Aetia. Iambi. Lyric Poems ISBN: 9780674997349 Platform/Publisher: Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: One Page at a time; Download: One Page at a time
The premier scholar-poet of the Hellenistic age.
Callimachus (ca. 303-ca. 235 BC), a proud and well-born native of Cyrene in Libya, came as a young man to the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, where he composed poetry for the royal family; helped establish the Library and Museum as a world center of literature, science, and scholarship; and wrote an estimated 800 volumes of poetry and prose on an astounding variety of subjects, including the Pinakes , a descriptive bibliography of the Library's holdings in 120 volumes. Callimachus' vast learning richly informs his poetry, which ranges broadly and reworks the language and generic properties of his predecessors in inventive, refined, and expressive ways. The "Callimachean" style, combining learning, elegance, and innovation and prizing brevity, clarity, lightness, and charm, served as an important model for later poets, not least at Rome for Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the elegists, among others.
This edition, which replaces the earlier Loeb editions by A. W. Mair (1921) and C. A. Trypanis (1954, 1958), presents all that currently survives of and about Callimachus and his works, including the ancient commentaries ( Diegeseis ) and scholia. Volume I contains Aetia , Iambi , and lyric poems; Volume II Hecale , Hymns , and Epigrams ; and Volume III miscellaneous epics and elegies, other fragments, and testimonia, together with concordances and a general index. The Greek text is based mainly on Pfeiffer's but enriched by subsequently published papyri and the judgment of later editors, and its notes and annotation are fully informed by current scholarship.
Callimachus was an Alexandrine grammarian and poet. He was a native of Cyrene in Africa. He lived at Alexandria where was a cataloguer of the famous library of Alexandria, from about 260 B.C. until his death about 240 B.C. Among his students were Arostophanes of Byzantium and Apollonius Rhodius
Callimachus wrote numerous works on a variety of subjects, but of these only his poems exist, which are characterized by elegance and learning. In his day he was widely admired and later served as a model for Catullus and the Roman elegiac poets, especially Ovid.
