Callimachus: works in Greek and English

The road of the text

Follow the text from Callimachus's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like ¹ are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

The author
Copies
Readers
Print and editions

c. 310 BCThe authorBorn at Cyrene, about 310 BC (Mair) or about 305 (Stephens)^1,3,4 Debated among scholars
about 40 years laterc. 270 BCThe authorIn the service of Ptolemy II at Alexandria by about 270 BC at the latest¹
about 30 years laterc. 245 BCThe authorThe Lock of Berenice, written no earlier than 245 BC, closes the Aetia^7,8
about 5 years laterc. 240 BCThe authorStill writing about 240 BC; dies about 235 (Mair) or some time after 240 (Stephens)^1,3,4 Debated among scholars
about 30 years laterc. 210 BCCopiesThe Lille papyrus of Aetia Book 3 is copied within a generation of his death⁸
about 150 years laterc. 60 BCReadersCatullus (about 84–54 BC) turns The Lock of Berenice into Latin (poem 66)^7,25,28
about 10 years laterc. 50 BCCopiesA papyrus roll of Aetia Book 4 (PSI 1092), the main source of the Lock, is copied in the first century BC⁸
about 200 years laterc. AD 150CopiesA roll of the Aetia with its prologue (P.Oxy. 2079) is copied in the second century AD⁸
about 200 years laterc. AD 350CopiesLines of the Hecale are written on a wooden tablet, now in Vienna, dated to the fourth century AD^4,10
about 1,070 years later1423CopiesGiovanni Aurispa brings from Constantinople to Venice the lost manuscript from which all copies of the Hymns descend⁴
66 years later1489Print and editionsPolitian publishes a Latin version of the fifth hymn, The Bath of Pallas⁴
about 7 years laterc. 1496Print and editionsFirst printed edition of the Hymns, by Janus Lascaris at Florence, printed in capital letters (about 1494–96)^4,29,30
about 220 years later1712ReadersAlexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, inspired by Catullus' version of the Lock⁷
about 150 years later1858ReadersWilliam Johnson Cory's English “Heraclitus” appears in his Ionica^4,22
35 years later1893Print and editionsTheodor Gomperz publishes the Vienna tablet of the Hecale⁴
34 years later1927Print and editionsThe prologue of the Aetia is published from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P.Oxy. 2079)^8,13,31
22 years later1949Print and editionsRudolf Pfeiffer's edition: the fragments (1949), then the hymns and epigrams (1953)³²
27 years later1976Print and editionsThe Lille papyrus is published, giving back the Victory of Berenice that opened Aetia Book 3⁹
36 years later2012Print and editionsAnnette Harder's edition and commentary of the Aetia³³

Life and work

Checked against sources · 7 October 2026

Callimachus of Cyrene was a poet and scholar who worked at Alexandria, the Greek capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, in the third century BC.¹ A Byzantine encyclopaedia, the Suda, credits him with «ὑπὲρ τὰ ὀκτακοϲία», “more than eight hundred” books (our translation), in a great many forms.^1,2 Six hymns and about sixty short poems came down to us whole; the rest is pieced together from quotations and from scraps of papyrus.^1,3 Susan Stephens calls him the most influential poet of his age, and the Roman poets took him as one of their chief models.^1,3

A Cyrenean at Alexandria

Most of what we know of his life comes from one entry, not free of mistakes, in the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopaedia of the tenth century.¹ It calls him «υἱὸϲ Βάττου καὶ Μεϲάτμαϲ, Κυρηναῖοϲ, γραμματικόϲ», “son of Battus and Mesatma, of Cyrene, a scholar” (our translation), and says that before he was introduced to King Ptolemy II he taught school at Eleusis, a village on the edge of Alexandria, and that he lived on into the reign of Ptolemy III.^2,4 The geographer Strabo names him among the famous men of Cyrene, “a poet who was also devoted to scholarship” (our translation).⁵ In his poems he calls himself Battiades, “son of Battus”, which may point to his father or to Battus, the founder of Cyrene, from whom he claimed descent.^1,4

Debated among scholars Even his dates are uncertain. A. W. Mair, his Loeb translator, put his birth about 310 BC and his death about 235; Susan Stephens puts his birth about 305 and, judging from the subjects of his poems, his death some time after 240.^1,3,4 The story of the poor schoolmaster has been doubted too: Alan Cameron called it “almost certainly outright fiction”.¹

A catalogue of Greek literature

The Suda also lists his «Πίνακεϲ τῶν ἐν πάϲῃ παιδείᾳ διαλαμψάντων, καὶ ὧν ϲυνέγραψαν», “Tables of those who were eminent in every branch of learning, and of what they wrote” (our translation), in 120 books.² Pinakes means “tablets”.^1,6 Working from the shelf-lists of the Library of Alexandria, Callimachus sorted Greek writers into poetry and prose and smaller classes, and listed them alphabetically, each with a short life and a list of works, every work identified by its opening words; the classicist Lionel Casson called it the first comprehensive guide to Greek literature.^1,3 It is lost.¹

