Saying things takes time; writing things takes up lines. There is always a connection between the length of a verbal utterance (in time when spoken and in space when written) and what it seeks to describe. There is a certain connection between form and content. In the terms I will be using throughout this book, it is a relationship (as yet undefined) between poetic extent and poetic content. How was this relationship perceived in Graeco-Roman antiquity?
Part I focuses on number and counting as one way in which the interrelation of poetic extent and content was understood. Enumerations of poetry – whether of its length or its quantity – enabled an audience to conceptualise and develop an idea of what the appropriate interconnection might be between the ‘stuff’ that poems contain and the space that is needed to express it. Which is to say, counting becomes one aspect of articulating poetic criticism. My argument across the two chapters of Part I is that Graeco-Roman poets were well aware of the counting criticism that could be directed at their poetry and that they engage with counting as a form of criticism within their poems. Particularly significant is that programmatic statements of poetic principles and of aesthetics contain explicit appeals to counting. Poets incorporate counting and references to counting within their poetry as a means of pre-emptively negotiating the position of their own works and the work of others within the wider literary landscape. Enumeration, in short, plays an abiding role as a component of poets’ self-advertisement of their distinctiveness, novelty or traditionality.
The story begins in Chapter 1 with the Hellenistic poet Callimachus of Cyrene and the influential prologue to his catalogue poem, the Aetia. There, he is emphatic in raising the topic of counting as criticism, only to reject it as a viable means of poetic judgement. In this chapter, I set out the argument of the passage more clearly in relation to poetic enumeration, its connection (implicit and explicit) to earlier scenes of criticism and the kind of poetic appreciation that Callimachus ultimately proposes. In place of enumerative strategies for assessing poetry, Callimachus proposes evaluating poetry’s intellectual value, its σοφία (sophia, ‘wisdom’). I then trace the later influence of this passage and how subsequent poets responded to Callimachus’ rejection of counting and introduction of a criterion that does not involve numerical measure. It will become clear that while they are attuned to Callimachus’ emphasis on appraising poetry rather by its refined intellectual calibre, they nevertheless continue to raise and enact enumerative accounts of others’ work and of their own. Counting as an evaluative tool is certainly being rejected by these poets, but – paradoxically – their compositions equally evidence that it has become part of the Graeco-Roman discourse on poetic criticism.
Nowhere is this paradox developed more starkly than in the isopsephic epigrams of Leonides of Alexandria, the focus of Chapter 2. His poems take advantage of Greek letters’ ability to signify numbers and be read as units, tens and hundreds. When the letters in his poems are interpreted as numbers, they yield couplets of equal numerical value. He makes a radical intervention into the debate about the validity of counting criticism by creating epigrams which are quite literally textual tallies. This compositional strategy is no marginal ornament to Leonides’ otherwise accomplished poetry, a literary game to be observed then ignored. Leonides’ epigrams, I demonstrate for the first time, actively engage with Callimachean poetics – in the Aetia and elsewhere – in arguing for the sophistication, the sophia, that emerges from a poetry which can be counted in the most literal sense. For all that Callimachus sought to make a justifiable and clear distinction between the world of numbers and the world of poetry, then, I show over the course of Part I that engaging with counting as a form of criticism was a poetic habit that proved difficult to kick.
In this chapter I examine a poem by Callimachus and its legacy in Graeco-Roman poetry. Callimachus was a prolific Hellenistic author of poetry as well as prose. He was a voracious reader of earlier literature and versatile in his composition of new works, composing epigrams, hymns, iambics, lyric poems, an epyllion (miniature epic) and a catalogue elegy, all innovative in generic form and intellectual content. His poetry had a considerable impact on Augustan Latin poets, as did his cataloguing efforts at the Library of Alexandria on literary history and bibliography. There is no doubt that he is an important and influential poet.Footnote 1 My intention in this chapter is to demonstrate that one undervalued strand of this literary heritage is his involvement in the question of the place of number and counting in the literary evaluation of Greek, and so subsequently Roman, poetry.
This chapter begins by analysing the opening lines of Callimachus’ Aetia, in which he addresses the Telchines and their criticism of his poetry and offers a response that outlines his own position. The Reply to the Telchines constitutes a significant and extended engagement with Hellenistic literary currents. It was well known, valued and imitated in antiquity, and it has been the focus of considerable modern scholarship.Footnote 2 My contribution to the interpretation of these heavily commented-upon lines will be to emphasise the presence of number and counting. I study both Callimachus’ characterisation of the Telchines’ attack and his response to their criticism, with the aim of showing that the Reply’s debate about poetic form and content can be better understood by appreciating the role of counting. This will involve first looking back to depictions of poetic criticism that Callimachus has inherited, and more specifically to the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs, in order to more clearly appreciate his representation of the Telchines as critics and what their counting implied. I then discuss Callimachus’ second address to the Telchines later in the Reply and demonstrate how his account of Apollo’s advice to him as a youth is intended to replace length as a criterion with a measure of poetry that does not require number. One important aim of the Reply, in short, is Callimachus’ attempt to extricate his poetry from criticism based on counting.
Having reappraised Callimachus’ engagement with number and counting, I then focus on a series of further Greek and Latin works that follow Callimachus in his resistance to counting as a criterion of judgement, but that also develop their anti-numerical stance in new contexts. I first examine an epigram by Antipater of Sidon praising the poet Erinna and her style. In describing Erinna, I show, his epigram hews close to Callimachus and his emphasis on the non-numerical measure of sophia for poetry instead of numerical length. Antipater’s rhetorical use of counting within the epigram, however, adds to the Callimachean aspects. He underscores that when poems are produced in large quantities, particularly short forms like epigram, their sheer multiplicity precludes an appraisal in any other terms than the numerical, which leads to their inevitable neglect. An excessive number of poems can be just as bad as a poem of excessive length: counting, Antipater implies, is helpful for neither.
I turn in the third section to select Roman receptions of Callimachus’ engagement with counting. From an analysis of poems 1, 5 and 7 in Catullus’ collection, it will become clear that Callimachus’ stance with regards to counting as a form of criticism remained a salient intertext. Catullus moves from employing enumeration as a form of self-positioning in the clearly programmatic c. 1, towards the performative use of counting in cc. 5 and 7 in order to (attempt to) reject criticism as a cultural practice in its entirety. Catullus turns the critics’ tool against them. Later poets were not so brazen. An epigram by Martial with which I conclude the chapter shows that criticism could (be imagined to) extend to the number of books of poetry as well as the number of poems or verses. Martial’s response, alluding to Roman predecessors rather more than to Callimachus, nevertheless fits neatly into this tradition as he attempts to square the Callimachean rejection of measuring poetry with the question, raised already by Antipater, of how many poems are too many. What I hope will become clear over the course of this chapter is that Greek and Roman poets found it important to follow Callimachus’ lead and to avoid critics counting up their compositions.
1.1 Counting in Callimachus’ Reply to the Telchines
Callimachus begins his Aetia, or one edition of it at least,Footnote 3 by giving voice to his critics, whom he represents as the Telchines, dwarf-like Rhodian metalworkers:
Often the Telchines mutter against me, against my poetry, who, ignorant of the Muse, were not born as her friend, because I did not complete one single continuous song (on the glory of?) kings … in many thousands of lines or on … heroes, but turn around my epos a little like a child, although the ten-count of my years is not small. I in turn say this to the Telchines: ‘tribe, well able to waste away your own liver … of a few lines’Footnote 4
Regardless whether the Telchines represent historical individuals, in the poem they serve as a foil for Callimachus to introduce his own approach to poetry.Footnote 5 My interest here is the constellation of numerical terms which cluster in the opening lines and characterise aspects of the Telchines’ literary criteria and concomitantly mark out Callimachus’ lack of adherence to them. Callimachus’ claim that the Telchines desired a single poem in many thousands of lines constitutes the core of my focus. It has been at the centre of considerable debate. While Callimachus’ critics, he says, grumble at him for not composing something which sounds very much like epic, Alan Cameron argues forcefully that at issue in the prologue was not Hellenistic epic, either mythological or historical, but the different styles of contemporary elegy.Footnote 6 Such a proposal is supported by Callimachus’ subsequent contrast of elegiac poets and their works (9–12; Mimnermus, Philetas, Antimachus(?)). The suggestion is weakened, however, by the emphasis on kings and heroes and the fact that ‘[k]ings, both contemporary and mythic, and heroes figure in virtually every fragment’.Footnote 7 If the Telchines criticise Callimachus’ poem for its focus on kings and heroes it is not likely to be a representative of the kind of elegiac poetry that he alludes to in the following lines. It should be observed, though, that the Reply deals with a range of concerns at once – size (9–16), novelty (25–8) and aurality (29–34) – which are all represented as in some way responding to the four lines of criticism. There is an obvious mismatch between the brief criticism of the Telchines and Callimachus’ much more extended response. Instead of seeing any one section of the response mapping directly and easily on to the Telchines’ critiques, there is more to be gained by seeing their criticism as misguided because of the very framework within which it operates and then seeing Callimachus replace as well as reject and reformulate their criteria. My argument is that this is precisely what Callimachus does in the case of numerical criticism. By spotlighting first the literary history of the Telchines’ enumeration and then setting it alongside more well-established aspects of Callimachus’ programme, I wish to show how he deconstructs the idea of poetic judgement as a form of numerical measurement which can be applied to a poem’s extent and then compared with its content. Instead he articulates a way of thinking about poetic form and content beyond enumeration.
1.1.1 Aristophanes’ Frogs and Models of Counting Criticism
In Aristophanes’ Frogs, Dionysus ventures to the underworld with the intention of retrieving Euripides, yet on arrival at Pluto’s house it transpires that Euripides has challenged Aeschylus’ claim to be the best tragedian. The ensuing poetic contest between Euripides and Aeschylus sees the two playwrights exchange representative verses from their plays as well as critique and attempt to undermine each other’s poetic styles. The decision Dionysus must make at the end is to choose whomever he considers to be the tragedian best equipped to save Athens, and he chooses Aeschylus. The contest was important for the later tradition not just because of the focus on explicit poetic judgement within poetry itself, but also because of the range of criticism used to appraise and evaluate the tragedians’ works. As has long been observed, the contest was one of a number of key intertexts for Callimachus in the Reply. He reconfigures those many images of poetry and its evaluative criteria in staging his own contest with, and response to, the Telchines.Footnote 8
An underexplored aspect of the Frogs is the audience or critic as a counter of poetry. After each of the tragedians has outlined their own poetic credo, defended their verbal art and rubbished their opponent (907–1118), Euripides and Aeschylus turn to criticising lines from each other’s prologues, with Dionysus as arbiter. When Aeschylus recites the opening of the Oresteia, Dionysus asks Euripides what aspects there are to criticise.
ΕΥ: πλεῖν ἢ δώδεκα.
ΔΙ: ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ πάντα ταῦτά γ᾽ ἔστ᾽ ἀλλ᾽ ἢ τρία.
ΕΥ: ἔχει δ᾽ ἕκαστον εἴκοσίν γ᾽ ἁμαρτίας.
ΔΙ: Αἰσχύλε παραινῶ σοι σιωπᾶν: εἰ δὲ μή,
πρὸς τρισὶν ἰαμβείοισι προσοφείλων φανεῖ.Footnote 9
Eur: More than twelve.
Dion: But all of that is not more than three lines long!
Eur: And each one has twenty errors.
Dion: Aeschylus, I advise you keep quiet. If you don’t, you’ll stand to owe more than three iambic linesFootnote 10
Presenting himself as an arch-investigator, Euripides tallies up the things which can be criticised and, when Dionysus notes that only three lines have been given, he accounts more specifically the line-to-mistake ratio. Euripides later enacts a different accounting of Aeschylus’ plays: εἰς ἓν γὰρ αὐτοῦ πάντα τὰ μέλη ξυντεμῶ (‘I will reduce all his lyrics into one [sort]’, 1262); Euripides shows that all Aeschylus’ lyrics are based on the same metrical pattern. In response, Dionysus joins in with the counting: καὶ μὴν λογιοῦμαι ταῦτα τῶν ψήφων λαβών (‘and indeed I will take some pebbles and reckon them’, 1263). Euripides will go on also to question the logic of Aeschylus’ plays (1139–50) and even critique the collocation of verbs (1152–7). Aeschylus’ criticism of Euripidean prologues, by contrast, is not concerned with counting mistakes or metrical patterns; he instead appends the bathetic ‘[he] lost his little oil flask’ (ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν, 1208, 1213, 1219, 1226, 1233, 1238, 1241) to Euripidean lines. It no doubt made the audience laugh, but it is a playful undermining of his poetry rather than a poetic nitpicking. Aeschylus did have specific criticisms of Euripides earlier, such as his debasement of the art and the presentation of unworthy models for the audience (1013–17, 1039–44), but when particular lines become the focus, he does not bring the same pedantic level of scrutiny as Euripides. Hellenistic poets were well versed in contemporary literary scholarship and composed their poems in such a way as to reflect literary critical interests.Footnote 11 From a later standpoint, Euripides’ ‘setting of reason and inquiry into the poetic art’ (λογισμὸν ἐνθεὶς τῇ τέχνῃ | καὶ σκέψιν, 973–4) that was aimed at getting the audience to examine their household organisation more thoroughly (975–9) could be seen to present one model of Hellenistic poetic practices.Footnote 12
The final weighing of Aeschylean and Euripidean verses presents an enumerative appraisal of poetry from a different perspective. Euripides chooses a ‘heavy’ line from his Meleager (531 TrGF), an ‘iron-heavy club’ (σιδηροβριθές … ξύλον, 1402), while Aeschylus chooses a battle line from his Glaucus Potnieus (38.1 TrGF) with two uses of polyptoton: ‘for chariot upon chariot and corpse upon corpse’ (ἐφ’ ἅρματος γὰρ ἅρμα καὶ νεκρῷ νεκρός, 1403). Dionysus, no doubt influenced by Euripides’ counting, reduces Aeschylus’ polyptota into numbers: ‘He put in two chariots and two corpses, which even a hundred Egyptians could not lift’ (δύ’ ἅρματ’ εἰσέθηκε καὶ νεκρὼ δύο | οὓς οὐκ ἂν ἄραιντ’ οὐδ’ ἑκατὸν Αἰγύπτιοι, 1405–6). This supposed arbiter of the contest keeps straying into a rather strict numerical approach to poetic appreciations.Footnote 13 Aeschylus rejects this method; Euripides could throw himself, his family and all his books on the scales (1407–9), all Aeschylus needs is ‘two lines’ (δύ’ ἔπη, 1410). It is not that Aeschylus is not interested in his verses being evaluated; indeed, he is eager for the weighing to occur since he sees it as the decisive form of judgement (1366–7). Rather, he is making the point that the weight of poetry is not equivalent to its verses, however many there are and however many numbers they are stuffed with. He implies instead that the weight comes from their style. Despite this form of measurement clearly favouring Aeschylus and his weighty words in the Frogs – there is no tool for measuring ‘lightness’ … – it is not ultimately the basis on which the winner is chosen. It is the poets’ respective advice and value to the polis which ultimately informs Dionysus’ decision (1417–23). Consequently, the respective success of their poetry is defined neither against Euripides’ counting up of errors nor against Aeschylus’ weighing. These two forms of criticism can be applied to poetry but are not represented as conclusive within the logic of the play.
The contest in the Frogs thus provides Callimachus with two forms of poetic measuring: a weighing and a counting. As with other contrasts between Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ judgements in the Frogs, however, the incorporation of these two forms of criticism into Callimachus’ prologue is not straightforward. Callimachus addresses three contrasting criteria that can also be observed in the Frogs: poetic fatness versus thinness,Footnote 14 sonic contrastsFootnote 15 and the measurement of poetry.Footnote 16 The contrast in the Reply between Callimachus and what the Telchines hoped for broadly draws on the distinctions between Euripides and Aeschylus as poets, the one being bloated and bombastic, the other streamline and subtle. There is, though, no consistency in the way the contrasts in Frogs map on to those in the Reply. Elsewhere in the prologue, Callimachus intertwines numerous images and intertexts, meaning that simple polarities of poetic style are undermined. For example, in contrast to the clear cicada there is the braying sound of the ass (30–1) but there is also the thundering of Zeus, which is not obviously negative or positive (20). Similarly, the paths that Callimachus is advised to follow are not wide but both untrodden and narrow (27–8). This seems to be used to direct him to novelty of subject matter, but the contrast of wide and narrow also has stylistic connotation.Footnote 17 In engaging with earlier conceptions of poetry, he is often seeking to reconcile them or expose their contradictions at the same time as he is forging an image of his poetry’s own uniqueness.
Euripides’ counting and Aeschylus’ weighing as a contrasting pair of scenes that address the measuring of poetry are likewise cross-fertilised in the Reply to characterise both Callimachus’ poetry and the Telchines’ poetic preferences. On the one hand, it is Euripides together with his fellow accountant Dionysus who considers the numerical mode to be a (meaningful) form of criticism. This is the position of the Telchines in the opening lines when they show their concern for the number of verses that Callimachus has composed. On the other hand, it is Aeschylus who wishes for his and Euripides’ poetry to be judged in terms of their weightiness – a challenge that cannot help but favour Aeschylus. For Callimachus too, poems can be weighed against each other. Yet, in contrast to the weighing in Frogs, it is a slender work that paradoxically outweighs the larger. Callimachus states: ἀλλὰ καθέλκει | … πολὺ τὴν μακρὴν ὄμπνια Θεσμοφόρος (‘But the nourishing Lawgiver by far outweighs the long …’, fr. 1.9–10 Harder). While much is unclear in these fragmentary lines, on the basis of the scholium identifying a reference to a poem by Philetas in these verses (fr. 1b.12–15 Harder), it is probable that the ‘nourishing Lawgiver’, an epithet of Demeter, refers to Philetas’ Demeter. On the same basis, it is also probable that the Demeter was meant to be a short poem that outweighed some longer poem, either by Philetas or by another poet altogether.Footnote 18 Poetry which is λεπτός (leptos, ‘slender’) like Euripides’ words can succeed in a weighing contest just as Aeschylus’ two lines would. Callimachus rejects Euripides’ counting strategy for poetic evaluation and uses instead the idea of weighing as Aeschylus had suggested, but he also values slender Euripidean-style poetry rather than longer compositions. This adds a further level to the Reply’s reception of Aristophanes’ multiple conceptions of literary criticism in the Frogs. Callimachus may (in general) take over his poetic self-representation from the figure of Euripides, but in talking about the Demeter he utilises the mode of poetic judgement which was used by, and favoured, Aeschylus.
