Hellenistic Poetry

The third century B.C. introduces a new political era (Greek monarchies extend over the Near East), but also a new set of intellectual and literary emphases. The scholars (above all in Alexandria) collect, edit and explain the Greek literary inheritance; the poets (often scholars themselves) rework and recreate that inheritance to produce a poetry of small-scale forms, refined diction and complex allusive textures. There is new-style epic (Apollonius Rhodius), and a new genre of pocket-epic, which diversifies by digression (Moschus, Europa) and domesticates the heroic (Callimachus, Hecale). There are new hymns, literary rather than ritual in function; a new civilised invective (Callimachus, Iambi) and a new pseudo-realism (Herodas); a new fashion in personal poetry, which transposes the old lyric into the brilliant miniature of the epigram. Greek roots grew in tradition as well as in literature: so Callimachus' Aetia traces the origins of festivals and rituals with ironised erudition. Theocritus spans the whole scene: myth, mime, pastiche, panegyric and the genre he made his own, the pastoral, in which the rustic frame sets off simply the eclectic elegance of the content.

G. O. Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford 1988); R. L. Hunter and M. Fantuzzi, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge 2004); K. Gutzwiller, A Guide to Hellenistic Literature (Blackwell 2007).

Teaching: lectures, and tutorials and classes.