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

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

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.

The couplet brings together various Callimachean passages. Leonides’ dislike for writing at length combines two expressions of aesthetic judgement found in Callimachus’ epigrams.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.