In seeking to elucidate this reconfiguration of Euripidean and Aeschylean poetic characterisations, Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens have appealed to historical context. Callimachus’ modification of the judgement that the weightiest wins highlights an interest in a different kind of wisdom or knowledge, where the subtle art of persuasion trumps the destructive art of warfare, a shift that they see as related to the political circumstances of the Ptolemaic state.Footnote 19 To my mind, the rejection of Euripides’ counting and modification of Aeschylus’ weighing together find an explanation much closer to home. Callimachus as a scholar was more than familiar with an enumerative approach to literary works. Organising the Alexandrian Library’s collection, he produced the Pinakes, a list which gave an account of its holdings. He was concerned with placing texts into generic categories but also with the number of lines in a text. It was foundational for later bibliographical writings, although it survives only in fragments.Footnote 20 The form of entries is as follows:
τοῦ Χαιρεφῶντος καὶ σύγγραμμα ἀναγράφει Καλλίμαχος ἐν τῷ Παντοδαπῶν Πίνακι γράφων οὕτως· δεῖπνα ὅσοι ἔγραψαν· Χαιρεφῶν Κυρηβίωνι. εἶθ᾿ ἑξῆς τὴν ἀρχὴν ὑπέθηκεν· “ἐπειδή μοι πολλάκις ἐπέστειλας.” στίχων τοεʹ.
Callimachus also lists a prose treatise by Chaerephon in his Catalogue of Miscellaneous Works, writing as follows: Authors of descriptions of dinner parties: Chaerephon to Bran [the nickname of a parasite called Epicrates]. Then immediately afterward he appends its opening words: ‘Since you often wrote to me’. 375 lines of text.
Broadly speaking, this form of categorising influenced how genres were defined, making categorical pronouncements regarding which list a work should be written upon. Since it was placed in the catalogue of miscellaneous works, Chaerephon’s treatise was a composition that was hard to pin down generically. In creating the Pinakes, importantly, Callimachus pioneered the consistent and systematic counting up of lines. This makes the Reply all the more surprising: he characterises the Telchines as having the same enumerative habit which he himself had practised in the creation of the Pinakes.
It can be nothing but purposeful that a poet who recorded prologues and counted lines chose to respond in his prologue to an alleged interest in a poem’s number of lines. This can best be explained as a conflict between poetic composition and criticism. Counting may well make sense in the context of the Alexandrian Library, where texts were being inventoried, catalogued and stored. It makes less sense for a composing poet. Later sources record that in the generation before Callimachus, Choerilus of Iasus in the retinue of Alexander was notorious for selling his verses for a fixed price per line (SH 333). Callimachus may thus have had something to prove, both because his patron was a Macedonian monarch and because his ‘day job’ was listing books and counting up the lines of texts. He may have wanted to emphasise that composition of poetry should not be ‘by the line’ either because of the financial reward from rulers or because of bibliographic practice. His caricature of the Telchines’ counting represents them as making this precise mistake, of taking counting to be a tool of criticism rather than a bibliographic feature. Whereas Callimachus has a tendency in the Reply to align himself with Euripides’ representation in Frogs – for example, in the slender, winged and airy nature of his poetry (cf. fr. 1.32–4 Harder and 1388, 1396)Footnote 21 – his deviation in respect of Euripides’ counting makes it clear that as a poet he pays no heed to the number of verses, nor does he see it as an important criterion.
In responding to the Telchines’ enumerative criticism, as Acosta-Hughes and Stephens have demonstrated, Callimachus draws on various images from earlier poetry through which poets articulated their poetics: his reference to the battle of the pygmies and the cranes comes from the Iliad (3.3–6; cf. fr. 1.13–14); the battle of the Medes and Massagetae, from an epic by Choerilus of Samos (SH 317; cf. fr. 1.15–16); the wagon and the narrow path, from Pindar (Paean 7b.11–12); the fable of the ass and the cicada, from Aesop (e.g. 184 Perry; cf. fr. 1.29–34); and Aetna and Enceladus, from Euripides (Heracles 638–40; cf. fr. 1.35–6).Footnote 22 Whereas the Telchines judge using the bibliographic tool that Callimachus had invented for the Library, Callimachus himself advances an approach to poetry based on its imagery and on the terms in which poets themselves had viewed their works. The Telchines, since they are ‘no friend of the Muse’ (fr. 1.2), understand and appreciate poetry through a numerical criterion alone and not as a poetically and culturally generative process.Footnote 23 When it comes to his use of poetic images as well as his rejection of number in this Prologue, Callimachus is very much on the side of the poets. This aspect of the Reply clarifies Callimachus’ reworking of Aeschylus’ weighing alongside the rejection of the Telchines’ counting which is so reminiscent of Euripides in Frogs. Despite his wish to have their respective verses weighed up, as I outlined above, Aeschylus corrects Euripides’ assumption that the number, or numerical content, of the verses correlates with their weight. Aeschylus defines this poetic weighing as a judgement that does not correspond to the traditional measuring and numbering of an object’s weight when set on a balance. In arguing against the application of bibliographic practice to poetic appreciation, Aristophanes’ Frogs provides Callimachus with a model of counting criticism in Euripides but also with a model for measuring the value of a poem in a way that does not involve number.
1.1.2 Apollo’s Advice and a New Measure of sophia
The opening lines of the Reply, then, see Callimachus distance himself from his bibliographical practice in the Pinakes and project counting as a form of literary criticism on to the figure of the Telchines. The poem by Philetas outweighing the longer poem in verses 9–11 presents in response a form of literary judgement that may seem to be related to measure but which does not involve enumeration.
A second address to the Telchines later in the Reply resumes the question of poetic form and how it ought to be judged. Here, Callimachus defines more clearly and positively the criterion he sees as the correct kind of poetic judgement; it is one where counting plays no part.
Be off, destructive breed of Bascania, and hereafter judge cleverness by craft, not by the Persian schoinos. Do not expect a loud thundering song to be born from me. For when I put a writing-tablet on my knees for the first time Apollo Lycius said to me: ‘… poet, feed the sacrificial animal so that it becomes as fat as possible, but, my dear fellow, keep the Muse slender’.
Callimachus wishes to get away from the Telchines as critics and forge a new means of conceptualising poetic value, drawing on his patron god Apollo for support in the endeavour. This further characterisation of the Telchines implies that they are more interested in measure and extent than enumeration per se, although the two are of course connected. The Telchines’ judgement is again of the same kind as Euripides’ in Frogs. Euripides is a counting critic, but he also presents himself as the poet who taught the Athenians ‘the introduction of subtle rulers and the set-squarings of words’ (λεπτῶν τε κανόνων εἰσβολὰς ἐπῶν τε γωνιασμούς, 956). The implication of Callimachus’ verses, that the Telchines would use the Persian schoinos, can be interpreted in two ways: as condemning poetic judgement that is interested in quantity alone, or that the schoinos, which is many stadia long, is condemned because of its excessive length. The Telchines are introduced in the Reply as interested in ‘continuous’ poems of ‘thousands’ of lines, which, in addition to representing them as interested in an enumerative form of poetic appreciation, suggests a focus on extremes of extent. The couplet following the mention of the schoinos in the above passage (19–20) provides some help in dealing with these two options. While Annette Harder seems to rule out an association between Zeus and Homer, I would instead follow those who see these lines as Callimachus distancing his own poetry from the grandeur of Homeric epic, without any negative implication for the thundering of Zeus or the Homeric style.Footnote 24 Such an interpretation, moreover, helps explain the progression of Callimachus’ argument. At 17–18 there is a command to replace a criterion of measure with that of sophia. If the schoinos is bad because it is both a criterion of extent and one which is excessive, then the couplet rejecting thundering (19–20) deals with the imagined excessive quality of the poetry that the Telchines value, such as long epics, while the following four lines (21–4) deal with extent as a criterion per se by employing the language of fatness and thinness.
The image of fat and thin sacrifices seems also to have the contest in Frogs in mind, recalling Euripides’ mention of inheriting the bloated τέχνη (technê, ‘art’) of tragedy from Aeschylus, which he then thins out (941). Callimachus is likewise thinking about his poetic practice and the type of qualities he wishes to embody when he describes the Muse that he has been instructed to cultivate as thin. Although it may initially appear that this contrast of fat and thin sacrifices is concerned with numerical measure, it is important to understand that this mention of a ‘slender Muse’ follows on from the discussion of his preference for poetry to be judged by technê. The γάρ at line 21 is explanatory: his promotion of poetic judgement not beholden to measure in 17–20 is because he cultivates a ‘slender Muse’ following Apollo’s advice given at 21–4. In which case, slenderness cannot be a criterion susceptible to numerical measuring (as, for example, length and weight are), since this would make for a confused connection between the advice which Apollo gave the poet in his youth and Callimachus’ immediately preceding dismissal of the schoinos as a criterion in favour of technê: his rejection of enumerative criticism would have arisen from the god’s promotion of a numerically measurable aesthetic quality.Footnote 25 The resulting sense would be something like, ‘do not judge poetry by length … although Apollo told me to cultivate a countable Muse’. The fact that sacrifices should be fat and poems slender, however, is not to say that the relationship between form and content should be abandoned, despite numerical measurement no longer being a criterion.
A roughly contemporary passage illuminates Callimachus’ thinking, since it too extracts enumeration from the critics’ toolkit (at least as an absolute concept) and has rather a speaker or poet’s intellectual ability in its sights:
Consider long-winded the man who says not even one of the things which is necessary – even when he says two syllables – but consider not to be long-winded the one who speaks well – even if he speaks very many things and for a long time. Take Homer as evidence of this; for he has written tens of thousands of lines for us, but not one person has said that Homer is long-winded.
This is a fragment of the comic poet Philemon, active in the decades preceding and following the start of the third century bce. Since it is recorded by Stobaeus (fifth century ce) in his collection of excerpts (his Anthology), neither a secure context for the lines nor the identity of the speaker can be ascertained. As a fragment from a comic work aimed for the stage, though, these lines provide additional evidence for a debate about the interrelation of poetic content and extent, beyond the elite, intellectual circle for which Callimachus was writing. Quite different from what Callimachus alleges the Telchines have to say about a ‘single’ poem in many lines, the contrast of the one and the many in Philemon playfully shifts from someone speaking at length but not saying a single important thing to Homer as someone who has written many thousands of lines but is not called long-winded by a single person. Still, Philemon’s passage is important for understanding the articulation of Callimachus’ poetic credo. In short: enumeration for the speaker is beside the point. Even if one speaks few and countable utterances (δύ’ εἴπῃ συλλαβάς), if they do not say ‘necessary’ or ‘essential’ things (τῶν δεόντων) then they ought to be considered long-winded.Footnote 26 The speaker is not concerned with brevity, then, as Alan Cameron suggests in his important discussion of the passage, but is promoting a compact relationship between intellectual import and length, without making length (or indeed extreme brevity) a criterion per se.Footnote 27 The focus on ‘not-long-windedness’ in this fragment pushes poetic judgement beyond measurement precisely by making the ‘two words’ or ‘thousand lines’ ultimately irrelevant polar opposites. Callimachus’ sophia operates in the same way as Philemon’s ‘necessary things’: it is the nature and importance of the content which dictates its judgement: ‘[W]hat matters is technê, “poetic craft”, however long the poem.’Footnote 28 Thus, all too well aware of the reductive potential of numbers, Callimachus in the Reply develops technê as a measure of poetry that does not require number. The measure is technê, and it is an indication of sophia. σοφία (‘wisdom’, ‘cleverness’) is an intellectual quality of a work that is dependent on its content and far more subjective than counting; to characterise a poem numerically would be precisely to ignore its imagery and language. Callimachus places poetic skill beyond the realm of the accountable and thus beyond the reach of the Telchines and their poetic tallying. He may be measuring up literature in the Library, but his Muse is not susceptible to mathematical measurement.
Callimachus’ championing of a criterion of poetic value that does not reduce poetry to the numerically measurable demands a nuancing of the Telchines’ criticism and Callimachus’ response. Given that Callimachus will go on to reject length as a criterion altogether and focus instead on technê and the sophia it produces, it makes little sense to see his first response to the Telchines’ enumerative approach as also being interested in absolute length. Unfortunately, the beginning of Callimachus’ response, and especially the start of line 9, is irretrievable. Either a person or a poem could be being described as ὀλιγόστιχος (‘of a few lines’), and there is a possibility that a negative adverb (‘X is not of few lines’) or even a conditional conjunction (‘if X was of few lines’) has been lost in the lacuna. The surest information, but by no means correct, is the comment of the scholiast: ‘they criticise him because of the meagreness of his poems and because no length …’ (με]μφομ(έν)ο[ι]ς αὐτοῦ τὸ κάτισ̣[χνον τῶν ποιη]μάτ(ων) κ(αὶ) ὅτι οὐχὶ μῆ̣κος, fr. 1b.8–9 Harder). The fact that the scholiast understands the Telchines to be making two distinct points, that his poems are ‘meagre’ and that they lack a certain ‘length’, means that he cannot be referring to the content of lines 3–4 alone, where the Telchines’ interest is only in length.Footnote 29 On this basis, I consider ὀλιγόστιχος to refer to a work by Callimachus – or less probably to Callimachus himselfFootnote 30 – which does not live up to the Telchines’ expectations, but which verses 9–12 effectively defend by comparanda, not as a work of insufficient length and meagre poetic content, but as a short work that nevertheless has great poetic ‘weight’. In other words, Callimachus avoids perpetuating the Telchines’ critical frame of reference and thinking of ὀλιγόστιχος as a solely enumerative term and argues in 9–12 that works that are ὀλιγόστιχος can be brief but poetically powerful. Diogenes Laertius’ later use of the term evidences a similar strategy. When talking about Herillus of Carthage’s books, he comments that they are ὀλιγόστιχα and δυνάμεως δὲ μεστά (‘full of force’, 7.165). Again, what is important is the extension in relation to content; few lines does not necessarily imply meagre content.
What Callimachus is doing in the Reply then is articulating an aesthetics of scale. In an illuminating work, Jim Porter deals with the big question of Hellenistic poetry’s concept of λεπτότης (‘fineness’, ‘delicacy’), encapsulated by Callimachus himself with the declaration that ‘a big book is big evil’ (Καλλίμαχος ὁ γραμματικὸς τὸ μέγα βιβλίον ἴσον ἔλεγεν εἶναι τῷ μεγάλῳ κακῷ, fr. 465 Pf. = Ath. 3.72a) and with his criticism of Antimachus’ Lyde as ‘a fat poem and not lucid’ (Λύδη καὶ παχὺ γράμμα καὶ οὐ τορόν, fr. 398 Pf.). Porter convincingly proposes that ‘smallness’ as an aesthetic criterion, in both Hellenistic art and poetry, is only one side of the coin. Instead, he reads a number of Hellenistic works as operating an ‘organized aesthetic of contrastive opposites’: the large set against the small.Footnote 31 Posidippus’ epigrams on stones set finely wrought gems (e.g. 3–5 AB) against cyclopean boulders (19 AB), while Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Idyll 17) overflows with hyperbole in a short compass. Certainly, I am not the first to propose that Callimachus’ wider outlook involves an aesthetics of scale.Footnote 32 Yet what I hope to have outlined here is that his focus on scale, on the variable relationship between extent and content, must be understood to go hand in hand with his rejection of counting criticism in the Reply. Counting has the worrying ability to reduce poems to their numerical aspects. Indeed, in the Pinakes works are presented as being defined merely by a generic label, an opening line and a sum of lines.Footnote 33 This is a scaling down that could diminish the profile of a poetic work and its intellectual content. By doing away with numerical measure altogether and advocating for technê as the key criterion, Callimachus presents his own poetry (and those predecessors mentioned at 9–12) as enacting an aesthetics of scale where the effective contrast is between the (relatively) short compass of poems and their ability to be weighty and contain a great amount of sophia. Indeed, this sophia is not only explicitly theorised in the Reply but also demonstrated by the densely allusive texture of his verses. His response to the Telchines draws on the entire arsenal of poetic tradition. This exemplifies what a great amount of sophia in only a few lines might look like: his own complex matrix of images cannot simply be sized up or scaled down by numbers.
1.2 Erinna and the Epigrammatists
In the prologue to arguably his most famous poem, Callimachus thus makes a case for extracting enumeration from the practice of poetic criticism. What was the impact of his argument? In this section, I look at a single epigram by Antipater of Sidon, written as an epitaph for the poet Erinna, who is commonly dated to the late fifth or fourth century.Footnote 34 I show that Antipater, who was active roughly a century after Callimachus, has observed his aesthetics of scale and redeploys it in an equally polemic context to praise Erinna and her work.Footnote 35 I propose, moreover, that Antipater tailors Callimachus’ concern with numerical forms of poetic judgement to the specific nature of Erinna’s Distaff, a short hexameter lament, which is compared with the output of epigrammatists. In so doing, he expands the range of numerical criticism that one could apply to poetry to cover also the number of compositions (as well as the extent of individual compositions) and in response develops further imagery to support a poetic criticism without number that applies to the number of compositions. Callimachus’ crusade against counting is being adapted to new contexts and criticisms.
Erinna was famous for having composed the Distaff, a 300-line poem which develops traditions of women’s lament within the hexametrical poetic form (SH 401). She appears to speak in her own voice as she recalls childhood experiences that she shared with her girlfriend Baucis, whose premature death – perhaps shortly after her marriage (cf. 2 HE = AP 7.712) – Erinna subsequently laments. The distaff of the title appears within the text as an object upon which Erinna gazes (SH 401.44); it may have been a gift given to Baucis (cf. Theoc. Id. 28), or it may represent the work of spinning, which is all that is left for Erinna to do. She was the subject of numerous epigrams in the Hellenistic and Imperial period, and a number of those ascribed to Erinna may well be later imitations of, and homages to, her style.Footnote 36 Antipater of Sidon’s epigram is one of the longer epigrams in praise of Erinna and undoubtedly the most complex in terms of its combination of images.
Erinna was of few words and not verbose in her songs, but this little epos has the Muse as its lot. For she had not failed to gain a memorial nor is she hindered by the shading wing of black night. But, stranger, we innumerable myriads of young poets, heaped, fade into oblivion. The small song of the swan is better than the cawing of jackdaws spreading out through the spring clouds.Footnote 37
The poem is highly structured. The first couplet characterises Erinna and her work. The second describes the fortune of her work’s afterlife. The third contrasts this fortune with the fortune of other poets. The fourth explains this comparison by analogy to the different sounds of the swan and the jackdaw. The first and the third couplet, to which I will soon turn, address matters of measurement. The second and fourth, by contrast, combine avian and meteoric images: black night and dark wings in the second, the croaking of the jackdaw that spreads through the clouds in the fourth. So too, the central couplets are marked by the antonyms of memory and forgetfulness.
