace uses in Carm. 2.1.7-8 to describe the hidden hazards of the 
course Asinius Pollio had chosen to tread. In Callimachus, however, 
the second and third lines make clear, if there had been any doubt, 
that the hidden fire is that of love. He says, "I don't trust myself; don't 
put your arms around me. Often a silent stream eats away beneath a 
wall and no one knows." The figure of the unseen fire has given way 
to that of the unseen stream, but both the fire and the stream are 
working away stealthily beneath the surface. The last two lines 
continue, "That's why I am afraid now, Menexenus, that this cELyapVTJC t 

may steal in and throw me into-love." Whatever is represented by 
the corrupt word must stand for the insidious influence of the lover's 
nearness. 

There is a family of words : cfjpay~ or crJpay~, crJpayyoc, cTJp6.yywv, 

cTJpayydJSTJc, cTJpayy6w, and Hesychius defines the first of these as 
c7T~Aawv, KOLA6'T7]c, vcpaAoc 7T€-rpa p~yp.a'Ta Exouca. The similarity of 
words of this group to our corrupt word and the appropriateness of 
its meaning to our context seem suggestive. Furthermore Hesychius 
offers the equation c7]payywv' c7T7]Aa{wv, €7TL{}UjLu;JV, suggesting a poetic 
source where the lemma, whose basic meaning is c7TTJAa{wv, has the 
figurative meaning€7TL{}vp.LCvv, and this would seem to be precisely the 
case with our corrupt word. Since, however, Hesychius' lemma is in 
the genitive it cannot be claimed for this epigram, and none of the 
recorded congeners of cfjpayg will, in the nominative, substitute for 
the corrupt word. If it were possible to suppose that Callimachus here 
used or coined a word c7]paYYEtk or c7]payy7]c (both agents), we would 
have a most satisfactory sense. The epigram would be saying, "That is 
why, Menexenus, I now fear that this underminer may find its way in 
and topple me into love." 

III. Hymn 6.135-37 
The hymn to Demeter ends with a leavetaking and an appeal to the 

goddess to preserve the city. The appeal is expanded in detail in the 
following lines: 



402 CALLIMACHEA 

.l. ' ~" '()' , ~EPE 0 cxypo L VOCTLP.CX 1TCXJITCX' 

.l.' {3 {3' .l.' ~\.l.' , l' () , 
~EP E OCXC. ~EPE P.CXI\CX. ~EPE CTCXXVV. OLCE EPLCP.OV • 
.l.'{3 ,., 
~EP E KCXr. ELPCXVav, 

These lines inevitably recall the puzzlingly corrupt abnormal lines of 
Sappho (104 L.P.), which have troubled critics and appealed to poets. 

"E '.J. ' ".l.' \ , ,~ • A" C1TEpE 1TCXJITCX ~EPWV OCCX ~(x£VO/UC ECKEOCXC VWC. 

t.l. ' "".l. ' 1'.J. ' "t' A~ ~EPELC OLV. ~EpELC cxr.ycx. ~EPELC CX1TV P.CXTEpt 1TCXr.OCX. 

That Callimachus had these lines in mind would seem to be guaranteed 
by the fact that in the dramatic opening of the hymn the appearance of 
Hesperus is emphatically referred to (7-8). 

Callimachus is not, in fact, the first to have made poetic allusion to 
these Sapphic lines. In fr.51 (PMG 396) Anacreon turns the anaphora 
to a different use:5 

m' '''~ .l." l' .,. A 

'¥Ep VUwp. ~Ep OWOV, W 1TCXL, 
.l. ' ~, '() ~ r, 
~EPE <0 > cxv EP.EVJlTCXC 7]P.LV 

.l.' " • ~\ CTE~CXVOVC. EVEtKOV. WC 07] 

1TpOC "EPWTCX 1TVKTaAt,W. 

The repetition of the verb is not, of course, remarkable, but the 
Similarity of pattern in the three passages is so striking as to seem to 
me to exclude coincidence. If the Sapphic lines were well enough 
known to have led Anacreon to imitate them, it may well be that the 
metrical problem which they present was a subject of scholarly 
discussion among Callimachus' Alexandrian contemporaries. On this 
supposition one might further suppose that his substitution of 4>lp{3E 

at the beginning of the two lines was intended as a sort of comment on 
the problem, a technique not unexampled in his poetry.6 It could also 
be that he was not unaware of the Anacreontic lines, since he varies 
the forms of 4>lpw with OlCE as Anacreon had done with €VEtKOV. 

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 

June, 1975 

5 I have followed the punctuation and orthography of B. Gentili, ed. Anacreon (Rome 
1958) fr.38, p.30. 

• Cf. R. pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford 1968) 139f.