HKB
and his sister-bride is not much more Greek in sentiment than are those old native hymns of Pentaur to ‘the strong Bull,’ or the ‘Risen Sun,’ to Rameses or Thothmes.
Again, the early Alexandrian was what we call a ‘literary’ age. Literature was not an affair of religion and of the state, but ministered to the pleasure of individuals, and at their pleasure was composed. {0f} The temper of the time was crudely critical. The Museum and the Libraries, with their hundreds of thousands of volumes, were hot-houses of grammarians and of learned poets. Callimachus, the head librarian, was also the most eminent man of letters. Unable, himself, to compose a poem of epic length and copiousness, he discouraged all long poems. He shone in epigrams, pedantic hymns, and didactic verses. He toyed with anagrams, and won court favour by discovering that the letters of ‘Arsinoë,’ the name of Ptolemy’s wife, made the words ίον Ηρας, the violet of Hera. In another masterpiece the genius of Callimachus followed the stolen tress of Queen Berenice to the skies, where the locks became a constellation. A contemporary of Callimachus was Zenodotus, the critic, who was for improving the Iliad and Odyssey by cutting out all the epic commonplaces which seemed to him to be needless repetitions. It is pretty plain that, in literary society, Homer was thought out of date and rococo. The favourite topics of poets were now, not the tales of Troy and Thebes, but the amorous adventures of the gods. When Apollonius Rhodius attempted to revive the epic, it is said that the influence of Callimachus quite discomfited the young poet. A war of epigrams began, and while Apollonius called Callimachus a ‘blockhead’ (so finished was his invective), the veteran compared his rival to the Ibis, the scavenger-bird. Other singers satirised each others’ legs, and one, the Aretino of the time, mocked at king Ptolemy and scourged his failings in verse. The literary quarrels (to which Theocritus seems to allude in Idyl VII, where Lycidas says he ‘hates the birds of the Muses that cackle in vain rivalry with Homer’) were as stupid as such affairs usually are. The taste for artificial epic was to return; although many people already declared that Homer was the world’s poet, and that the world needed no other. This epic reaction brought into favour Apollonius Rhodius, author of the Argonautica. Theocritus has been supposed to aim at him as a vain rival of Homer, but M. Couat points out that Theocritus was seventy when Apollonius began to write. The literary fashions of Alexandria are only of moment to us so far as they directly affected Theocritus. They could not make him obscure, affected, tedious, but his nature probably inclined him to obey fashion so far as only to write short poems. His rural poems are ειδύλλια, ‘little pictures.’ His fragments of epic, or imitations of the epic hymns are not
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—not full and sonorous as the songs of Homer and the sea. ‘Ce poète est le moins naïf qui se puisse rencontrer, et il se dégage de son oeuvre un parfum de naïveté rustique.’ {0g} They are, what a German critic has called them, mythologischen genre-bilder, cabinet pictures in the manner called genre, full of pretty detail and domestic feeling. And this brings us to the third characteristic of the age,—its art was elaborately pictorial. Poetry seems to have sought inspiration from painting, while painting, as we have said, inclined to genre, to luxurious representations of the amours of the gods or the adventures of heroes, with backgrounds of pastoral landscape. Shepherds fluted while Perseus slew Medusa.