An epigram by Antiphanes (no later than the mid-first century ce) rails against grammarians who are ‘so proud of their Erinna, [and are] bitter and harsh barkers at Callimachus’ command’ (ἐπ’ Ἠρίννῃ δὲ κομῶντες | πικροὶ καὶ ξηροὶ Καλλιμάχου πρόκυνες, 9.3–4 GP = AP 11.322.3–4).Footnote 38 Antiphanes does not explain the connection between the two, but what is clear is that allegiance to Callimachus in literary critical matters could lead to an appreciation of Erinna.Footnote 39 Kathryn Gutzwiller has recently argued that Callimachus’ opening description of his poetic practice in the Reply – ‘I turn around my epos a little’ (ἔπος δ’ ἐπὶ τυτθὸν ἑλ[ίσσω, fr. 1.5 Harder) – should be understood as a weaving image – ‘I twist’ or ‘I spin my epos’ – and that a probable influence was Erinna and her Distaff. Although Callimachus does not name Erinna in any extant work, it is quite possible that this shared representation of poetic composition brought the two together in Antiphanes’ mind.Footnote 40 This seems also to be the case with Antipater of Sidon. On first reading, the epigram pointedly varies Callimachus’ language and focus in the Reply. The ‘foolish’ or ‘unpractised’ Telchines who acted as a foil for Callimachus’ poetics are matched by the youthful poets in Antipater who are dissolving into oblivion just as the Telchines had wasted away their own liver.Footnote 41 Verbally, Antipater’s τὸ βαιὸν ἔπος (‘little epos’) resembles Callimachus’ own ἔπος (fr. 1.5 Harder) and οὐ πολύμυθος (‘not verbose’) looks to invert a Callimachean usage of πολύμυθος (‘verbose’) to refer to the maiden Crethis in a funerary epigram (37.1 HE). The term ἔπος will hold a similar weight of reference when it is used by Crinagoras of Mytilene, late first century bce, in an epigram on Callimahus’ Hecale, in which it is identified as ‘this chiselled epos’ (τὸ τορευτὸν ἔπος τόδε, 11.1 GP). Antipater’s description of Erinna’s ‘little epos’ is modelled on Callimachus’ presentation of his own compositional practice in the Reply.Footnote 42
Two further epigrams exhibit similarities in the way they praise Erinna, but their differences are equally important.
This is the sweet labour of Erinna, but not great in extent, since it is by a maiden of nineteen years, but it is greater in power than many others. If death had not come quick to me, who would have had such a name?
This is the Lesbian honeycomb of Erinna. Though it is small, it is entirely mixed with honey from the Muses. Her three hundred lines are equal to Homer, though by a maiden of nineteen years. Either at the spindle in fear of her mother or at the loom she stood applying herself as a handmaid of the Muses. As much as Sappho is better than Erinna in lyric metres, this much in turn is Erinna better than Sappho in hexameters.
Asclepiades was writing in the early third century bce; the second epigram is of unknown date but is probably later.Footnote 43 Both epigrams, like Antipater’s, share a focus on the contrast between the extent of Erinna’s poem and its content. For Asclepiades, Erinna’s poem is short in compass but nevertheless ‘rather powerful’ or ‘forceful’ (in a similar way to Diogenes Laertius’ appraisal of Herillus’ books; see above). For the anonymous epigrammatist, although her work is small, it is even able to match up to Homer himself. Asclepiades’ poem shows, then, that an appreciation of her poetry as exhibiting a contrastive aesthetic of scale predated Antipater’s epigram. Yet an interest which is present in these two epigrams but absent from Antipater’s poem is quantification. Both give her age with the striking παρθενικῆς ἐννεακαιδεκέτευς fitted into the pentameter, presumably borrowed in 38 FGE from Asclepiades.Footnote 44 The anonymous epigram has counted up the lines of her Distaff for comparative purposes too: her verses are counted for a comparison with Homer (300) and her metre for a comparison with Sappho (ἐν ἑξαμέτροις, 38.8: lit. ‘in measures of six’). As Callimachus had caricatured in his Reply, the Telchines were concerned with the number of his verses but also with his age and the fact that his ‘decades are not few’ (fr. 1.6 Harder). In addition to the Callimachean style of his epigram, it is further significant that, unlike Asclepiades and the anonymous epigrammatist, Antipater does not focus on the quantifiable aspects of Erinna and her poetry despite the aesthetic of scale that all have identified in her work. Antipater rather follows Callimachus’ attitude as outlined in the Reply by not applying counting as a critical tool, even for positive evaluations. To Antipater, it would seem, the precise number of her years and the number of her verses are not relevant.
However, this is not to say that Antipater does not have a point to make about numbers in relation to poetry. As Alexander Sens has shown, in the first and final couplets Antipater draws on Antenor’s recollection of Menelaus’ and Odysseus’ rhetorical style in the Teichoscopia of Iliad 3.Footnote 45 Antipater’s παυροεπὴς … οὐ πολύμυθος echoes Homer’s description of Menelaus as ‘[speaking] few words but very clear, since he was not a man of many words’ (παῦρα μὲν ἀλλὰ μάλα λιγέως, ἐπεὶ οὐ πολύμυθος, Il. 3.214). His newly coined παυροεπὴς (‘of few words’), and Erinna as someone who does not ‘miss out on’ (ἤμβροτεν) a memorial, respond to the Homeric hapax describing Menelaus as ‘not missing the mark in speaking’ (ἀφαμαρτοεπής). The allusion to Menelaus suggests that Antipater followed Callimachus in espousing a critique that does not involve enumeration, but conceives of a relative relationship between content and extent that produces a contrastive aesthetic of scale: here, few but exacting words. In contrast to Menelaus, Odysseus in Antenor’s view speaks ‘words like winter snow’ (ἔπεα νιφάδεσσιν ἐοικότα χειμερίῃσιν, Il. 3.222): Homer also contains the seeds of a criticism interested in quantity.Footnote 46 The third couplet sees Antipater rework this contrast between Menelaus and Odysseus into a contrast between Erinna as a singular success and the innumerable epigrammatists. The Iliadic scene gives examples of how successful different characters are at speaking and the content of their speech, whereas the contrast in Antipater has become one in which a single work is set against numerous works. This change is occasioned, I would tentatively suggest, by the simile of Odysseus’ words being like winter snow in contradistinction to Menelaus as a speaker who is not verbose (οὐ πολύμυθος), where Odysseus’ many words have been taken to imply a multiplicity of works. A further concern for judging between different styles and their relative success, then, is not only the interrelation of content and extent in a way that exhibits one’s sophia, but also the quantity of poetic output per se.
Consequently, Antipater may seem to follow in the Telchines’ footsteps by making an evaluative statement by counting up and contrasting Erinna and the epigrammatists. However, his use of the adverb σωρηδόν points to a deeper sophistication. It brings to mind the philosophical sorites problem. Susanne Bobzien summarises it as follows:
‘Does one grain of wheat make a heap?’ – ‘No’. ‘Do two grains of wheat make a heap?’ – ‘No’ ‘Do three?’ – ‘No’. – etc. If the respondent switches from ‘no’ to ‘yes’ at some point, they are told that they imply that one grain can make a difference between heap and non-heap, and that that’s absurd. If the respondent keeps answering ‘no’, they’ll end up denying e.g. that 10,000 grains of wheat make a heap. And, they are told, that’s also absurd.Footnote 47
The problem is about definitions that have in-built vagueness; the image of the soros points to enumeration as wholly unsuitable for defining certain things. Indeed, the possibly fuzzy nature of counting, as well as numbers’ unsuitability for delimiting certain quantities, is already embedded in the paradoxical ἀναρίθμητοι … μυριάδες (58.5); μύριας can mean ‘ten thousand’ and ‘a countless amount’ (LSJ s.v. μυριάς A.I). Having the sorites problem in mind on reading this epigram both raises the question of how many new poets are enough and how many too much, at the same time as it suggests that enumeration is not a useful metric: these μυριάδες are ἀναρίθμητοι. Just as Callimachus ultimately argues for the pointlessness of simply counting up lines, so this implied soros focuses rather on the poets as a large multitude, not requiring – or susceptible to – enumeration.Footnote 48
An unmeasured multitude finds precedence elsewhere in Iliad 3. Antipater draws imagery from the opening of that book to depict the oblivion that Erinna might have faced. The opening similes depict the gathered Trojan contingent; the sound of their mass is ‘like a clamouring flock of cranes’ (ἠύτε περ κλαγγὴ γεράνων, Il. 3.3) and the resulting dust cloud from the marshalling is ‘a mist better than night for the thief’ (ὀμίχλην | … κλέπτῃ δέ τε νυκτὸς ἀμείνω, Il. 3.10–11). Birds and blotting out the sunlight go together. Antipater’s elliptical description that Erinna is ‘not constrained by the shadowy wing of black night’ brings together two aspects of this multitude, their flock-like behaviour and their ability to cast shadows. This image becomes more understandable on reaching the third and fourth couplets, where other poets are an immeasurable mass, whose poems spread like the cry of the jackdaws. A related simile from Iliad 17 clarifies the mention of the cry of the jackdaws in the epigram’s final couplet.
And as a cloud of starlings or jackdaws flies, shrieking cries of destruction, when they see a falcon coming on them that brings death to small birds, so before Aeneas and Hector fled the youths of the Achaeans, shrieking cries of destruction, and forgot all fighting.
The repetition of κεκλήγοντες in this passage highlights the change in circumstances from Iliad 3: this time it is the Achaeans’ turn to clamour. Antipater evokes the first line of the passage in his final couplet; the phrase ἠὲ κολοιῶν is found only here in this form and sedes in Homer, and κολοιός only appears once more in any form in Homer (at Il. 16.583). In a pointed contrast, the cloud (νέφος) of jackdaws has become the clouds through which they croak in Antipater’s poem. Following the logic of this simile, if other poets are the mass of jackdaws, then Erinna is the falcon; she can turn lesser poets to flight. Antipater’s mention of poetic oblivion (λήθῃ, 6), too, finds a model in the jackdaws, who forget about the lust of battle. This intertext provides a model for the swan qua bird achieving avian success over the host of other poets, whom Erinna leaves behind to be forgotten.Footnote 49
With the Teichoscopia in Book 3 already evoked by the epigram’s opening lines, what Erinna now appears to have avoided in the second couplet is the effects of the gathering Trojan host at the opening of that same Iliadic book; she meets no flock of cranes nor is overshadowed by their battle cloud. Likewise, the opening lines of that book also make explicit the sonic contrast with the Greek army; the Trojans are like a clamour of cranes, but the Greeks ‘came up to them in silence, breathing fury’ (οἱ δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἴσαν σιγῇ μένεα πνείοντες Ἀχαιοί, Il. 3.8). There seems to be some analogical thinking on Antipater’s part in the two scenes, or parts of them, which he has chosen to combine: just as Odysseus’ words were a blizzard, so the cranes create their clamour ‘as when they flee the winter storm and the unspeakable rain’ (αἵ τ᾿ ἐπεὶ οὖν χειμῶνα φύγον καὶ ἀθέσφατον ὄμβρον, Il. 3.4). In effect, Antipater uses these images from Iliad 3 to do two interrelated things. The allusion to Menelaus’ rhetorical abilities and the contrast with Odysseus characterise two forms of composition in which one type of speech or poetry involves the production of multiple works. The allusion to the flock of birds and Erinna as the single swan make the distinction on the level of people, between the individual fighters and the multitude of the gathered troops, between the one and the many. Erinna has not been obscured by the countless flock of poets, as it were, because she composed a single powerful work rather than many works that are susceptible to being left among the uncountable multitude.
Such a reading is also reflected in the use of σωρηδόν. As well as recalling the sorites problem, σωρηδόν in the context of epigrams and epigram collections would evoke the shadowy Hellenistic Soros.Footnote 50 This epigram collection was either the first to collect Posidippus of Pella’s poetry, or may have been the first to combine epigrams from different authors; in either case it would have been a well-known collection.Footnote 51 The adverb, together with the epigrammatist’s first-person plural μαραινόμεθα, ‘we fade into oblivion’, thus raises the possibility of a poetic sorites problem: how many epigrams make a book, perhaps; but also: how many epigrams are too much? Callimachus had sought to reject epic length in his Reply, whereas Antipater champions Erinna’s poetry as refined and Callimachean by contrasting the Distaff with epigram. The image of a heaped mass of epigrammatists suggests that poems, like grains of sand, can get too small, at which point they paradoxically proliferate and together become an unmanageable and unaccountable multitude. Whereas the Telchines were interested in a single work of great length, Antipater is focused on the opposite extreme of poetic extent: he figures the Distaff as achieving Callimachus’ non-numerical aesthetics of scale where epigram fails.
An equally important intertext for Antipater’s epigram, as well as Callimachus’ Reply, is Homer’s Invocation to the Muses in Iliad 2. As Homer is clear to state: ‘the multitude I could not tell or name’ (πληθὺν δ᾿ οὐκ ἄν ἐγὼ μυθήσομαι οὐδ᾿ ὀνομήνω, Il. 2.488). He and the audience must settle instead for the catalogue counting up the ships, the leaders and the soldiers per ship but not the names of or stories associated with individual soldiers. Likewise, the great proliferation of epigrammatists has the same effect on Antipater in his role as a commemorator of poetry and poets. They are so many that only their numerical total can be captured in the poem; unlike Homer’s Catalogue, though, their number is so large that it borders on the entirely uncountable. Erinna avoids the ignominy of oblivion. Antipater is able to recall and commemorate Erinna as a leading poet just as Homer, with the help of the Muses, was able to recall the leaders of the contingent and their stories. In conception, that is, Antipater models the distinction between Erinna and the epigrammatists on Homer’s foundational expression of the effect that quantity has upon the ability to commemorate and his resolution that counting at least enables him to account for each soldier. I would also argue that Antipater signals his debt to Homer’s concern for counting and commemoration in Iliad 2 within the epigram. As I have noted, the simile of a flock of screeching birds appears in Iliad 17, but it is imagery which is used to describe the Trojan troops at the opening of Iliad 3, and to describe the gathering Achaean troops in Iliad 2, in a run of similes immediately prior to the Invocation (Il. 2.459–65). The same image bookends Homer’s roll call of both the Greek and Trojan contingents at Troy and thus forms a ring composition, which is a common feature of Homeric poetry. The particular contrast in this case is that similes describing a multitude are set in contrast to the counting up of a multitude. In characterising the epigrammatists as a shrieking flock, Antipater deploys imagery in his epigram that also contrasts with his counting, or inability to count, in the third couplet. In a more allusive vein, Antipater addresses the epigrammatists as νεαροί (‘young’), which is a Homeric hapax taken from Iliad 2, in a scene where Odysseus compares the Achaean troops to ‘youthful children’ (παῖδες νεαροί, Il. 2.289), disheartened and longing for home. If the Homeric source of the term is observed in the epigram, then the reader is given a direct clue that Antipater sees the uncountable heap of epigrammatists as akin to the unnamed but numbered multitude of Achaeans at Troy who will also fade into oblivion. Antipater, then, not only follows in Callimachus’ footsteps and carefully avoids numerical assessment of Erinna’s poetic skill in his epigram. He also raises the idea, which can be traced back to Homer’s Invocation, that counting as a form of description is all that remains when the poetic output is so large as to risk becoming unmanageable, and it is a counting that likewise obscures commemoration as well as a detailed treatment of a poet’s sophia.
Antipater’s epigram exemplifies the extent to which Callimachus’ approach to numerical poetic criticism permeated Hellenistic literary discourse. His characterisation of Erinna bears all the hallmarks of a Callimachean appraisal that avoids number in favour of poetic refinement. Antipater combines Callimachus’ interest in scale and the question of multiplicity in contrast to the singular – as shown by his allusions to Iliad 2 and 3 – in order to contrast Erinna’s short (epyllion-like) hexameter lament and the mass of epigrammatists. This shift in generic focus attests to the malleable use of number and of Callimachean criticism in the literary landscape: what was once a concern used to justify Callimachus’ poetics at the opening of an aetiological elegiac catalogue is now also extended to epigram and epigram collections. There is an engagement with Callimachus and Homer and the pairing of a poet who rejects numerical criticism with the poet who displayed his ability to count at length. Later readers are influenced by Callimachus’ rejection of counting criticism, but they read it alongside other passages that also set poetry and counting in dialogue.
1.3 Roman Reckonings
Callimachus’ influence on Roman literature was widespread and is well known in modern scholarship. My intention in this section is to show that his engagement with the question of how numbers and counting relate to criticism is not ignored by later Roman poets. Rather, they take up this concern and develop it, observing both how it relates to an aesthetic of scale, and also – as in the case of Antipater – adapting Callimachean themes to the question of quantity: how many compositions are poetically appropriate? I begin first with Catullus and some programmatic poems from his collection: cc. 1, 5 and 7. While his Callimachean allegiance is not in doubt, I wish to bring more clearly into focus his awareness and reworking of Callimachus’ concern with counting.Footnote 52 Subsequently, I examine an introductory poem to Martial, Book 8. It addresses the number of poetry books that Martial has produced and what the implications are of this count for an appreciation of his poetry. What will emerge is two poets’ attentiveness to, and rejection of, the range of reckonings that Roman readers could apply to their poetry books.
1.3.1 Catullus Kisses Goodbye to Criticism
Catullus c. 5 – uiuamus mea Lesbia atque amemus (‘Let us live, my Lesbia, and love’, 5.1) – is one of the most famous poems in Latin and arguably the most famous counting poem in antiquity. Together with c. 7, its focus on the numerical has garnered much attention. The substance of this subsection is devoted to arguing that an underemphasised aspect of the poems is their engagement with counting as it relates to criticism. In particular, I wish to build on the work of earlier scholars and propose that c. 5, with the help of c. 7, reworks Callimachus’ Reply to the Telchines and thus constitutes a programmatic statement about the nature of counting as a means of poetic appreciation and the extent to which it can be applied to his poetry and its erotic subject matter. I will tentatively suggest, moreover, that this problematisation of counting as a means to appreciate Catullus’ poetry may be extended to the collection as a whole.
First, though, I discuss c. 1, Catullus’ opening poem in the collection as found in the manuscripts, and the emphasis it places on Callimachean poetics and numerical appraisals of literature, at the same time as it introduces – albeit subtly – the erotic current that runs through the collection.
To whom do I give this new fine little book, recently polished up with dry pumice? To you, Cornelius; since you always used to think my trifles worth something, you who now dare of all Italians to unroll all the ages in three books – learned ones, by Jupiter, and laboured! So have for yourself this work such as it is, whatever it is worth; and may it, o virgin patroness, remain for more than one generation.Footnote 55
Since Catullus presents his libellus as a gift, the poem probably prefaced at least one collection of his works. It has long been noted that the poem, with its advertisement of the libellus as lepidus, translates the Callimachean interest in poetic refinement at the opening of the Reply – θρέψαι τὴν Μοῦσαν δ’ ὠγαθὲ λεπταλέην (‘[but], my dear fellow, keep the Muse slender’. fr. 1.24) – for the context of a Roman poetry collection. So too, the final line of Catullus’ poem characterises his libellus in the same way that Callimachus’ describes his own work at the conclusion of his first aition in the Aetia: ἔλλατε νῦν, ἐλέγοισι δ’ ἐνιψήσασθε λιπώσας | χεῖρας ἐμοῖς, ἵνα μοι πουλὺ μένωσιν ἔτος (‘Be gracious now and wipe your shining hands upon my elegies, so that they will remain for many years’, fr. 7.13–14 Harder).Footnote 56 In terms of its programmatic effect, Bruce Gibson identifies how the poem ‘anticipates and outmanoeuvres criticism’ and that ‘[t]he basic technique is similar to that used by Callimachus in the Aetia prologue’.Footnote 57 Catullus diverges from this model somewhat in emphasising Cornelius Nepos’ appreciation of his nugae rather than his (negative) criticism, although it is no simplistic positive appraisal: precisely what value he ascribes to the nugae is left pointedly vague (cf. aliquid, 4 and 8–9), and the fact that he ‘used to’ (solebas, 3) hold them in esteem begs the question of what, if anything, has changed in the present. Nevertheless, Catullus follows the broader structuring of the Reply by beginning with a response to someone else’s appraisal of his existing poetry.
