INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter free, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Ifigher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 THE ANCIENT QUAREIEL BETWEEN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY IN CALLIMACHUS' HYMN TO ZEUS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Stephanie J. Winder, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1997 Dissertation Committee; Professor W. Batstone, Adviser Approved by Professor D. Hahm Professor S. Johnstone Adviser Department of Classics UMI Number: 9813372 Copyright 1997 by Winder, Stephanie Jayne All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9813372 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Stephanie J. binder 1997 ABSTRACT The age of Callimachus, the third century BC, was one which experienced a widespread revival of poetry. This was the case in the Greek world generally, but particularly so in Alexandria, the new political, economic, and cultural capital. This renaissance can be seen in the large number of poets, and in the development of new poetic genres, new forms, and new metres. In the theoretical realm, poetry's new importance is attested to by the Alexandrian project of collecting, editing, and interpreting all known Greek texts, and by the vitriolic debates among poets, scholars, and philosophers on the function and value of poetry, of methods of poetic interpretation and evaluation. I examine the place of Callimachus' Hymns in that revival, the ways in which they engaged in the critical cultural debates of the third century BC concerning the place and value of poetry, and the challenge they offer to the rationalistic philosophers who had appropriated the poet's traditional cultural authority. This revises the traditional view of Callimachean poetics as the declaration of the autonomy of art and the demand that poetry be judged only by aesthetic and technical criteria. I begin by surveying the origin and terms of the debate between poetry and philosophy. I then analyze how all of the hymns, in different ways, raise questions about the value, function and even the very possibility of poetry in a rationalistic age. These questions, in turn, center on the problem of establishing or defining the nature of the poetic voice, which I address in a detailed interpretation of the first, and in my view programmatic. Hymn to Zeus. This hymn sets up the collection by subordinating the voice of transcendental truth, pragmatic probability, moral and generic appropriateness, and political exigency to that of the poet, whose unique power is shown to derive from poetry's capacity for continual deception. In turn, the Hymn to Zeus demonstrates that it is that capacity alone which can speak to and for the multivocal mythopoetic tradition and the community which inherited it. lU VITA July 31, 1963 .......... Born-Ches ter field, England July 1985 .............. B.A.Hons., Classics, Leeds University, England December 1987 .......... M.A., Classics, The Ohio State University Sept. 1985-Dec. 1987 and Sept. 1990-July 1994 ....Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University Aug.-Dec. 1984.......... Visiting Instructor Wittenberg University Jan. 1995-Present......Visiting Instructor Ohio Wesleyan University FIELDS OF STUDY MAJOR FIELD: CLASSICS Hellenistic Poetry IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract.................................................. ii Vita...................................................... iv Chapters : Introduction............................................... 1 1. Philosophical Approaches to Myth and Poetry: The Hellenistic Context of Callimachus ' Hymns....... 9 2. The Problem of Voice and Song....................... 44 i 3. Authorizing the Voice: T t Callimachus and the Problem of Truth................ 81 ; 4. What Better to Sing of than the God Himself?...... 115 I 5. 'Ixvia Sold : [ Rationalism and the Dynamics of Patronage.......... 172 I Bibliography............................................. 200 INTRODUCTION The age of Callimachus, the third century BC, was one which experienced a widespread revival of poetry writing. This was the case in the Greek world generally, but particularly so in Alexandria, the new political, economic and cultural capital.^ This renaissance can be seen in the large number of those engaged in writing poetry (of which the majority survive as names only or in small fragments), and in the development of new poetic genres (e.g. New Comedy, Bucolic, epyllion), new forms (e.g. pattern poems), and new metres. In the theoretical realm, poetry became the focus of attention on a scale previously unsurpassed. This is attested to by the Alexandrian project of collecting, categorizing, cataloguing, editing, and interpreting all known Greek texts, as well as by the fierce competitiveness and vitriolic debates among poets, scholars, and philosophers on the function and value of poetry, on methods of interpretation, and on the appropriate criteria for evaluating a poem. I will examine the place of Callimachus' '■ The significance of Alexandria is reflected by the fact that the literature of this period, which most classicists now call "Hellenistic," was, until the early twentieth century, referred to by scholars as "Alexandrian." 1 Hymns in that revival, the ways in which they engaged in the critical cultural debates of the third century BC (especially concerning the place and value of poetry), and the challenge they offer to the rationalistic philosophers who had appropriated the poet's traditional role as cultural authority. This reading constitutes a revision of the traditional view of Callimachean poetics as the declaration of the autonomy of art and the demand that poetry be judged only by aesthetic and technical criteria. At the beginning of the third century BC, the prospects for the writing of original poetry did not look particularly bright. The prose genres of philosophy, history, and oratory were so clearly in the ascendancy that Plato ' s proposed ban on poets in the Republic seemed to be well on its way to being realized. The paltry extant remains of fourth century BC poetry has led to the current consensus of opinion that the new poetry being written was small in volume and inferior in quality relative both to the output of the past and to the concurrently great flow of prose works. This poetic decline was, in fact, a preoccupation of the poets themselves, who tended to locate its source in a sense of exhaustion, a feeling of despair that perfection had been reached in all possible genres, that all paths of song had been fully explored.^ As an explanation for the collapse of poetry in ' Traces of this feeling are found even as early as the end of the fifth century BC. The most often cited example is that from Choerilus of the fourth century and the form it took when it returned to prominence in the third, the emphasis placed by many modern literary scholars (following the ancient poets themselves) on this crisis in confidence and sense of exhaustion caused by the "burden of Homer/ the past" is, I suggest, misleading.^ Homer, after all, had both inspired and intimidated poets since the archaic age. A more complete story of the fall and rise of poetry during this period would include a wide range of political, philosophical, cultural and economic factors.* This dissertation attempts to highlight and explore the role of one of those factors: the rise of rationalism and the philosophical appropriation of the poet's role as interpreter of the past, arbiter of the present and prophet of the future. Samos’ Persica in H. Lloyd-Jones & P. Parsons (Eds.), Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin & New York 1983), 317: Happy the man who at that time knew how to sing as servant of the Muses, before the meadow was mown. But now, after everything has been broken up and the arts have come to an end, we are so to speak the last ones remaining in the field, and look where one may it is just no longer possible to come across a newly harnessed steed. (Translation T. Gelzer) For other examples suid for a careful literary-historical survey of the "crisis" of poetry in this period see T. Gelzer, "Transformations," in A. Bulloch et al. (Eds.), Images and Ideologies (University of California Press 1993), 130-151. ' In Callimachus and His Critics (Princeton 1995), A. Cameron has forcefully argued against the current overemphasis on the burden of Homer as a factor for Callimachus, though he possibly goes too far towards the opposite extreme of suggesting he was not a factor at all. * See Gelzer (above n.