Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

The fourth chapter introduces several ‘personal voices’, immediately complicating our understanding of how personally to take them: the authors discussed here seem to offer us an unmitigated look at their inner lives, but Latin literature does not, for the most part, work like that. Through discussions of Lucilius, in-depth treatment of Catullus, and exploration of the letters of Cicero, we show the public nature even of what seems most personal.

I loathe everything to do with The People,’ writes Callimachus, and this (public) turning away from the public poetry of the fifth century is a stance, a gesture, repeated in a multiformity of guises throughout the texts of the Hellenistic period. Although the practices of literary production, performance and circulation are known in even less detail for this period than for the fifth century (and many questions about, say, the constitution of the public of Hellenistic literature are simply not answerable with any security), none the less there are much-discussed and highly significant shifts both in the conditions of literary production and in the presentation of the poet’s voice which require some brief introductory remarks.

This chapter investigates the role of Hellenistic kings and queens as victorious horse owners. It is asked to which degree the different dynasties of the period used equestrian victories as a means of representation. The fact that Philip II and his son Alexander had a different approach to agonistic competition gave leeway to their successors’ competitive behavior: Whereas the Antigonids and Seleucids refrained from equestrian competition, the Ptolemies became the most successful royal family in terms of athletics. They sponsored promising athletes, established a new category of contests, and were imitated by their courtiers with regard to their engagement in chariot races. In the agonistic context, the Ptolemies presented themselves as a victorious, Macedonian dynasty which integrated the female members of the family into an image of power. The Attalids, in contrast, labelled themselves a loving family of united brothers in which no disputes over the throne ever occurred.

This chapter argues that, unlike all other Greek novelists, Longus shows knowledge of Callimachus’ poetry, both the Aitia (whence his use of ἀρτιγένειος, twice: 1.15.1 and 4.10.1) and the Epigrams (whence the figurative ἕλκος of 1.14.1, near to Longus’ first use of ἀρτιγένειος). These strong cases increase the probability that some other words (ἐπτoηθεῖσαι 1.22.2) and themes (e.g. the simultaneous death of two young siblings at 4.24.2, cf. Call. Anth.Pal. 7.517; the recondite myth of Branchus, 4.17.6, cf. Call. fr. 229 Pfeiffer) are drawn from Callimachus. In explaining why Callimachus might attract Longus’ interest, it is proposed that the four-book format of Daphnis and Chloe, unique in the novels, might be a further Callimachean intertextuality, calculated to invite readers’ reflection on how Longus’ work could be read as a series of Aitia, that of the cave of the Nymphs (in the preface and Book 4) complementing those of the inset tales of Books 1 to 3.

This chapter discusses modern trends in the study of late antique Latin poetry, namely the aesthetics of the jeweled style and especially the scholarly discourse on ‘nonreferentiality’ in allusion, and seeks to apply the concepts underlying this scholarship to late antique Greek epic, in particular to Triphiodorus and Quintus of Smyrna. As a case study and the focus of the chapter, allusions to Apollonius’ Argonautica, previously noted but undiscussed in scholarship on Triphiodorus, are discussed at length. The chapter ends with a re-examination of the in-proem in Book 12 of Quintus’ Posthomerica, and argues, in a nuancing of recent scholarship, that the passage’s much-discussed allusion to Callimachus can be read as ultimately ‘nonreferential’ in function.

This chapter examines the range, scope, generic roots and poetics of Hellenistic paradoxographical collections. The cultural context surrounding the production of the first paradoxographical collections in Ptolemaic Alexandria is thoroughly explored. The relationships between paradoxography, wonder and previous traditions of Greek ethnographic writing and contemporary Peripatetic scientific writing are outlined through the examination of Antigonus of Carystus’ Collection of Marvellous Investigations, Ps. Aristotle’s On Marvellous Things Heard, Herodotus’ Histories, Callimachus’ Aitia and Aristotle’s biological writings.

Although there appears to be a lot in common between Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses in terms of how they connect the present to the past through aetiology, the chapter argues that in fact there are profound differences in the role of aetiology in each poem. The Fasti is full of examples of past actions that have become fixed in a form that endures in current ritual, but there are vanishingly few examples of ritual aetiology in the Metamorphoses. The Fasti is really about religion while the Metamorphoses is really about mythology. Even though scholars of religion in both the ancient and modern worlds have seen a tight connection between myth and ritual, the chapter argues that we should follow Ovid in disavowing the myth/ritual nexus.

This chapter is concerned with the fable, in this case the Akkadian fable of The Date-Palm and the Tamarisk, which travelled eastward to Persia and westward to Greece: in both places, the fable retained its ‘deep structure’ but underwent adaptations on the surface to suit the new localities. The fable posed a fundamental question to its audiences – is the cult of the gods more important than preservation of humans? – and provided a platform on which views and beliefs of other cultures could be built, with the change of scene or characters as needed.

The fifth chapter is chiefly concerned with the creative instantiations of Hyperborea in the Hellenistic and later periods, studied there as examples of a more thoroughly textualised, literary process of worlding. It looks at changing strategies of composing worlds through an archive of libraries and canons. The first section of the chapter starts with an overview of the transformations of the Hyperborean material in geographical literature after Herodotus, from Eratosthenes and Strabo to Pliny the Elder. The second section examines two equally productive, creative strategies of appropriation of the Hyperborean nexus in the post-Classical archive: Solinus' De mirabilibus mundi and the Philippica of Theopompus. The third section is concerned with the distinctive cosmographical usages of Hyperborea in early Hellenistic utopias, and their deep engagement with the archive: Hecataeus of Abdera's On the Hyperboreans, Callimachus' Hymn to Delos, and Simias of Rhodes' Apollo. All support the wider considerations of the chapter on the continued relevance of Hyperborea for thinking the worlds of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms. The fourth section brings us back to Athens, with detailed study of two cosmographical texts written over and through the archive: the Delian Oration of Lycurgus and the pseudo-Platonic Axiochos.

Chapter 6 examines aspects of the reception of catalogue in early Hellenistic poetry, focusing on Callimachus and Hermesianax. These poets, I argue, exploit catalogue as a non-mimetic form, using it to defy traditional ways of counting, and traditional orderings and boundaries of space and time. In their hands, the catalogue poem becomes a locus of disorder and fantasy.

Addresses the most intense programmatic section of the poem: the delayed proem of Book 12. Rather than reading it in the light of current Quintan scholarship, as an indication of Alexandrian indebtedness, the chapter puts forward a new anti-Alexandrian interpretation. Shows Quintus reconfiguring symbolic imagery from Callimachus’ Aetia to create a pointedly un-Callimachean programme and emphasises the Homeric core of the ‘anti-epic’ voice.