He also copies the critical frame of the Reply with regards to the extent of the Chronica and of his libellus in relation to their content. The single time span of all Roman history fits in Nepos’ three books, while Catullus wishes his single libellus to last over an entire saeclum.Footnote 58 Just as the Telchines, Callimachus claimed, focus on the numerically measurable extent of the poem that they desired of him and its nature as a continuous work, Catullus likewise measures out the three books of Nepos’ Chronica and identifies its continuous nature: omne aeuum glossing Callimachus’ διηνεκές (‘continuous’).Footnote 59 Gibson interprets this as Catullus subtly and with playful irony critiquing Nepos’ Chronica.Footnote 60 In effect Catullus adopts the pose of the Telchines when characterising the Chronica, despite the fact that he has scaled so much history into just three books, and so learnedly. In (re)presenting his own libellus, however, he evokes Callimachus’ emphasis on slenderness as part of a contrastive aesthetic by reworking the connection between the one and the continuous and between time scale and the quantitative aspect of the text. The hope is that his single poetry book offered in response to or in exchange for Nepos’ labouring over the Chronica will be impressive for the contrast between its small size and the length of time for which it survives. Catullus’ collection, that is, begins with a demonstration of his ability to judge literary works through enumeration as the Telchines had, but also his commitment to a Callimachean slenderness and its contrastive aesthetic when it comes to accounting for his own poetry.
The final aspect of c. 1 that is important for my current discussion is its introduction of the erotic tone, which is then immediately developed in the infamously teasing passer poems.Footnote 61 C. 1 participates in what William Fitzgerald terms an ‘erotics of poetry’ that is directed at Catullus’ readership. His overarching claim is that sexual provocation is a constituent element of Catullus’ poetry and the relation constructed between poet and audience. What Catullus is doing is ‘exploring an aesthetic relation that unsettles the rigid framework of Roman conceptions of power and position as they are metaphorised by sex and gender’.Footnote 62 On this view, the opening poem addressed to Nepos has flirtatious undertones. The book ‘recently polished up with dry pumice’ (c. 1.2) plays on the idea that bodies too could be polished with pumice and advertise effeminacy: ‘Catullus’ book has a teasing sexuality that is provocatively effeminate.’Footnote 63 By calling his Muse patrona uirgo (9), though, he pulls the rug out from under Nepos: the book may appear sexually available, but cannot be ‘taken’ in a sexual sense since it is virginal and so is to remain ‘for more than one generation’ (10).
The opening poem thus carefully introduces three aspects of Catullus’ poetic world: his adherence to Callimachean criteria when appraising literature; his additional use of number and numerical measures of poetry as a tool of distinction; and his sexual positioning of himself and of his poetry vis-à-vis others. To put this another way, Catullus matches his drama of position through sexual language in the social sphere with a self-consciously literary positioning through both Callimachean poetics and enumeration. My argument is that c. 5 with the support of the ‘response’ in c. 7 combines these three aspects again in an equally programmatic way. It intertwines Callimachean motifs, counting and erotics in order to introduce his love for Lesbia explicitly and at the same time reject criticism of his account of that love affair. What is important about Catullus developing Callimachus’ poetics and refusing to adopt counting as a critical measure is that he adheres to these principles at the same time that his poem performs counting within its verses. In so doing, c. 5 rehearses the collocation of motifs seen in c. 1, but is fundamentally different in its use of counting not as a tool of criticism, but a tool against it.
Here is the text and a translation of c. 5 and 7.
Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and let us value all the rumours of rather severe old men at a single as. Suns will set and rise; for us, when our single brief light has set, night is one perpetual sleep. Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have reached many thousands, we will confound them all so that we might not know, nor any evil person look with spite and know, how many the kisses are.
You ask how many of your kissifications, Lesbia, would be enough and then some. As many as the great number of the Libyan sands that lie around silphiophoric Cyrene among the sweltering oracle of Jove and the sacred tomb of old Battus, or as many as the many stars that look upon the hidden loves of men when night is silent. To kiss you with that many kisses is enough and then some for deranged Catullus, which busybodies will neither be able to count up nor curse with their evil tongue.
The resonance between these two poems has long been noted: 7 is a ‘pendant’, a delayed reply, or a reworking of 5. Poem 5 begins with a call to love (1), which is made urgent by the observation of the brevity of life, a life critiqued by older generations (2–6). There follows the count of the many kisses Catullus orders Lesbia to give him (7–10). The poem concludes with the confounding of this freshly made account so that no evil onlooker may know the tally (11–13). Poem 7 begins by representing Lesbia in response having asked how many kisses would be sufficient for Catullus (1–2). He replies by offering two images of the innumerable – sands and stars – both of which he has nuanced and personalised beyond their (already) stereotypical usage (3–8): these are Libyan sands around Battus’ tomb and stars that spy on clandestine loves.Footnote 64 In the case of the number of the stars, Catullus makes the theme particularly topical by resuming the theme of the night as a space for lovers (cf. 5.6 and 7.7). He concludes by reiterating that such an amount would satisfy ‘mad’ Catullus and mean that ‘busybodies’ will be not be able to count them up nor utter curses against them (9–12).
One early question was the type of counting Catullus represents. Harry Levy suggested that Catullus keeps the score of Lesbia’s kisses upon the abacus, while Roger Pack, considering the abacus to be too mercantile for Catullus, proposed instead that he is counting on his fingers.Footnote 65 The issues with these two reconstructions notwithstanding, it is difficult to identify within the poem anything that demands a specific counting method, let alone one that is operative from a literary perspective.Footnote 66 I therefore leave the matter aside since it will not have an impact on the following interpretation. In a different vein, Francis Cairns designated c. 5 an arithmetikon and compared it to arithmetic poems found in Book 14 of the Palatine Anthology.Footnote 67 As will become evident in Chapter 4, the majority of those compositions postdate Catullus, and neither the term nor the genre would likely have been recognised by Catullus. A more useful historical contextualisation is the financial aspect of Catullus’ counting, or rather, accounting. The views of an older generation are valued by Catullus in monetary terms, but so is the treatment of his own kiss count, conturbare (11) having the sense of ‘to bring one’s financial affairs into disorder’, ‘to go bankrupt’.Footnote 68 Catullus’ defining of his relationship with Lesbia in this way draws on definitions of social interaction in economic terms that are part of his larger transactional outlook, observable most clearly in his ‘contractual’ approach to love (e.g. cc. 76.1–6, 109). Indeed, the sense of exchange is already present in the ‘you ask: I answer’ form of c. 7. At the very least, then, counting is operative in this poem inasmuch as it reflects an everyday, economic reality in the Roman world.
Especially relevant for my current purposes, though, is the connection between c. 5 and Callimachus’ Reply, noted by Francis Cairns and Stephen Heyworth.Footnote 69 I delineate here the Callimachean resonances in the poems, before looking at the development of counting as a theme in the two poems. Catullus’ designation of the upper limit of desired kisses turns, at the centre of c. 7, to the tomb of ‘old Battus’ (6). Contextually, his immediately preceding mention of Cyrene (4) means that he is referring to one of its kings named Battus, quite probably the first of that name and its founder (cf. Hdt. 4.150–9; Pind. Pyth. 5.87). Equally, however, since the patronymic Battiades is elsewhere used by Catullus to refer to Callimachus (cc. 65.16 and 116.2) – following Callimachus’ own presentation of his genealogical connection to Battus (cf. epigrams 29 and 30 HE) – Catullus is making a connection to one of his poetic models. His choice to allude to Callimachus’ place of birth and lineage in a pair of poems so reliant on enumeration, given Callimachus’ own rejection of counting, is clearly a provocative move. But Catullus does more than refer to Callimachus by alluding to his heritage.
Consider again the opening of Callimachus’ Aetia.
Often the Telchines mutter against me, against my poetry, who, ignorant of the Muse, were not born as her friend, because I did not complete one single continuous song (on the glory of?) kings … in many thousands of lines or on … heroes, but turn around my epos a little like a child, although the ten-count of my years is not small. I in turn say this to the Telchines: ‘tribe, well able to waste away your own liver … of a few lines’
In cc. 5 and 7, Catullus responds to the opening of the Reply to the Telchines by reworking its key themes. First, Catullus’ representation of those who would criticise his and Lesbia’s love recalls the Telchines. In both cases, the poet is reacting to the chatter (cf. rumores, 5.2; ἐπιτρύζουσιν, fr. 1.1 Harder) of others who talk about him. So too, both sets of critics are connected with envy. The Telchines, as Callimachus will go on to say, are from ‘the destructive race of Bascania’ (Βασκανίης ὀλοὸν γένος, fr. 1.17 Harder). Bascania is a malign influence or jealousy that had the capacity to bewitch those who were the object of envy; it comes to be associated with the Evil Eye (LSJ s.v. βασκανία). Likewise, Catullus emphasises at the end of both poems the invidiousness of the supposed onlooker (ne quis malus inuidere possit, 5.12; nec pernumerare curiosi | possint nec mala fascinare lingua, 7.11–12).Footnote 70 Indeed, βασκαίνειν and fascinare derive from the same root (OLD s.v. fascino); Catullus may thus be etymologically alluding to Callimachus’ ‘race of Bascania’. The onlookers’ interest, as with the Telchines, is to employ counting when prying into the poet’s own affairs (cum tantum sciat esse basiorum, 5.13; pernumerare, 7.11). Catullus makes a connection between the critics’ envy and enumeration, a connection which Callimachus had implied later in the Reply where the Telchines as the breed of Bascania seek to employ the schoinos to measure poetry.
It may be thought – despite these parallels – that this is rather a coincidence of broader themes related to the envy of the poet. But even setting the reference to Callimachus’ Cyrenean lineage in c. 7 to one side, further phrases in c. 5 suggest that Catullus is looking specifically to Callimachus’ Reply and knowingly appropriating it for his own poetic needs. The Telchines’ first criticism as presented by Callimachus is that he did not compose ‘one long poem in many thousands of lines’. There is debate about how this comment relates to wider trends of criticism in the Hellenistic period.Footnote 71 The minimum that can be said is that their desire is for a poem which is both in some way ‘singular’ (ἕν) and ‘continuous’ (διηνεκές, fr. 1.3 Harder). This is a set of terms that Catullus reworks across the two poems to diverse effect. As has been observed, Catullus’ statement nox est perpetua una dormienda (5.6) responds to the Telchines’ desired poem, and indeed in later Roman poets perpetuus will come to signal an engagement with Callimachus’ poetics in the Reply, such as in Horace’s first book of Odes (1.7.6) and, famously, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.4).Footnote 72 The same terms are also loosely evoked by Catullus’ evaluation of the rumores of the old men: they ‘value them all at a single as’ (omnes unius aestimemus assis, 5.3). The criterion of the singular can be decidedly negative when it refers to monetary value, but it is a criterion that the Telchines value in poetry: Catullus has used the Telchines’ criticism to shut up his critics. This is also the case with his emphasis that nox est perpetua una dormienda. He again adopts the numerical aesthetics that the Telchines espoused only to use it against his own murmurers. A single continuous time span emerges as synonymous with the eternity that follows death, a simply unmanageable time frame that is meaningless for humans who occupy the repeated divisions of time into day and night (5.4–5). A time span that would be suitable for the Telchines would leave no space for the prying of the senes.
Yet, evidently, Catullus breaks away from the Callimachean model when his poem descends into a counting of kisses. In Callimachean terms, enacting enumeration in poetry is uncharted territory. This is part, I would argue, of Catullus’ strategy of co-opting the Telchines’ terms in his defence against his own (imagined) critics. As the Reply makes clear, counting is the interest of the critics. As John Elliott has shown, the Evil Eye is connected in many ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures with possessiveness and accounting: miserliness or excessive abstemiousness of one’s own possessions incurs the influence of the Evil Eye, while those who are unwilling to share their own possessions are said to cast the Evil Eye on others.Footnote 73 It is this connection between the critics’ envy and enumeration which Catullus draws out of the Reply. Callimachus banishes the destructive race of Bascania (ἔλλετε Βασκανίης ὀλοὸν γένος, fr. 1.17 Harder), after which he outlines the critical framework which ought to be adopted for judging his poetry, a framework which does not require measure. Catullus’ strategy is to count up his kisses – or appear to – in a way which responds to ‘all the rumours’ (rumoresque … omnes), but which also strips the numbers of their signification. The hypnotic quality of 5.7–10 places the emphasis on sound and also responds to the Telchines’ fame for witchcraft with an incantation of Catullus’ own.Footnote 74 In any case, the conclusion to c. 5 makes explicit the distance between his own counting and the traditional world of accounts and their susceptibility to the Evil Eye, as he exhorts himself and Lesbia to ‘throw into confusion’ (conturbabimus) the account of their affair.
Catullus, then, employs his kiss count as a countermeasure. One thing he is aiming to ensure is that the affair lasts and continues for an extended period of time, a concern which also has its roots in the Reply. There, the Telchines measure up Callimachus’ poetry and his verses but also count up the years of his life, seemingly making a connection between his age and the poetry he produces (fr. 1.5–6 Harder). Catullus’ kisses replace the counting of lifespans with a counting that cannot be turned to express temporal extension. This resistance of erotics to measurement is resumed in 7, where the kisses that would satisfy Catullus are ‘as many as the stars which watch over the stolen loves of humans, when night is silent’ (quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox | furtiuos hominum uident amores, 7.7–8). This time, within which erotic clandestine liaisons occur, allows no criticism: there are no human onlookers here, only the eternal and innumerable stars. Catullus takes the Telchines’ concern with age and counting and carves out a time which is not susceptible to envy and criticism, but which is also not the perpetua nox of c. 5. He opens up a new temporality for his love and for love poetry, moreover, that co-opts the Telchines’ own conception of poetic unity of time: not ‘one long poem on kings and heroes in many thousands of lines’ but ‘one long night for lovers with many thousands of kisses’.
This pre-emptive counting up and kissing goodbye to criticism, moreover, fits within Catullus’ wider erotics of reading. For Fitzgerald, c. 5 represents a failed assertion of masculinity through its focus on foreplay rather than penetration, reminiscent of the puer delicatus or even the impotent.Footnote 75 Yet if the poet is all mouth and no trousers, there is good reason. As Benjamin Eldon Stevens has elucidated, speech and silence are recurring themes in Catullus and can be explained against the backdrop of Rome as tam maledica ciuitas (‘so gossipy a city’, Cic. Cael. 58): in the case of Catullus’ kiss count: ‘While a sexual oral activity like kissing precludes or occludes speech, causing a sort of inarticulacy, this is yet more desirable and valuable than articulate speech, which has been, in the poet’s view, more truly perverted, put to use in worthless rumormongering and “bad, hexing speech”.’Footnote 76 Such speech comes from those who, like the Telchines, would look upon Catullus and criticise, and they are characterised as orally polluted in that they have a mala lingua.Footnote 77 Rather than foreplay being failure, in Fitzgerald’s terms, kisses are an empowering form of oral articulation that is not contaminated by the mala lingua of his critics.
Poems 1 and 5 therefore combine their use of Callimachean poetics with Catullus’ focus of love affairs and erotic interactions. Eroticism is insinuated in c. 1, but by c. 5 such imagery has come to the surface, undoubtedly supported by the well-explored erotic undertones of the intervening passer poems. Still, c. 5 exhibits similarities with c. 1 that suggest a close dialogue. Both respond to appraisal and judgement of Catullus (Nepos of Catullus’ nugae; the old men of Catullus’ love affair), and both are cognizant of singularly long spans of time (the single saeculum and perpetua nox). Both too engage with Callimachus at the same time that they introduce enumeration. The connection may be strengthened by the particular number of the kiss count: Nepos’ Chronica stretches over three books, while Catullus counts up 3,300 kisses with 1,100 set over three lines (7–9).Footnote 78 Just as his Chronica contains all Italian history, there is the implication that Catullus’ kisses also stand for the duration of the affair, all the kisses that must be made before that nox perpertua comes to them. Of course, the development in 5 is equally important. If Catullus demonstrates that he is able to wield counting as criticism in c. 1 then he rejects the possibility of accounting for love in c. 5, where the enacted enumeration is swiftly undercut by his confounding of the count they have made: love, and the acts of love, cannot be so easily accounted for.
To what extent can this counting and subsequent confusion be understood as programmatic for Catullus’ collection? Counting plays an important role in Catullus’ poetic outlook in other poems. He counts up volumes elsewhere in the collection: his friend Cinna takes nine years to produce his Zmyrna (c. 95.1–2), while one Hortensius, according to the most likely construction of the couplet, ‘produces half a million verses in a year’ (milia cum interea quingenta †Hortensius uno, 95.3).Footnote 79 Perhaps the most pointed case of numerical criticism on Catullus’ part is in his poem on the poetry of Suffenus:
That Suffenus, Varus, whom you know very well, is a charming fellow, and has wit and good manners. At the same time, he makes many more verses than anyone else. I bet he has got some ten thousand or even more written out, and not, as is often done, put down on used sheets: [but] imperial paper, new rolls …
Commentators have often observed how the poem sets form against content, material text against verbal artistry and appearance against sentiment, simultaneously highlighting how in a social context these contrasts can reveal people’s lack of self-awareness.Footnote 81 The primary contrast is that Suffenus seems witty, but writes reams upon reams of poor poetry straight on to deluxe paper. Although verbally he shares many valued qualities with Catullus, such as uenustas and urbanity, when it comes to writing it down it all reads as doggerel.Footnote 82 Just as with Hortensius’ many lines, Catullus diagnoses a central fault of modern poets as being their obsession with length and so sharing the Telchines’ critical framework.Footnote 83 Equally, Catullus is aware that his own poetry can be counted. He implies, without providing a finite figure, that his verses are enumerable in a poem attacking his puella, calling together his hendecasyllables ‘as many as there are’ (quot estis | omnes, c. 42.1–2). In demanding that Asinius ‘return his napkin’ (linteum remitte, c. 12.11), he warns him just how many invective lines he will be sent: ‘or expect three hundred hendecasyllables’ (aut hendecasyllabos trecentos | expecta, 12.10–11). Enumeration appears as a strategy of articulating his distance from other poets and literary figures, whether in judgement of their work, as seems to be generally the case, or as part of an invective characterisation of his own poetic retaliation.
It is only in c. 5, however, that counting is directed at Catullus’ actions, and it is only in c. 5 that counting is resisted by first being performed and then confounded. The main difference is that Catullus is appraising literary works elsewhere, whereas in c. 5 it is Lesbia’s kisses that are under threat of being enumerated. Nevertheless, it is a strong supposition based on his allusion to Callimachus and the Reply that this poem is drawing on a model of poetic criticism and responses to it. As I have suggested, too, the account of the kisses could be interpreted as an account of the love affair, an affair which plays out over the course of Catullus’ libellus. What I propose is that Catullus is adapting the model of criticism in the Reply to his new poetic context, the literature of love. Catullus may count when appraising others’ mythological poetry (Cinna’s Zmyrna) or historical works (Nepos’ Chronica), but when it comes to poetry about love, the same sort of enumerative criticism cannot apply. Putting the deeply personal into poetry leaves oneself and not simply one’s work open to criticism, as will become clear in c. 16. There, Furius and Aurelius have in fact supposedly read c. 5 – quod milia multa basiorum | legistis (‘since you have read my many thousand kisses, c. 16.12–13)Footnote 84 – and make too close a connection between what his poetry says and its relation to real life.Footnote 85 In c. 5, at the very point when the erotics of his collection transition from flirtatious insinuation to explicit surface meaning, Catullus also chooses to emphasise that his is a new kind of poetry, for which traditional measures of poetic evaluation, such as counting, will simply not do.
This argument about the interplay of the erotic, enumerative and literary critical aspects of c. 5 supports the modern image of Catullus as a descendant of the learned Alexandrians revelling in recherché references and intricate intertexualities as well as the first Roman lyricist to create for his audience the impression of intense moments of passion fervently transcribed on to the page.Footnote 86 In this particular case, paying attention to his reworking of Callimachean themes alongside the performance of counting shows Catullus to be a poet who is deeply aware of, and subtly thematises, the inconcinnity of applying an enumerative form of criticism to poetry so intimate, erotic and personal. A traditional form of poetic aestimatio is no match for the poet’s aestus. Indeed, those modern scholars who have attempted to analyse Catullus’ love by numbers, to adapt the title of Helen Reference DettmerDettmer’s 1997 monograph (Love by the Numbers: Form and Meaning in the Poetry of Catullus), have thus singularly ignored the programmatics of c. 5.Footnote 87 In showing that his account is not something available for enumeration by the critic in c. 5, Catullus is making a claim also about the content of his love poetry: the inscription of love into the collection, just like its effect on the mind, is illogical, disordered and incalculable.
1.3.2 Counting up the Collection
My claim has been that Catullus’ counted kisses are utilised as a means to defend against critics not only of his love for Lesbia, but also of his literature about love. I concluded that c. 5 and its dialogue with the equally Callimachean c. 1 makes it possible that the resistance to counting as a form of poetic criticism extends to the Catullan collection as a whole. Here I wish to show that his use of enumeration, and the reworking of Callimachean themes, has a noticeable afterlife which constitutes slender but positive evidence for Roman readers’ awareness of the interweaving of counting and poetic criticism. I present just one example of a later engagement with the ideas that Catullus first raised in Latin. The most notable development will be that, while in Callimachus’ Reply there is no mention of books or their number, a programmatic wariness about the enumeration of poetry has transformed into a focus on the numbering of books, a movement which I have suggested began with Catullus.
Martial is not a love poet, but he is a keen reader of Catullus.Footnote 88 He is also a poet for whom numbers always matter. As Victoria Rimell has explored in depth, Martial’s interest in enumeration arises from his imperial and urban context. Exchanges of gifts, favours and poems require a keen mathematical eye in order for the reader to keep track of who values whom at what, while the operations forming and forcing the many into the ‘one’ is the reflex of the Roman Empire’s ‘ecumenical’ attitude.Footnote 89 Here, though, I focus in on a programmatic poem that crystallises the concerns which I have been tracing about numerical criticism and applies it to the question of how many books of poetry ought to be produced.
‘Five had been enough. Already six and seven books is too much. What is the benefit, Muse, of playing still further? Let decency be the end. Fame can add nothing further for us. My book is a commonplace everywhere. And when Messala’s site lies as broken stone, and Licinius’ tall marble is dust, I will still be read and many visitors will take my poems back home with them.’ So I concluded, and the ninth Muse, with her hair and dress all perfumed, responded as follows: ‘You ingrate, are you able to give up your sweet trifles? Tell me, what more idle thing will you do? Will it please you to swap the comic boot for the tragic buskin or to thunder harsh war in equal rhythms; that the overblown schoolmaster in rough voice read you out, and the grown girl and good lad despise you? Too serious, too grave men write such things – miserable men whom the lamp looks upon in the middle of the night. But you dip your books in Roman spice and refinement. Life must read and recognise its habits. By all means be seen to sing on a slender reed, as long as your reed beats the trumpets of the many.’Footnote 91
Martial’s books seem not to have been titled but simply numbered, and in joking about their numbering he shows he is well aware of their ordering.Footnote 92 This epigram makes that numbering programmatic. (The following poems in the book also return to the question of counting: 8.7, 9, 10, 13.) Surely if one is counting books, eight is too many? Martial already has his eternal imperishable fame. To this counting critique the ninth Muse responds: stick with epigrams, serious themes are not for you.Footnote 93
In response to his concern about an excessive number of books, the ninth Muse justifies the importance of (being suited to) a more playful poetic mode with two clusters of allusions. First, verses 17–19 refer to Catullus’ poetry. As commentators have observed, the lepidos … libellos cannot but recall c. 1.1, and sal (‘spice’, ‘charm’) is a quality Catullus specifically describes his poetry as having at c. 16.7.Footnote 94 While these references to c. 1 have been noted, it has gone unobserved that 17–18 also rework Catullus’ imagery in cc. 5 and 7. The image inverts Catullus’ own valuing of the overly serious at an as and the night as a time within which lovers love. Here, serious topics make severe old men work through the night – not unlike Callimachus’ Aratus (cf. 56.4 HE = AP 9.207.4) – while the lamp, more often the witness to lovers’ trysts, must make do with looking over them.Footnote 95 Whereas Catullus had marked out a time within which severity is to be abandoned, Martial presents the effect of serious poetry as reversing those manners and so reversing Catullus’ poetological programme: the mark of a witty, charming poet is that his dulces nugae are reserved for the daytime alone. Second, in verses 21–2 the ninth Muse simulates the advice in Vergil’s sixth Eclogue, where Apollo warns Tityrus to avoid composing epic – ‘the shepherd, Tityrus, ought to feed his sheep fat, but speak a drawn-out song’ (pastorem, Tityre, pinguis | pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen, Ecl. 6.4–5) – which itself evokes Callimachus’ Reply.Footnote 96 Martial’s poem thus concludes by alluding to a number of poems which in different ways draw on a Roman Callimacheanism to negotiate their poetics.
Although Martial does not directly point to the numerical concerns of those intertexts, it is nevertheless clear that he is mobilising their poetics to legitimise his production of a large number of books. Callimachus’ slender Muse cannot be appraised by a numerical criterion, but Martial employs Vergil’s ‘translation’ of that passage in Eclogue 6 to make a numerical point in his final line. Composing such finely wrought and slender poetry, Martial suggests, is acceptable if it is witty and refined enough to compete with the works of epic. Yet since he contrasts the singular auena with the many of the multorum … tubas (22), it is clear this is an unequal fight and is not simply an issue of the scale of poems, whether large or small. The question Martial leaves unresolved at the close of the epigram is: how does his single refined ‘reed’ compete with the grand works of many people? The nature of his works offers two answers that are not mutually exclusive. As Rimell has shown, the one/many distinction/s informs his attitude towards books of epigrams; they are full of many smaller compositions, but ultimately constitute a unified whole.Footnote 97 His work beats the many since a single book of his is itself a multitude of different poems. This reading of the final lines explains how epigram can compete with loftier genres, but it does not clearly answer the opening rhetorical question of how many epigram books are sufficient. By the same token, though, if an epigram book can be understood as a unity or a unit, then books too can be added together to form a multitude. The ninth Muse’s answer to the question of how much is too much borrows from Martial’s own thinking. With a conception that seems to reverse Antipater’s attitude to epigram collections (see above), Martial makes it the adding of books together that enables the genre to compete with the likes of epic, just as adding poems together is what makes a good book.
Martial acknowledges the criticisms that might arise from the number of books he has written and seeks out earlier passages in Latin literature in order to respond. The epigram shows Martial following in Catullus’ (and Vergil’s) footsteps, engaging with Callimachus’ poetic positioning in the Reply (whether at first hand or more probably through Roman receptions) and turning it towards a goal that he had not intended and which is manifestly in contradiction to his poetics, under the guise – it seems – of continuing to reject grand epic themes. Where Callimachus had argued for poetic judgement beyond number, a Muse without numerical measure, Catullus and Martial co-opt the discourse of number in the Reply and turn it towards the ends of both framing and defending their multiple book projects. This is not to say, however, that they had not absorbed Callimachus’ articulation of an aesthetics of scale as an alternative to numerical measures of poetry; both Callimachus and Martial show a clear awareness of the slenderness advocated by Callimachus. Their engagement with number as well is thus a purposeful move. Despite Callimachus’ efforts to banish enumeration from poetry’s critical discourse, Roman poets of the first centuries bce to ce demonstrate that the habit has not been shaken and they produce ever more sophisticated ways of responding to readerly reckonings.
Chapter 1 analysed Callimachus’ explicit rejection of counting as a form of poetic criticism and traced out the responses to that intervention in subsequent Greek and Latin poetry. Where Callimachus had sought to introduce a poetics that does not require numerical measurement since it focuses instead on the sophia – the sophistication – of the poem, later poets nevertheless found it necessary to address counting forms of criticism alongside an emphasis on their own slender poetry. Against the backdrop of Chapter 1’s diachronic study, this chapter examines in details the output of a single Graeco-Roman poet of the mid-first century ce and his engagement with counting as a form of poetic criticism: Leonides of Alexandria and his isopsephic epigrams.
The practice of isopsephy is when the letters of the Greek alphabet are read according to their numerical value: α = 1, β = 2, … θ = 9; ι = 10, κ = 20, … ϙ = 90; ρ = 100, σ = 200, … ϡ = 900.Footnote 1 A certain word or phrase is then summed up according to the series of numbers it signifies and that phrase is then made numerically equal to another phrase. Literally, it is the making of pebbles – that is, accounts – equally. For example, Suetonius preserves the following apparently well-known isopsephic statement: Νεόψηφον· Νέρων ἰδίαν μητέρα ἀπέκτεινε (‘A new count: Nero killed his own mother’, Nero 39.2), where ‘Nero’ and ‘killed his own mother’ both add up to 1,005: an equivalence that reveals the nature of the emperor. While isopsephy was a pastime loathed by Aulus Gellius (NA 14.6.4–5), it was popular enough for isopsephic guides to be written on papyrus and isopsephic constructions to be indicated in inscriptions: it can be shown to carry a variety of meanings in different contexts, such as enumerating the name of a god or deciphering words in dreams.Footnote 2 Within the breadth of isopsephy as a game of numerical and alphabetic equivalences, it could be employed in poetry, as was the case with the epigrams composed by Leonides of Alexandria. Isopsephy in this context aimed to produce epigrammatic couplets of equal value or lines of equal value in a single distich.
In modern scholarship, Leonides has received short shrift. Johannes Reference Geffcken, Pauly and WissowaGeffcken’s 1925 Realencyclopädie article on the epigrammatist describes him as a ‘conceited versifier’, a ‘miserable artiste’ and ‘one of the most unpleasant little Greeks of the age’.Footnote 3 In his Further Greek Epigrams, too, despite placing the textual integrity of Leonides’ epigrams on a stronger footing, Denys Page could still comment that the poems would be ‘contemptible to readers nowadays’.Footnote 4 What is all the more surprising is that both scholars in addition do much to highlight Leonides’ literary imitations of other epigrammatists and the political circles in which he moved.Footnote 5 It is the mix of isopsephic ‘parlour game’ and epigram which has drawn out the critics’ disdain.Footnote 6 In recent years, however, analysis of literary play has become a serious business. Acrostics, palindromes and anagrams are now situated in a culture experimenting with multiple potential directions of reading,Footnote 7 and pattern poems or technopaignia are frequently read against the long and vibrant tradition of ekphrastic epigrams.Footnote 8 Similar benefit can be gained by re-evaluating the cultural importance of isopsephic epigrams.Footnote 9
My strategy in this chapter is thus to read Leonides’ use of isopsephy in epigrams as a development of the aesthetics of scale that I outlined in Chapter 1. That is, I take Leonides’ fashioning of verses that contain large numerical accounts to address the same critical concern about how much content can be fitted into a limited extent that arose in Callimachus’ Reply and in Antipater of Sidon’s praise of Erinna. In this case, isopsephic epigrams advance an aesthetics of scale through the dual significance of Greek letters. This contrast of the large and small has its roots in Hellenistic mathematics and poetry, too. Apollonius of Perga was a younger contemporary of Archimedes working in Alexandria under Ptolemy Euergetes.Footnote 10 Preserved in what remains of the second book of Pappus’ Collection is Apollonius’ method for multiplying numbers that are an integer multiple of ten between 1 and 9. The method divides each of the numbers into their ‘base’ and powers of ten for ease of computation; for example, the base of 400 is 4 and of 30, 3. Once all the numbers are separated in this way, the bases are multiplied, then also the powers of ten, and finally the two are multiplied together to reach final sum.Footnote 11 Apollonius exemplified this method of multiplication for the reader by multiplying the letters in a hexameter line.Footnote 12
Ἀρτέμιδος κλεῖτε κράτος ἔξοχον ἐννέα κοῦραι
Nine maidens, praise the most eminent power of Artemis
The verse, presumably of Apollonius’ own devising, creates a context in which an opening invocation yields the sum of 196,036,848,000,000,000.Footnote 13 This produces an unusual form of isopsephy in poetry; one would typically expect the verse to be ‘counted’ by means of addition. As Netz has shown, Apollonius’ non-utilitarian numerical practice here can be understood as part of Greek mathematicians’ interest in shocking and amazing their readership and in generating a ‘carnival of calculation’ as much as in producing a new notational form for multiplications.Footnote 14 His choice of a hexameter line – and one invoking the Muses at that – takes a new approach to the interrelation of content and extension. The nine maidens of Apollonius are not only the nine Muses, but also the nine ‘bases’, the numbers 1–9, which form the basis of his multiplication method. In another case of an aesthetics of scale, these nine Muses generate large totals. Apollonius is not simply producing a new system more capable of delivering what poetry only rhetorically gestured at, he is testing traditional poetry’s numerical capacity: just how much could a poem, and even a single line, contain? It turns out that the shortest of poems, not even past their invocatory verse, can compress large sums.
Isopsephy, however, was also a mode of reading poetry. Aulus Gellius records that a friend of his had listed all the verses of Homer where two consecutive lines had the same total (NA 14.6.5), but he does so only to disparage it as among those things which appear learned but are neither entertaining or useful (NA 14.6). He does not quote examples, but the later tradition has recorded some pairs (e.g. Il. 7.264–5 and 19.306–7).Footnote 15 There is also evidence that isopsephic reading was applied to Euripidean drama. In the late first or early second century ce, Aelius Nicon, father of the physician Galen and a successful architect at Pergamum, had an isopsephic treatise on geometry inscribed upon a building which propounded the relation between the cone, sphere and cylinder.Footnote 16 A further inscription (IGRom. 4.506), quite probably part of the same project, introduces the architect and contains a hymn, in which lines 2–4 directly echo and modify for the new context Euripides Phoenissae 3–5. Such an adaptation would have required first counting up Euripides’ verses. The same can be said for the subsequent readers of the inscription, too: the literary game involves both scrutinising the verses isopsephically to confirm the numerical equivalences and examining their meaning in order to identify the Euripidean borrowing.
The earliest evidence for the critical games that could be had with such a mode of reading is found on a mid-third-century bce inscription at the necropolis of Hermoupolis Magna in Egypt, comprising an iambic epigram for the Egyptian sage Petosiris upon his grave and a later response.Footnote 17
I speak of Petosiris, a corpse in the earth, while now he lies among the gods: a sage among sages.
The summed amount of these iambics is 8,373 silver drachmas.
And of this, 2,720.
Following the epigram, at some later date another hand has given its numerical value, reading the letters as numbers, and has suggested that this is the cost in drachmas of the epigram. The following inscription, whether written by the second hand or another, pokes fun at this counting by appending ‘and of this’: it does not gloss the total amount of the previous statement (i.e. 3–4: κεφάλαιον … ͵ητογʹ), but self-referentially points to the amount of that very statement.Footnote 18 The final line exposes the entire absurdity of counting the numerical value of epigrams, here possibly to critique the cost of public epigrams (think, perhaps, of the 15,000 bushels of wheat given to one Archimelus for a single epigram, Ath. 5.209b). It is an operation that could be applied to texts ad infinitum. The final line ‘that sums itself’ represents the result of such thinking: a text which is only there to make up the numbers. By the time Leonides composed his isopsephic epigrams, then, there was a pre-existing habit not only of experimenting with poetry that could contain large totals within a verse, but also of literary responses and criticism involving isopsephy (and criticism of that criticism, if my interpretation of the final line is to be followed).
My aim here is to examine Leonides’ ‘accounting’ compositions and the literary critical positions with which he engages. More specifically, I trace how Leonides reinterprets and redeploys themes from Callimachus’ poetry. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, Callimachus engaged in literary polemic which aimed to carve out a poetics not susceptible to numerical forms of criticism. This precedent, I propose, provides a foil for Leonides’ representations of his own poetic products. In Section 1, I analyse a number of Leonides’ epigrams and their allusions to Callimachus or use of Callimachean themes. I argue that Leonides responds to the Reply to the Telchines and its aesthetics of scale, but that he reintegrates numbers into the literary equation. The addition of numbers into his poems allows for short, compressed compositions which contain ‘large accounts’, and he gestures to this fact by also compressing Callimachean statements into his epigrams. The second and third sections offer an extended discussion of a single epigram and its Callimachean resonances. Epigram 33 FGE describes the novelty of Leonides’ isopsephic poetry and alludes to Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo. Section 2 analyses the opening couplet and how it relates to other receptions of Callimachus’ poetics. I also propose that Leonides places himself in a Callimachean literary tradition, at the same time as correcting Callimachus’ reception elsewhere and offering a potential context for his own playful poems. Section 3 examines the second couplet and argues that Leonides programmatically reframes Callimachus’ approach to poetic measurement by reinterpreting the image of the stream which concludes the Hymn to Apollo. By making Callimachus count, so to speak, he enters into a contemporary debate over poetic refinement and argues that enumerating epigrams are very much a Callimachean product. In response to his modern reception, I show both that Leonides is a sophisticated epigrammatist and that his poems attempt to grapple with a wider discussion about the interrelation of counting and criticism.
2.1 Callimachus Compressed
This section surveys a number of Leonides’ epigrams which respond to Callimachus, tracing out where and to what end Leonides signals his enumerating verses through Callimachean intertexts. At the same time, I hope to demonstrate that, while Callimachus remains a constant through these poems, Leonides also shows himself well aware of, and seeks to upturn and innovate upon, the preceding traditions of epigrammatic poetry. It will further become clear that the ‘Nile-born’ Leonides adopts the stance of the earlier Alexandrian poet in negotiating his own position in relation not to the Ptolemies, but to the imperial family at Rome. His emulation of Callimachean themes extends to their political as well as poetic aspects.
First, an epigram by Leonides which looks to move programmatically from his typical two-couplet epigram form to a single couplet.
One [line] equals one in its psêphoi, not two to two. For I no longer love writing at length.
The couplet brings together various Callimachean passages. Leonides’ dislike for writing at length combines two expressions of aesthetic judgement found in Callimachus’ epigrams.
I hate the cyclic poem, nor do I enjoy the path which carries many this way and that. I hate the beloved who goes around, nor do I drink from the fountain. I loathe everything public.
A short speech, Dionysus, is fine for an accomplished poet. For while one says ‘I win’ as the lengthiest thing, the other, on whom you do not breathe favourably, if asked ‘how did it go?’, says ‘things are tough’. Let that be the story of the one worrying about unjust things, O lord, but for me: concision.
The first epigram begins with a statement of poetic preferences, which then expands out to include other public goods. The target, introduced in the second couplet, is the beloved, who will be explicitly named and attacked in the third couplet (not given here). The second epigram contrasts the concision of the successful and unsuccessful poet: one says enough in two syllables, while the loser goes on at length about his luck. The use of μακρότατον recalls its application by Philemon in Chapter 1, where long-windedness was not a matter of length but unnecessary extension of speech. The same sense should be understood here: ‘I win’ is all that is necessary. The finally irony of the epigram is that the speaker, in recapitulating his opening claim about the poetic value of short speech, produces the verbose form βραχυσυλλαβίη.Footnote 19 The epigram poses the question of whether the speaker practises what he preaches. Leonides manages to invert both sentiments in reaching the same poetic ends of valuing refinement: Callimachus’ coinage βραχυσυλλαβίη is replaced by Leonides’ contrasting coinage δολιχογραφία (‘writing at length’), and Callimachus’ verb of hating is replaced with a positive verb expressed in the negative.Footnote 20 This innovation is itself Callimachean, since Leonides specifically echoes Callimachus’ claim of smallness by replacing one long six-syllable noun with another equally long. Leonides’ allusion ‘corrects’ Callimachus (i.e. smooths away the irony) with a word which both enacts and means writing at length: a six-syllable noun in a two-line epigram creating another contrast of the large in the small.
A further intertext is significant here. The single couplet form recalls Callimachus’ single couplet epigram on Theris.
Short was the visitor, for which reason the line ‘Theris, Cretan, son of Aristaius’, though not intending to be long-winded, is long on me.
There are two points of contact with Leonides’ epigram. The concluding δολιχός (‘long’), which tends to refer to length in either space or time, is echoed by Leonides’ δολιχογραφία. Its use is not confined to Callimachus, but its position in the pentameter is found elsewhere only in Leonidas (72.6 HE = AP 7.726.6) and Dioscorides (5.4 HE = AP 5.55.4) before Leonides, which if nothing else guarantees it as a Hellenistic usage. The allusion to Callimachus is strengthened, though, by the fact that only in the case of Callimachus’ epigram is there the same self-reflection on the act of writing. In addition to the emphatic placing of δολιχός, there is also the concern with the small being paradoxically long by comparison to something else. In the case of Callimachus’ epitaph, the comment seems to be that the short three-word name with demonym and patronym is still too long for a man of such short stature or short in speech. In the same way, when Leonides introduced the equivalence of one line to one, the two-to-two equivalence is what he appears to be describing as δολιχογραφία (cf. οὐ γὰρ ἔτι στέργω). In its form, rhetoric and allusiveness, then, Leonides’ couplet looks to Callimachus’ own couplet attesting to a penchant for short, concise compositions. Equally, he is able to distil Callimachean contrastive aesthetics further through his isopsephy: at the same time as Leonides cuts down his epigrams from two couplets to one and aims at literary smallness, the epigram’s account remains in the thousands (8,222 in the present case).
A second isopsephic epigram continues to display a contrastive aesthetic by alluding to a pre-existing epigrammatic convention.
One sends you birthday gifts from the hunting-nets, another from the sky, a third from the sea, Eupolis. But from me accept a line of the Muses, which will survive forever, a sign of friendship and good learning.
This poem for Eupolis enacts a ‘compression’ of epigram in epigram. The opening line alludes to a tradition inaugurated by Leonidas of Tarentum (66 HE) in which a fowler, a hunter and a fisherman dedicated gifts to the god Pan. Fifteen variations on the theme are preserved in the Palatine Anthology, each following a set of rules concerning content: 1) the dedication is to Pan; 2) the fowler must be called Pigres, the hunter Damis and the fisherman Cleitor; 3) they should be brothers; 4) they should dedicate their tools; 5) they should end with a prayer for success.Footnote 21 As with numerous other epigram series which survive, literary innovation within thematic limits is the aim.Footnote 22 Leonides, however, is acutely aware of this tradition in his reworking. Following the ‘three hunting brothers’ theme, a reader might expect the address to be to Pan. He redirects the traditional address instead towards his friend as the literary brothers reach out to send him gifts on his birthday. More pointedly, though, in the second couplet Leonides outlines his own gift as a ‘line of the Muses’, where στίχος is most naturally taken as a singular (LSJ s.v. στίχος II.a).Footnote 23 Rather than indicating his epigram as a whole, Leonides is probably referring to his opening hexameter which not only resonates against the ‘three hunting brothers’ tradition, it scales down those epigrams of two or three couplets; encapsulating in a single line gifts from everywhere, from land, sea and sky. Here the isopsephic reading matches up to the literary game: just as Leonides can fit a whole epigrammatic tradition into one hexameter, those who have εὐμαθία see how he fits large and equivalent tallies into his two couplets.
Once again, though, Callimachus is also likely to be one of Leonides’ intertexts. The term εὐμαθίη is particularly significant, and it is programmatic for one of Callimachus’ epigrams.
Simos son of Miccus gave me to the Muses and asked for learning; and they, like Glaucus, gave it, a great gift in exchange for a little one.
The speaker in this epigram is Dionysus in the form of a statue, who goes on to lament that his dedication to the Muses by Simos, supposedly in a classroom, has meant that he has to hear the same trite line from Euripides’ Bacchae: ‘the lock is sacred’ (ἱερὸς ὁ πλόκαμος, 6: Euripides Bacchae 494). With typical irony, Callimachus’ final line queries just what this dedicatee is doing with his ‘great gift’. These lines, however, describe the contract between the Muses and the dedicatee with literary pretensions: a gift must be offered. Referring to the encounter of Diomedes and Glaucus in Iliad 6, he does not have the mention of the generation of the leaves in mind, but Glaucus’ exchange of his gold armour for Diomedes’ bronze (234–6). In that passage, Homer points out the relative value in numerical terms – ‘gold for bronze, a hecatomb for nine oxen’ (χρύσεα χαλκείων, ἑκατόμβοι’ ἐννεαβοίων, Il. 6.236) – while Callimachus is more interested in the contrast of large and small. Callimachus’ passage is reworked by Crinagoras in concluding his dedicatory epigram on a finely wrought pen sent to one Proclus on his birthday.
Crinagoras sends [this to you], a little gift but from a greater heart, an accompaniment to your recently learnt scholarship.
Crinagoras is reworking Callimachean themes.Footnote 25 The contrastive aesthetic has been inverted here, with the gift itself being small, but the impetus of friendship behind it being great. The term εὐμαθίη has been moved from the programmatic first position to the equally programmatic final position in the epigram. This move looks to have been inspired by its only use (on present evidence) between Callimachus and Crinagoras in Meleager’s epigram on the coronis, the diacritical mark which ends a text: ‘I sit enthroned at the boundary of learning’ (σύνθρονος ἵδρυμαι τέρμασιν εὐμαθίας, 129.8 HE = AP 12.257.8). Crinagoras takes Meleager’s ‘learned’ ending and combines it with Callimachus’ gift-giving opening theme. Apollonides, Crinagoras’ younger contemporary, echoes the position in the pentameter when he describes the consul Laelius, about to become a poet and write in the book ‘of the Muses’ (Μουσάων, 22.3 GP), seeing in a jay atop a tree ‘a token of learning’ (σύμβολον εὐμαθίης, 4). Leonides thus follows a later Hellenistic tradition of reworking Callimachean epigrammatic themes. Whereas Crinagoras’ finely wrought object is small in contrast to his great intent, Leonides follows Callimachus (and Apollonides) in identifying the Muses as enabling great artistry to inhere in short compositions.
The epigram responds to the theme of εὐμαθία in poetry introduced by Callimachus and developed by later epigrammatists, but I also want to propose that Leonides is building on themes found most clearly in Callimachus’ twelfth Iambus. First, both are presents for birthdays. Iambus 12 celebrates the birth of the daughter of Leo, a friend of Callimachus. It is set on the seventh day after her birth, a traditional time at which the Amphidromia occurs, where the child is circled around the hearth and given presents. Whereas Leo’s daughter has been born recently, it is more likely that Eupolis is older (cf. φιλίης σῆμα).Footnote 26 Second, the Muses are invoked in connection with Leonides’ composition, much as the speaker in Iambus 12 addresses the plural ‘goddesses’ (θεαί, 18) – and then one specific goddess: τῇσδ’ ἐτῇς εὐχῇ[σι .]..α̣εισομαι | Μοῦσα (‘with these true prayers … I will sing, Muse’, Ia. 12.19–20 Kerkhecker) – before offering his poem. Third, both describe in a poem the act of giving poetry as a gift. During the Amphidromia celebrations, Callimachus offers Leo’s child the gift of a poem. The poem recounts the gathering of the gods for Hebe’s birthday, at which each offers a present. Each god provides wonderful gifts, but Apollo bests them all by offering the gift of song, which he describes as being superior to the material gifts of the others.Footnote 27 There emerges a clear structure where Leo’s daughter’s celebration mirrors Hebe’s and so Callimachus’ gift echoes Apollo’s.Footnote 28 Similarly, Leonides contrasts the material gifts of the three brothers, sourced from all sections of the cosmos, with his own isopsephic poetry. Although it is unclear due to the state of the text – Apollo says only that ‘mine is the best gift for the child’ (ἡ δ’ ἐμὴ τῇ παιδὶ καλλίστη δόσις, 68) – the contrast with the other gods’ presents is specifically that his will not perish. Likewise, Leonides’ composition will ‘remain forever’ (ἐς αἰεί … μίμνει). Equally, however, the gifts which the other gods give to Hebe are described by the speaker as παιχνία (‘toys’, ‘games’, 27 and 33), and Apollo alludes to their gifts in a negative fashion by connecting material possessions, especially those made of gold, to human corruption and the disrespecting of the gods. Leonides seeks to reconcile these two attitudes of Iambus 12 in this epigram. His isopsephic epigram improves upon material objects and will last through the ages, but he also conceives of the epigrams as a form of toy: in 2 FGE his composition is ‘a two-line plaything of clever eloquence’ (δίστιχον εὐθίκτου παίγνιον εὐεπίης, 2). In addition to an emphasis on εὐμαθία in relation to a contrastive aesthetics of scale, Leonides draws on the Callimachean theme of the superiority of poetry as a gift over material goods (see 8 FGE below), but he manages to offer poetry from the Muses which is nonetheless also a ‘toy’.
A slightly more straightforward epigram represents itself as a birthday present for Agrippina. Its themes recall those in the previous epigram by Leonides and confirm the location of the second couplet as a site for ‘Callimachean reflection’ on the preceding couplet.
One will send crystal, another silver and some again topaz, birthday gifts of wealth. But look, having only made two couplets equal for Agrippina, I am content with this gift which envy shall not conquer.
This poem operates, as the Milan Posidippus now illuminates, in a rich tradition of epigrams responding to precious stones which dates from the Hellenistic period, a tradition which often develops a metapoetic tone by setting material against literary value.Footnote 29 It also echoes the structure of 4 FGE, with the three terms in the opening hexameter and the contrast with Leonides’ gift in the second couplet; it compresses an epigrammatic theme or commonplace into the first line and offers it as a gift in the second. The second couplet comments on the novelty.
As Jan Kwapisz has recently suggested with regards to this epigram, there is additional playfulness in referring to precious gems.Footnote 30 The etymology of isopsephy alludes to the material context of accounting in the ancient world, and Leonides seems to play with the meaning of ψῆφος here; the extravagant precious gems of the opening line contrast with Leonides’ own implied ψῆφοι in the background. An emphasis on poetic longevity set in contrast to the force of envy (or Envy), furthermore, parallels the reworking of Iambus 12 in 4 FGE by means of a further allusion to Callimachus. As I will argue in Sections 2 and 3, Leonides makes an extended and sophisticated allusion to the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo. In this epigram, Leonides looks to supplement a key term which is absent from 33 FGE. In the Hymn to Apollo, Callimachus succeeds in banishing Blame to where Envy has already fled (113), and 33 FGE focuses on sending Blame away (see below). In the context of a self-arranged epigram book, Leonides, gesturing overtly to his isopsephic innovation, would again be warding off criticism by resuming the Callimachean mode encountered earlier (or at least, elsewhere) in his collection. Leonides’ compositional novelty brings a charm which ensures Agrippina’s fame, while equally his poetic defence against potential ‘private criticism’ (φθόνος) now also extends to his royal addressee. As in many Callimachean passages (e.g. Aetia fr. 1 Harder), Leonides’ pre-emptive strike in this epigram ensures his novel, royal gift is not left open to criticism: he produces tough-as-rock poems that are worthy gifts for the imperial family.Footnote 31
A fourth epigram takes gifts to the imperial family in a different direction.
The Muse of Egyptian Leonides offers this epigram to you, Caesar, on your birthday. The offering of Calliope is always smokeless. But next year, if you wish, she will sacrifice even more than this.
Leonides figures his epigram as a gift and the giver as the Muse of poetry herself. This epigram is no mere plaything; it is (styled as) a signal of the Muse’s wish to acknowledge and celebrate Caesar’s (probably either Nero’s or Vespasian’s) birthday. The opening of line 3, importantly, looks to echo a fragment of Callimachus.
We poets always offer smokeless sacrifices …
The imagery appears elsewhere in Greek literature, but Leonides’ line is notable for its closeness of form, not to mention its closeness in time.Footnote 32 Its preservation in the epitome of Athenaeus (1.8e) does not reveal whether it originally had a political context. What does seem likely is that it is part of Callimachus’ use of sacrificial imagery in order to frame his poetry as also a gift to the gods. In the Reply to the Telchines, Apollo appears to Callimachus and offers him advice.
τὸ μὲν θύος ὅττι πάχιστον
θρέψαι, τὴ]ν Μοῦσαν δ’ ὠγαθὲ λεπταλέην·
feed the sacrificial animal so that it becomes as fat as possible, but, my dear fellow, keep the Muse slender
Apollo’s command sets up a contrast between two different offerings to the gods, a poetic composition and ritual sacrifice, and in particular marks the differing criteria of quality.Footnote 33 Leonides mixes the terms of this Callimachean parallelism in his opening line: what is being ‘sacrificed’ or offered is this very epigram.
Two things are remarkable about the allusion. First, if Callimachus in the fragment also advances a parallelism that sets poetry and sacrifice as two means of pleasing the gods, then Leonides changes this religious claim into a political statement, as the Muse now sacrifices to a ruler. Once offerings were given up to the gods, now both appear subservient to the emperor. Second, if the Reply to the Telchines is also recalled when reading Leonides’ epigram, then line 4 toys with Apollo’s directive and Callimachus’ parallel of sacrifice and song. In the future Leonides promises to sacrifice ‘greater things’, ‘more excessive things’, or adverbially ‘more greatly’, ‘even more’ (LSJ s.v. περισσός, literally ‘beyond the regular number’). For a sacrificial offering, this is a boon for the gods and so for Caesar. Yet as Leonides makes clear in the first line, what is ‘sacrificed’ or offered is the poem. A promise for a greater poem appears to contradict Apollo’s order as represented in Callimachus. Leonides’ isopsephic epigrams, however, with their contrastive aesthetics of scale operating through the dual significance of Greek letters, can metaphorically bypass this contrast between a large sacrifice and a slender poem. With verses adding up to thousands, he can produce slender poems which are also large offerings. It is fascinating in this respect that a further epigram by Leonides explicitly mentions a sacrifice to Caesar (likely Nero) which specifies 100 oxen to be slaughtered (29 FGE = AP 9.352; 1 + 2 = 3 + 4 = 7,218). As Page notes, ‘hecatomb’ was rarely an actual sacrifice of so much and Leonides’ specificity here suggests an important occasion.Footnote 34 By the same token, of course, it might be read as responding to 1 FGE. Leonides promised more. 29 FGE delivers by making a ‘hecatomb’ (a word itself notably absent) true to its numerical claim, vastly improving on the singular offering of 1 FGE, while on the isopsephic level, the count goes up from 5,699 to 7,218. What is important to note about 1 FGE, and potentially also about 29 FGE, is how Leonides pulls Callimachus’ self-description in fr. 494 Pf. in two directions. Callimachus’ imagery is redeployed in order to underscore the contrastive aesthetics of Leonides’ innovative isopsephic epigrams, but also in order to strike up a relationship with the imperial family. Leonides’ allusion in 1 FGE suggests Callimachus as a model of poetic self-presentation with respect to one’s literary production but also with respect to a poem’s function within a broader set of political concepts related to the ruling power – in this case the emperor as a divinity to whom people ought to sacrifice.
The dual poetic and political aspects of Leonides’ poetry and Callimachus’ influence on both finds its most complex expression in another epigram to Caesar (either Nero or Vespasian).
Caesar, once more accept from me this book, the third of the Graces, as a token of eloquence equal in number; the Nile will in any case also send it straight through Greece to your land, a most poetic gift.
In this opening to a third book of isopsephic epigrams (after 6 and 33 FGE, perhaps?), Leonides gifts his work to Caesar, transmitting his poems from Alexandria to Caesar’s land (either Rome or Italy broadly speaking; cf. Ἰταλίδαις, ‘Italians’, at 21.2 FGE). A number of intertexts come into view when reading this poem, which open up both a numerical and political relationship between poet and addressee.
On first reading, Leonides makes a connection between reading and counting with his reference to a third Grace. In the same way that his handling of εὐμαθίη showed that his reception of Callimachus is mediated through subsequent epigrammatists, 7 FGE similarly recalls an epigram which opens with an accounting that was composed by Antipater of Thessalonica, an Augustan poet patronised by L. Calpurnius Piso.
Four Victories lift on their wide-winged backs an equal number of children of the Immortals. One [holds] war-confronting Athena, one Aphrodite, one Alcides, one fearless Ares, on your fine painted ceiling; and they are heading to heaven. O Gaius, bulwark of your country Rome, may the ox-devourer make you invincible, the Cyprian happy in marriage, Pallas wise in council, Ares unflinching.
The presence of such a rare form as ἰσήριθμος (‘equal in number’) in the first pentameter in both epigrams is too specific to be a coincidence.Footnote 36 In Antipater’s epigram, four gods supported by Victories and painted on Gaius’ house roof are described as gifting him the qualities in which they themselves excel. The gift in Leonides’ epigram is more modest: only one Grace, as opposed to the attributes of four gods, and instead of these Victories transporting the gods heavenwards, Leonides sends his gift directly to Caesar. It seems that Leonides took inspiration from an earlier epigrammatist who also addressed his poem to a member of the Julio-Claudian family. Antipater’s description, moreover, recalls an epigram by Callimachus describing the Graces.
Four are the Graces; for one besides those three has just been fashioned and is still wet with perfume. Happy Berenice, resplendent among all, without whom the Graces themselves are not Graces.
Antipater’s opening word echoes Callimachus’ epigram, but he varies the vision: not four statues of the Graces, but an image of four Victories.Footnote 37 Whereas Callimachus equates Berenice with a Grace, in effect deifying her, Antipater chooses instead to figure Gaius as receiving certain divine attributes. If, according to Gow and Page, the epigram can be dated to around 1 bce, then perhaps this is due to Augustus’ tight control over the imperial cult and the deification of rulers while he was still alive.Footnote 38 Leonides here follows Callimachus in his mention of the Graces in the opening line, in a metrical position (across the second and third feet) that has an association with the counting up of Graces in epigram. Meleager makes repeated play on the number of Graces, using the same opening position twice (39 HE = AP 5.195 and 74 HE = AP 9.16), and further epigrams by him and others suggest Callimachus’ poem could readily come to mind.Footnote 39 If Leonides’ third Grace does not in fact directly point a reader to Callimachus’ epigram, it nevertheless places the poem in an epigrammatic tradition of counting up Graces that has Callimachus as its origin point.
By describing a third Grace while looking to other epigrams with four as well as three goddesses in their opening verse, Leonides makes the reader count on a level additional to his isopsephic tally. And it is worth being clear about what ἰσήριθμος refers to in Leonides’ epigram. On one level, the three Graces are the object of comparison for which his book offers a token of equal-numbered eloquence. At another level, an ‘eloquence which is equal in number’ or an ‘equal-numbering eloquence’ refers to Leonides’ own isopsephy. Understanding ἀριθμός as ‘worth’ or ‘rank’ (LSJ s.v. ἀριθμός I.5.), it might also reflect Leonides’ self-evaluation on a more concrete level, either in relation to Caesar or to the Romans more generally, or in relation to the other epigrams that develop the Callimachean tradition of counting up Graces. This ambiguity would allow for further interpretive games for the reader, sending them to, inter alios, Antipater then Callimachus counting up their respective Graces and Victories, asking them to interrogate what the very idea of things being ἰσήριθμος means.
Leonides also sets out the cultural stakes of his poem, but in a less obvious and more allusive fashion. His last three verses together draw phrases and imagery from Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos in representing the transfer of his poetic book to Rome. First, there is the term ἰσήριθμος. In the hymn, Apollo prophesies how the Galatians as ὀψίγονοι Τιτῆνες (‘late-born Titans’, 174) will attack the Greeks ῥώσωνται νιφάδεσσιν ἐοικότες ἢ ἰσάριθμοι | τείρεσιν (‘rushing on like snowflakes, or in numbers equalling the stars’, 175–6).Footnote 40 Granted, here the alpha is short in contrast to the long etas in the epigrammatic examples, and similarly the word appears in the final position, unlike the position in Leonides and Antipater. As Chapter 3, Section 3 will further evidence, however, ἰσήριθμος does have a certain currency in Hellenistic poetic passages relating to numbers, and as a close reader of Hellenistic poetry it is plausible that Leonides is alluding to such a usage.Footnote 41 The similarity between Leonides’ and Callimachus’ use is that both index a contact of cultures: Greeks and Galatians, Romans and Greeks. In advancing his Egyptian identity in the face of a Roman audience, the Nile-born Leonides – as he repeatedly tells his reader (1.2, 29.1–2, 30.4, 32.2 FGE) – presents his gift as measuring up to Roman expectations in a world where it is now the Greeks and not the Galatians that are the subdued people.
Second, there is the fact that the Nile sends the book through Greece on its way to Caesar’s land. In Callimachus’ hymn, Delos (in her former guise as Asteria) offers herself as a location for Apollo’s birth after Leto’s search for a place willing to receive her. Leto rests by the river Inopus, ‘which the earth sends forth most abundantly at the time when the Nile in full flow comes down from the Ethiopian heights’ (ὅν τε βάθιστον | γαῖα τότ’ ἐξανίησιν, ὅτε πλήθοντι ῥεέθρῳ | Νεῖλος ἀπὸ κρημνοῖο κατέρχεται Αἰθιοπῆος·, 206–8). Callimachus here refers to the belief that the river Inopus had a subterranean connection with the Nile, just as the river Arethusa in Syracuse was considered by some to have been fed by the Alpheius in the Peloponnese.Footnote 42 He uses the site at which Apollo, the god of song, is to be born in order to connect Delos as part of ‘Old Greece’ with the new Greek territory of Egypt from which he writes. The belief brings Callimachus’ own context and praise of Apollo into a much closer (geographical) relation with the god’s origins. In what survives of Leonides’ poetry, the overriding audience is presented as Roman and the poet as Egyptian; there is nothing marked as Greek in the epigrams whether topical or reworking commonplace themes. Leonides could have simply sent the poetry from Egypt to Rome, but he does not. I therefore take it as probable that the trajectory which connects the Nile with Greece, before moving to Caesar’s land, is motivated by the implicit reference to that geographical belief mentioned in Callimachus’ hymn. Leonides signals his debt to Callimachus’ geographical bridging of Egypt and Apollo’s Delos and at the same time adds Rome as the final stop on this journey in order to reflect the new political context of his Alexandrian poetry, which is in dialogue with Rome as well as with old Greece.
Third, there is the superlative adjective ἀοιδότατος (‘most poetic’) in line 4, which as Page notes has a certain Hellenistic currency.Footnote 43 It is employed later in the Hymn to Delos to describe the swans: ἀοιδότατοι πετεηνῶν (‘the most musical of birds’, 252). They circle seven times around Delos as Apollo is born, having come from Maeonian Pactolus in Asia Minor. The numerical frequency of this act is marked by the use of ἑβδομάκις (‘seven times’), ‘an absolute hapax eiremenon in Greek’; perhaps Leonides noticed the striking phrase that captured the numerical nature of their action.Footnote 44 As the swans left Pactolus and flew to Delos, so Leonides’ own most poetic gift leaves Egypt and makes its way to Rome, and not to the heavens as in Antipater’s epigram. What emerges – in admittedly allusive fashion – is that Leonides modifies three points of cultural and geographical contact and connection in the Hymn to Delos and does so in order to signal his own poetic transfer between two cultures, two empires and two capitals. Suggesting such a transfer through Callimachean models once again places him as a new Callimachus within these shifting geographies of power.
Even more tentative but nevertheless worth noting is the ending of the first pentameter. It has a particularly Callimachean ring; σύμβολον (‘token’) followed by a noun in the genitive and preceded by a further noun or adjective modifying the latter noun occurs first in extant epigram in Callimachus’ epigram on Aratus: χαίρετε λεπταί | ῥήσιες Ἀρήτου σύμβολον ἀγρυπνίης (‘hail, subtle discourses, the token of Aratus’ sleeplessness’, Callimachus Epigram 56.3–4 HE = AP 9.507.3–4). In the epigram, σύμβολον ἀγρυπνίης (‘token of sleeplessness’) is a conjecture, whereas AP reads σύντονος ἀγρυπνίη (‘concise sleeplessness’) and a version preserved in two of the Aratean Vitae reads σύγγονος ἀγρυπνίης (‘sibling of sleeplessness’).Footnote 45 In recent times, Selina Stewart has proposed σύντομος ἀγρυπνίη, and it is indeed easy to see how it might fit with Callimachean ideas of concision, as well as how it might have been corrupted to σύγγονος and σύντονος in transmission.Footnote 46 I continue to read σύμβολον ἀγρυπνίης, however. This reading of such a widely read epigram provides a good explanation for the stylistic habit in subsequent epigrammatists of having a pentameter, often the final one, end with similar phrasing built around σύμβολον, something not shared by σύντονος or σύγγονος.Footnote 47 Leonides is certainly one of these later epigrammatists following Callimachus’ style, but there may be something more to its use. Leonides presents himself as having formerly been a devotee of astronomy and only recently become a poet (21 FGE = AP 9.344) and in another poem gifts ‘an imitation of the skies’ (οὐράνιον μείμημα, 32.1 FGE = AP 9.355.1) to Poppaea Augusta, the wife of Nero. It would be particularly apt for a poet who thinks of himself also as an astronomer to present his poems as a symbol of his own literary skill in the language that Callimachus had used for Aratus’ Phaenomena, the quintessential poem of astronomy.
In each epigram, there is a question of just how close Leonides’ imitation of Callimachus is and to what extent it is mediated through intervening epigrammatists. Nevertheless, the cumulative evidence makes it probable that Leonides is engaged in a concerted programme of allusions to the famous Alexandrian poet and his aesthetics. It is, moreover, a playful engagement in that Callimachus’ aesthetic pronouncements are juxtaposed with poems that can be counted in the most literal of senses. And I do not think this is an accident of survival or of the selection of Leonides’ poems preserved in the later collections. My proposal in the following two sections is that one epigram in particular demonstrates that Leonides’ aim is specifically to reformulate Callimachus’ poetics and to introduce counting back into poetic criticism.
2.2 Cups and Sources
One of Leonides’ epigrams above all others deserves closer inspection: it provides a programmatic Callimachean introduction to a book of isopsephic poetry and engages in contemporary reflections on the influence and nature of Callimachus’ poetics.
We open, so as to draw off a drink from another spring, the unfamiliar writing of Muse-serving Leonides. The couplets are equal in psêphoi. But away with you, Blame, sink your sharp tooth into others.
The epigram introduces the poet and the strange nature of his work in the first pentameter, yet it is the initial hexameter which figures it as a programmatic piece (οἴγνυμεν, ‘we open’). Its wording is a cause for comment. For Page, the reader ought rather to expect οἴγνυμεν … πίδακα (‘we open a spring’).Footnote 48 I would prefer to read οἴγνυμεν as governing γράμμα and to understand the rest of the hexameter as providing the metaphor for that action. To draw a drink from a stream is an idea attested in Posidippus’ poem on a shrine to the Nymphs in honour of Arsinoe: ἡ δ’ ἀφ’ Ὑμηττοῦ πέτρος ἐρευγομένη πόμα κρήνης | ἐκδέχεται σπιλάδων ὑγρὰ διαινομένη (‘the stone of Hymettus, gushing from the caves, receives a drink from the spring, glistening with water, 113.10–11 AB = SH 978.10–11). It is perhaps more clearly seen in an epigram preserved in the Paradoxographus Florentinus, a collection roughly contemporary with Leonides: the poem inscribed above the spring commands any thirsty goatherds ‘to draw a drink from the spring’ (τῆς μὲν ἀπὸ κρήνης ἄρυσαι πόμα, Anon. 143a.3 FGE).Footnote 49 A drink as an image for poetry is at least as old as Pindar, who at the end of Nemean 3 sends to his patron, Aristocleides, his ‘cup of song’ brimming with honey and milk (πόμ᾿ ἀοίδιμον, 79). At the same time, of course, the syntax encourages wordplay on the idea of partaking of a new vintage from the jar or cup which one opens: an equally programmatic image.Footnote 50 Leonides here draws on both cups and streams in metaphorising his novel composition. This and the following section intend to trace out the Hellenistic and Callimachean aspects of these images and how they are used to present but also justify the presence of isopsephy in his epigrams.
First, let me state what I see to be the key connection to Callimachus. Christine Luz has proposed that in the epigram – a point surprisingly missed by Page – ἐξ ἑτέρης … πίδακος echoes the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo.Footnote 51 Likewise, on my reading it is the mention of a πῖδαξ in line 1 and the address to Momus in lines 3 and 4 which I take to be an allusion to the hymn, where Apollo responds to the criticisms that Phthonos whispered in his ear. Here is Apollo’s response and Callimachus’ concluding line:
Phthonos spoke secretly in Apollo’s ear: “I do not love the poet who does not sing as much as the sea.” Apollo kicked Phthonos with his foot and said the following: “Great is the flow of the Assyrian river, but it drags all filth from the earth and much refuse in its waters. Bees do not carry water to Deo from everywhere, but from a small stream, pure and undefiled, which comes from a holy spring, the highest choice of waters.” Greetings, lord. But as for Blame, let him go where Envy dwells!
Apollo’s contrast of the large Euphrates and the small stream has typically been read as reflecting Callimachus’ preference for small and refined poetry over long epic.Footnote 53 Its use by Leonides would certainly make a pointed introduction to a collection of epigrams, the genre par excellence for poetic smallness and refinement. On the one hand, the allusion in a programmatic epigram at the start of the collection to Callimachus’ programmatic conclusion would emphasise literary continuity through its very subject matter; (the spirit of) Callimachus’ poem ‘flows’ naturally into Leonides’ own works, like the water from a stream into a cup. On the other hand, Leonides marks his innovation while alluding to his predecessor: a notably Callimachean stream in its allusiveness, it is nevertheless different and new.
Leonides, though, was not the only epigrammatist to allude to Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo passage. Antipater of Thessalonica lambasted those poets who drink κρήνης ἐξ ἱερῆς … λιτὸν ὕδωρ (‘the simple water from the holy fountain’, 20.4 GP = AP 11.20.4). Instead he pours libations to Archilochus and Homer; his cup οὐ δέχεθ’ ὑδροπότας (‘does not receive water-drinkers’, 6). In reference to Callimachus’ reception in this epigram, Peter Knox has argued persuasively that this contrast between water and wine as inspirational sources does not seem to exist before Antipater. Rather, his epigram is innovative in alluding to Callimachus’ stream – possibly also to Hippocrene on Helicon from the Dream at the beginning of Aetia 1 – as a pedantic mode of bookish poetry and, in opposition, wine as the force behind the ‘authentic’ poetry of Archilochus and Homer.Footnote 54 Antipater reframes Callimachus’ metapoetic images; what was a matter of the source’s purity has been turned into its nature qua water. Writing in the wake of Antipater’s epigram, Leonides would have likely encountered both this negative approach to, and other more faithful readings of, Callimachus’ poetics. This observation helps makes sense of Leonides’ opening line, which is not simply a Callimachean stream, but a ‘drink’ from it. Contrary to Antipater of Thessalonica’s allusion, Callimachus was not teetotal, as he emphasises in his own epitaph.
You set your feet beside the tomb of Battus’ son, who knows well both song and how to join together in laughter over wine at the right time.
More than this, though, in another passage of the Aetia, Callimachus depicts himself drinking at a symposium. The fact that, like himself, his drinking companion from Icus, Theugenes, enjoys small cups (ὀλίγῳ δ’ ἥδετο κισσυβίῳ, fr. 178.12 Harder) has also been read as intimating Callimachus’ preference for poetic refinement over excessively large works, oxymoronically making small Polyphemus’ monstrous κισσυβίον (‘rustic cup’) in the Odyssey (9.346).Footnote 55 Later on in the same passage, Callimachus states that wine needs both water and conversation mixed into it and so exhorts that the two symposiasts ‘add it to the harsh drink as an antidote’ (βάλλωμεν χαλεπῷ φάρμακον ἐν πόματι, fr. 178.20 Harder) – a line which also alludes to Odyssean drinking, this time recalling Helen adding a drug of forgetfulness to the drink served up to Menelaus and Telemachus at a banquet in Sparta (Od. 4.220). Far from Callimachus having a ‘prohibition poetics’, for him wine requires dialogue and, not unsurprisingly in the Aetia, this leads to Theugenes providing an aition for an Ician ritual. Callimachus’ πόμα is just as much a source as the stream on Mount Helicon that he arrives at in the first book of the Aetia (fr. 2 Harder), the latter of inspiration, the former of information. That Leonides’ epigram opens with a ‘drink from another spring’ reconciles two aspects or, rather, two possibly conflicting readings, of Callimachean inspiration. The use of ἀρύω in the result clause is particularly apt, then, since it denotes both the pouring out of wine and the drawing off of water from a stream (LSJ s.v. ἀρύω). The reader is invited to think that the poetics of the opening epigram, and so the collection, responds to a multitude of Callimachean poses and passages, not only to Antipater’s caricature.
Having Callimachus’ stream ‘in a cup’, furthermore, would have resonances in the context of epigram collections. In the same way that the allusion to Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo might rework a programmatic end into a programmatic opening, sympotic imagery could also be exploited programmatically in Hellenistic poetry collections. When it comes to epigram collections, consider a poem by Posidippus from the Palatine Anthology which opens Κεκροπί, ῥαῖνε, λάγυνε, πολύδροσον ἰκμάδα Βάκχου (‘Sprinkle, Cecropian jug, the dewy moisture of Bacchus’, 1.1 HE = AP 5.134.1 = 123.1 AB). Posidippus goes on in the following lines to reject the Stoic drinking practices of Zeno and Cleanthes and takes γλυκύπικρος Ἔρως (‘bittersweet Eros’, 4) as his topic. It thus has a programmatic function. In her study of this epigram, Kathryn Gutzwiller suggests that Posidippus may be the first to compose ‘a hymnlike poem addressed to a wine jar’.Footnote 56 Hymns often introduced ancient collections of poems (e.g. Theognis 1–18, Sappho fr. 1), so it is possible that the hymnic aspect marks it as programmatic. Equally, though, Theognis’ collection is strongly sympotic in its themes, and hymns were sung at the beginning of symposia: an opening hymn could itself be sympotically programmatic.Footnote 57 With the publication of the Milan Posidippus, this proposal can be extended.Footnote 58 The first two (readable) epigrams in the collection’s programmatic opening section, restored as Λιθικά (On Stones), take as their subject drinking vessels. Epigram 2 AB envisions a κέρας (‘drinking horn’, 1) used for pouring libations.Footnote 59 Epigram 3 AB instead considers a ruby engraved with the image of a cup encircled with tendrils. These ekphrastic epigrams’ reflection on the preciousness of the materials and the drinking-ware, it has been convincingly proposed, articulate an aesthetic program which runs through the whole collection.Footnote 60 Posidippus introduces the sympotic motif symbolised by a drinking vessel to set out his aesthetic principles in a convivial mode.Footnote 61
Leonides’ ‘cup’ continues this strategy of indicating a particular aesthetic approach through a sympotic motif and is equally as programmatic as the allusion to Callimachus’ spring. There is a further reason why the cup is an apt image for Leonides to introduce. Leonides elsewhere represents his works as crafted gifts for friends in a dining setting.
Look again at this sturdy Muse of Leonides, a two-line plaything of clever eloquence. This will be a very fine toy for Marcus at the Saturnalia, both at dinners and among the servants of the Muses.
Pastimes such as isopsephy have a long and apparently distinguished history. They are in some sense a descendent of the games mentioned by Larensius in Athenaeus’ Dinner Sophists, who on the authority of Clearchus of Soli (fourth century bce) describes how οἱ παλαιοί (‘the ancients’), in contrast to Clearchus’ degenerate contemporaries, challenged each other with sympotic games: to recite a verse with a specific number of syllables or letters, or to recall in turn cities in Asia and Europe which began with certain letters (Ath. 10.457c–f = Clearchus fr. 63 Wehrli). While Clearchus describes letter-play as more noble than contemporary habits, for Plutarch the ‘putting of names into number symbols’ (θέσεις ὀνομάτων ἐν ἀριθμοῖς ὑποσυμβόλοις, Qaest. conv. 5.673b) was a game playable even by the ‘unlearned’ (ἀφιλόλογοι, 673a) after dinner. Setting both Clearchus’ and Plutarch’s rhetoric of the high-brow and low-brow to one side, it is clear that Leonides specifically invites the reader into the text’s games (‘look again’), while the image of the cup in the opening line of the epigram which probably inaugurated one of Leonides’ collections sets out a context for them as post-prandial play.
2.3 Pebbles in the Stream
The opening words of the second couplet of 33 FGE explain (γάρ) what is new about Leonides’ epigram, while the subsequent adversative address to Blame – ἀλλὰ σύ, Μῶμε – looks to defend what has immediately preceded. What Leonides must defend in his claim that δίστιχα γὰρ ψήφοισιν ἰσάζεται is that his opening Callimachean introduction swiftly turns to a concern for numbers. In this section I explore further how Leonides’ imagery and engagement with the Hymn to Apollo seek to bridge the perceived gap between refined poetry and numerical accounts: the presence of ψῆφοι in his poems is a rebuttal against a very particular form of biting criticism.
At a critical point for concepts of number and measurement in the Reply to the Telchines, Callimachus addresses the Telchines and attempts another banishing.
Be off, destructive breed of Bascania, and hereafter judge cleverness by craft, not by the Persian schoinos.
Callimachus’ injunction addresses two related but distinct aesthetic concepts: the act of measurement and the criterion of measurement. The prohibition against judging by the σχοῖνος Περσίς implies on the one hand that one ought not to approach artworks with the criterion of length in mind. On the other hand, the σχοῖνος Περσίς as the criterion, a land-measurement of many stadia in length, could be understood as a rejection of producing and valuing works of excessive length: ‘do not judge poetry by the kilometre’. In what looks like a purposeful (mis)reading of this latter sense in Callimachus, Leonides announces that what is unique about his poem is its being equal in ψῆφοι, which refers in the first instance to the small stones used for numerical manipulations (LSJ s.v. ψῆφος II.1). That is, Leonides still numerically ‘measures’ his epigrams, but replaces an excessive criterion with a smaller one, a size more apt for the refined aesthetics of Callimachus and the Hellenistic age and which might be thought of as particularly apt for the small, originally stone-bound genre of epigram.
Leonides’ epigram also thematically reconciles his potentially un-Callimachean enumerating epigrams by invoking the aesthetics of scale observed in Section 1. In Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, a contrast is made between the great torrent of the Euphrates and an undefiled stream: a contrastive aesthetic underscored by Phthonos’ preference for large poems which takes up a single line and Apollo’s favouring of smaller works which extends to five. The key feature of the Assyrian river, the symbol of its large size, is that it carries filth (λύματα) and refuse (συρφετός) with it. Leonides, however, appears to respond to a literal parallel between water source and poetry: large rivers carry debris, while streams are clean; large poems carry literary ‘rubbish’, while small poems are pure. His use of the term ψῆφος (‘pebble’) to indicate the letters counted as numbers of course has as its common meaning a small pebble or stone (LSJ s.v. ψῆφος). On first reading, the epigram upsets the imagery of Callimachus’ aesthetics at the end of the Hymn to Apollo. The Callimachean ‘source’ which flows into Leonides’ collection has been modified; for (γάρ) his couplets ‘are equal in pebbles’ or, even, ‘these couplets are equal to pebbles’. Either way, Leonides provocatively reworks Callimachus’ hydrological metapoetics by taking his cue from Callimachus’ source, while quite literally filling his own lines with ψῆφοι, making it a Callimachean spring of a rather different kind: ἐξ ἑτέρης … πίδακος. This plays out on the textual level too. Just as it is Leonides who adds pebbles into Callimachus’ undefiled spring, it is the announcement of Leonides, his new epigram and its innovation in lines 2–3 which disturbs the flow of Callimachean allusions in lines 1 and 3–4, which appear in the hymn in consecutive lines (112–13).
The water metaphor of Hellenistic – and particularly Callimachean – poetics is well known, but stones too have their place among the aesthetic imagery of the poets and even beside water. In Theocritus’ Idyll 22, for example, the Dioscuri wander from the rest of the Argonauts and encounter ‘a perennial spring, brimming with undefiled water and the pebbles seeming like crystal or like silver’ (ἀέναον κρήνην ὑπὸ λισσάδι πέτρῃ | ὕδατι πεπληθυῖαν ἀκηράτῳ· αἱ δ’ ὑπένερθε | λάλλαι κρυστάλλῳ ἠδ’ ἀργύρῳ ἰνδάλλοντο, 37–9).Footnote 63 The description of the stream is similar to Callimachus’ in that it is pure, and the implication is that this allowed for the λάλλαι (‘pebbles’), if that is the correct reading, to be viewed with clarity.Footnote 64 Immediately after this scene the Dioscuri meet the boxer Amycus. The description forms a notable contrast.
Beneath his shoulder points the muscles in his brawny arms stood out like rounded boulders which some winter torrent has rolled and polished in its mighty eddies.
The peaceful stream with its pebbles like crystal is replaced by Amycus, whom they will soon fight, whose monstrous mass is like a boulder polished by a torrent. Theocritus’ description is a detailed reworking of Homer’s simile of Hector’s attack on the Achaean ships (Il. 13.137–43).Footnote 65 There Hector’s onslaught is likened to a stone pulled loose by a winter storm and carried down to the plain. Similarities can be observed with Callimachus’ torrent which carries refuse. Theocritus and Callimachus diverge, however, in that both Theocritus’ streams – the one seen by the Dioscuri and the torrent employed in the simile – contain stones. In fact, the boulder smoothed down by the torrent is an equally Hellenistic image of fineness as the smoothed rock at the locus amoenus and the pebbles in the stream.Footnote 66
The contrasting aesthetics of stone and water imagery can also be observed in Posidippus’ programmatic opening section, the Lithica. It too contains in its sequence an arrangement that starts with fine, engraved stones (1–7, 13–15 AB) and even crystal (16 AB) which then moves on to larger rocks (18, 19 AB). Size, too, is a focus for the smaller work ‘that measures three spans in circumference’ (τρισ[πίθαμον περίμετρον, 8.7 AB) as well as for the ‘fifty-foot rock’ which concludes the section (ἡμι]πλεθραίην … πέτρην, 19.5 AB). In fact, this final stone of the section again alludes to Homer’s ‘rolling stone’ from the Iliad’s Hector simile (ὀλοοίτροχος, Il. 13.137; cf. 19.9 AB).Footnote 67 In the case of both the small refined stones and the large fifty-foot rock their movement is connected with water, whether in a rushing river or washed up by the sea.Footnote 68
My point is not that these are necessarily metapoetic images, but that the Hellenistic tradition already advanced a contrastive aesthetic by setting small stones beside larger rocks all in a waterborne context. What I am proposing, then, is that Leonides is drawing on this distinction between the differing aesthetics of stones in a river when alluding to Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo; placing small pebbles and not refuse in Callimachus’ stream resembles the river content seen in Theocritus Idyll 22 and the earlier epigrams from Posidippus’ collection. Leonides sets his unique form of poetic ‘refinement’ (pebbles) within Callimachus’ pre-existing image of ‘slimline’ poetry (stream), and so his epigram doubly emphasises poetic fineness through two mutually reinforcing Hellenistic aesthetic images. Skimming pebbles into Callimachus’ stream, Leonides underscores the value of isopsephy. He composes small, refined works which nevertheless contain ψῆφοι and not large stones: isopsephy is another source of refinement.
Leonides can be seen to draw on Hellenistic imagery of water and stones in characterising his poetry, but it is also important to highlight the contemporary reception and critical value of those images. Longinus’ On the Sublime, a text perhaps contemporary with Leonides, also uses fluvial metaphors to characterise literary output and the nature of the sublime poet.Footnote 69 Significant for the current discussion is that he does so by drawing on the distinction found at the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo.
ἔνθεν φυσικῶς πως ἀγόμενοι μὰ Δί’ οὐ τὰ μικρὰ ῥεῖθρα θαυμάζομεν, εἰ καὶ διαυγῆ καὶ χρήσιμα, ἀλλὰ τὸν Νεῖλον καὶ Ἴστρον ἢ Ῥῆνον, πολὺ δ’ ἔτι μᾶλλον τὸν Ὠκεανόν.Footnote 70
So it is that we are led in some natural way, by Zeus, not to wonder at the small streams, even though they are clear and useful, but at the Nile, the Istrus and the Rhine, and much more still, at the Ocean.
The image of Homer as the Ocean from which all poets draw inspiration is a commonplace which arises in the Hellenistic period and is not confined to Callimachus.Footnote 71 Longinus nevertheless inverts the contrastive aesthetic of the Hymn to Apollo; the great poets are like roaring torrents majestic and sublime, completely eclipsing fine, small rivulets. Nicholas Richardson and Richard Hunter, among others, see this discussion in Longinus as conspicuously avoiding mention of Callimachus.Footnote 72 The language of poetic purity or immaculacy, as has been noted, echoes Callimachus’ ‘pure’ (καθαρή) stream. His rhetorical comparison of poets develops the allusion.
τί δέ; Ἐρατοσθένης ἐν τῇ Ἠριγόνῃ (διὰ πάντων γὰρ ἀμώμητον τὸ ποιημάτιον) Ἀρχιλόχου πολλὰ καὶ ἀνοικονόμητα παρασύροντος …;
What then? [Is] Eratosthenes [better] in his Erigone (in all respects a blameless little poem) than Archilochus surging greatly and disorderly?
Longinus will go on to compare Bacchylides and Pindar, and Ion of Chios and Sophocles. The contrast of Eratosthenes and Archilochus here may have something to do with Archilochus’ connection to wine and the Erigone’s aetiology for the introduction of wine production into Attica.Footnote 73 It may also be that Callimachus was too great a figure to challenge and so Longinus takes on his ‘pupil’, his ‘second in command’ (Eratosthenes, as a polymath, was famously named τὸ Βῆτα, ‘Mr Beta’).Footnote 74 While it has been observed that Archilochus’ surging here aligns him with the large torrents (of great poets) as found in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo and later on in Longinus, it should also be noted that Eratosthenes’ poem provides the second term of comparison in the hymn. Just as Apollo in the hymn champions refined compositions and banishes ‘Blame’ (Μῶμος), Eratosthenes’ poem is small (cf. τὸ ποιημάτιον) and ‘blameless’ or literally ‘does not attract μῶμος/Μῶμος’.
Longinus, then, goes to great lengths to cleave sublime poetry and Homeric verse apart from poetry concerned with minutiae, and he does so by using Callimachus’ fluvial imagery against him. Underlying this contrast is the question of how ‘accuracy’ (ἀκρίβεια) relates to good poetry. He opens his digression on the difference between genius and faultlessness (of which the fluvial comparison forms a part) with a question: is a great poet made by the largest number of virtues, or the greatness of the virtues themselves (33.1)? He proposes in response that ‘the greatest natures [of poets] are the least immaculate; for accuracy in everything runs the risk of smallness’ (αἱ ὑπερμεγέθεις φύσεις ἥκιστα καθαραί· τὸ γὰρ ἐν παντὶ ἀκριβὲς κίνδυνος μικρότητος, 33.2). He sets sublime poets apart from concerns about accuracy by looking to the Aristotelian conception of it as social pettiness: ἡ ἀκριβολογία μικροπρεπές (Eth. Nic. 1122b8). The greatest poets, those who achieve sublimity, are not petty or mean but ignore small faults in the grip of genius. In his later comparison of Demosthenes and Hyperides (34), too, distinguishing between the precise and flawless poet and the sublime poet is the difference between judging based on ‘counting’ (ἀριθμῷ) and on ‘greatness’ (μεγέθει).Footnote 75 It is not only the water imagery that Longinus inverts: the counting up of poetry at which Callimachus so inveighed is turned against him here. For Longinus, the flawless Hellenistic poet wins only when the counting Telchines are the critics.
Given Leonides’ combining of isopsephy with Callimachus’ poetics, it would be hard to imagine him agreeing with Longinus’ assessment that accuracy is only for second-rate, non-sublime poets, especially when that argument is cloaked in Callimachean imagery. Equally, Leonides does ‘make Callimachus count’, as it were, and sets his themes in compositions that have manifestly focused on numerical accuracy. However, I would tentatively argue that the intertextual advertisement that his ‘Callimachean’ stream contains pebbles proposes a rather different critical judgement regarding his enumerating epigrams. The precedent of pebbles in a stream reaches back further even than Callimachus, to Homer’s simile describing Scamander’s onslaught on Achilles in Iliad 21.
Just as when a man drawing from a dark water source guides the water in a channel along his plants and orchard, holding in his hand a spade and chucking out from the ditch obstructions. The pebbles are all jostled by the water as it flows forth, and as it quickly flows down, it murmurs in the sloping plot and outruns the man guiding it.
It has often been noted in passing – although, as far as I have been able to investigate, nowhere in print – that Callimachus’ image of the Assyrian river full of refuse is modelled, at a certain remove, on this passage. Immediately before Scamander and Achilles meet in battle, Scamander turns to Apollo and warns him to keep out of the fight as he had agreed (Il. 21.227–32): a scene reworked in Callimachus with Phthonos’ championing those who sing as much as the sea being thoroughly rebutted by Apollo’s rejection of big rivers. Here, Leonides’ ψῆφος (‘pebble’) in the stream becomes important. The term λίθος (‘stone’) appears numerous times in Homer, but this passage is the only use of ψηφίς (ψῆφος is not attested at all). It may be that Leonides saw the image in this passage behind Callimachus’ stream and so created a window allusion to Homer, a strategy recognisable in Hellenistic and Roman poetry, where an author alludes to another text as well as a third that was a source for that other text.Footnote 76 The Homeric hapax ψηφίς, at any rate, together with the importance of ψῆφοι for Leonides’ poetics more generally, makes it possible that Leonides has the Homeric passage in his sights.
Reading this further intertext into the epigram has an important bearing for understanding Leonides’ argument in 33 FGE. The scholia to the Homeric passage preserve a range of critical responses to Homer’s simile. For the late Classical writer Duris of Samos, the evocation of irrigation is too exact and takes the reader away from a sense of the din of battle (Ge-scholia on Il. 21.257–62 = Duris FGrH 76 F 89). An anonymous scholiast replies to Duris with a more charitable reading: ‘but he has composed it in this way, since he is good at introducing a new thought into the poem’ (ἀλλὰ τοῦτο συνέθηκεν οὕτως, ἀγαθὸς ὣν καινοτομῆσαι τὴν ἐν τοῖς ποιήμασι διάνοιαν, Ge-schol. Il. 21.257–62). In On Style, a rhetorical treatise attributed to one Demetrius and usually dated to the second or first century bce,Footnote 77 the author identifies Homer’s simile as a prime example of vividness (ἐναργεία). Vividness comes about, he says, ‘first from exactness of speech and from omitting and excluding nothing’ (πρῶτα μὲν ἐξ ἀκριβολογίας καὶ τοῦ παραλείπειν μηδὲν μηδ’ ἐκτέμειν, On Style 209). Here, Demetrius makes positive Duris’ criticism that it is ‘the complete evocation of the water irrigation through the orchard’ (<τὸ> τὴν ἐν τοῖς κήποις ὑδραγωγίαν ἐκμιμεῖσθαι, Duris FGrH 76 F 89) which takes the reader away from the greatness of the battle scene. He quotes Homer’s passage as an example of how vividness can be achieved through the plain style and its focus on the small things: ‘We should perhaps keep to subjects which are small … the more familiar is always simpler … and employ no words which create grandeur’ (ἔχοιμεν ἂν καὶ πράγματα ἴσως τινὰ μικρὰ … μικρότερον γὰρ τὸ συνηθέστερον πᾶν … μηδ’ ὅσα ἄλλα μεγαλοπρέπειαν ποιεῖ, On Style 190–1). Demetrius sees in this Homeric stream an example of how the greatest of poets can nevertheless excel in the arena of poetic ‘accuracy’ (ἀκρίβεια): in contradistinction to Longinus’ later pronouncement, it demonstrates an ἀκριβολογία (‘exactness of speech’) appropriate to Homer.
Homer’s simile could be seen to enshrine – though not uncontroversially – poetic innovation in accurate descriptions of small subjects and thus also to provide authority for Leonides for placing pebbles in the stream (and read: for combining Callimachus and enumeration). This innovation in poetic accuracy is an important claim that Leonides also makes for his ξεῖνον … γράμμα (‘novel epigram’). By muddying the waters and placing ψῆφοι in Callimachus’ stream, 33 FGE justifies Leonides’ enumerating epigrams. If one reads the presence of ψῆφοι between the allusions to Callimachus’ stream as a reference to the Homeric passage, then Leonides can be observed to collapse the dichotomy of the great river and its rubble in contrast to the pure clean source, an image that Callimachus himself had constructed and which Longinus inherited and inverted in attacking Hellenistic ἀκρίβεια. Leonides positions his playful isopsephic epigrams as filled from a Calimachean stream and as drawing on a Homeric source. The allusive nature of the ψῆφοι in the epigram notwithstanding, I think it is clear that Leonides is seeking to intervene in a debate about poetic accuracy by mobilising the metapoetic image of the stream so tied to Callimachus. For Longinus accuracy may lead to triviality (μικρότης), but Leonides makes a virtue of it.
* * *
It is evident that Leonides has suffered for not having been included in Philip’s Garland and for the novelty he sought to introduce into epigram.Footnote 78 Yet, as I hope to have demonstrated, isopsephy is not treated by Leonides as simply a novel addition to the epigrammatic art but as a practice which must be justified on poetic grounds and defended against criticism. And he legitimises isopsephic epigrams by drawing on the language and themes of his Alexandrian forerunner Callimachus – not to mention responding to earlier epigrammatic receptions of Callimachus – in order to lay out what he sees to be the correspondences between Callimachean poetics and his own counting compositions. He also deftly balances the poetic and the political by addressing poems and introducing their novelty to the Roman imperial family.Footnote 79 Here again Callimachus provides a model.
Crucially, unlike the mainstream of Callimachean reception at Rome which constructed an Alexandrian poet of programmatic refinement and thinness, but quite similar to Catullus and Martial in the previous chapter, Leonides has identified a tension between counting and criticism foregrounded in the Reply to the Telchines. Which is to say, after Callimachus had made explicit the role that counting could – but should not – play in poetic criticism, the issue remained present and alive enough for poets to repeatedly return to the Reply and explicitly develop Callimachus’ examination of how poetic content and extent interrelate. Moreover, the poems I have discussed – but especially Catullus’ kiss count and Leonides’ epigrams – show in different ways just how influential this concern could be for the form of new poems. In seeking to respond to an ongoing debate about counting in relation to criticism, these poets produced works that purposefully and patently straddle the boundary of poetry and counting. Across the centuries following Callimachus’ Reply, in short, counting can be seen to influence poetic composition. This poetic world was shaped in part by the world of number.
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