Debated among scholars Many older books made him head of the Library, after Zenodotus; Mair warned in 1921 that this was not an established fact,⁴ and Stephens now says plainly that he never held the post: Apollonius of Rhodes followed Zenodotus.^3,6

What survives

The six hymns are to Zeus, Apollo, Artemis, the island of Delos, Athena (The Bath of Pallas) and Demeter; three of them are written as if a festival were happening before the reader's eyes.¹ The fifth and sixth are in the Doric dialect, and the fifth alone uses the metre of elegy instead of the epic line.⁴ The epigrams survive mostly in the Palatine Anthology, a tenth-century manuscript found at Heidelberg in 1606.¹

His most admired work, the Aetia (“Causes”), told in four books of elegiac verse why odd rituals and objects were as they are: why, for instance, the people of Lindos hurl abuse at Heracles when they sacrifice to him.^7,8 After a prologue (see below) comes a dream in which the young poet is carried to Mount Helicon and questions the Muses, an echo of Hesiod.^7,9 The last two books were framed by poems for Queen Berenice II, ending with The Lock of Berenice, in which the lock of hair she dedicated for her husband Ptolemy III's safe return from war becomes a constellation.^7,8

There were also thirteen Iambi, in the old, aggressive tradition of iambic verse,¹ and the Hecale, a poem of about a thousand lines.^3,10 In it the hero Theseus, on his way to fight the bull of Marathon, shelters in the hut of a poor old woman, Hecale; when he comes back she is dead, and he names a village after her and founds a shrine of Zeus in her honour.¹⁰ Travellers honoured her, says one fragment, «ἔχε γὰρ τέγος ἀκλήιστον», “for she kept an unbarred house” (Mair's translation).^4,11

Small, fine and new

At the head of the Aetia Callimachus answers his critics, whom he calls Telchines, after the sorcerers of myth: they grumble that he has never finished one continuous song of many thousands of lines about kings and heroes.¹² Whether they were real people is not known.¹² He tells them to judge poetry by its art, not its length: “thundering is not my job, it is Zeus's” (our translation).¹² When he first put a writing tablet on his knees, he says, Apollo told him to fatten the sacrifice as fat as he could but to keep his Muse leptaleēn, slender, and to drive not on the wide road but on untrodden tracks, even if narrower.¹² Liddell and Scott's great dictionary gives λεπταλέος as “fine, delicate”, citing this very line;¹³ the same word describes the delicate sound of panpipes in his Hymn to Artemis: «λεπταλέον σύριγγες».¹⁴

One epigram says it more sharply: «ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν», in Mair's English “I hate the cyclic poem”, and a few lines on, “I loathe all common things”.^4,15 So does the end of the Hymn to Apollo.^4,16 Envy whispers to the god «οὐκ ἄγαμαι τὸν ἀοιδὸν ὃς οὐδʼ ὅσα πόντος ἀείδει», “I do not admire the singer who does not sing as much as the sea” (our translation).¹⁶ Apollo kicks Envy away: “Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but much filth of earth and much refuse it carries on its waters”, while the Bees, Demeter's priestesses, bring her only water from a holy spring, “pure and undefiled, the very crown of waters” (Mair's translation).^4,16 An ancient note says these lines answer critics who mocked him for being unable to write a long poem, and that this drove him to write the Hecale;¹⁷ Cameron thought the note of little authority.¹

The writer Athenaeus reports that «Καλλίμαχος ὁ γραμματικὸς τὸ μέγα βιβλίον ἴσον ἔλεγεν εἶναι τῷ μεγάλῳ κακῷ», in C. D. Yonge's translation “CALLIMACHUS the grammarian said that a great book was equivalent to a great evil”; Mair put it more crisply, “a big book is a big evil”.^4,18

Debated among scholars Mair also noted a more modest modern explanation: that the saying may refer only to papyrus rolls of inconvenient size.⁴

Reading him

His Greek is learned, but it can also be witty.¹ The Hymn to Zeus weighs whether the god was born in Crete or in Arcadia, and settles it with «Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται», “Cretans are ever liars” (Mair): after all, the Cretans built a tomb for Zeus, and Zeus never died.^4,19 The same three words open a line quoted in the New Testament letter to Titus, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, and idle gluttons”; Mair notes that the saying was attributed to Epimenides.^4,20

One epigram mourns a friend, the poet Heraclitus of Halicarnassus. It begins «εἶπέ τις Ἡράκλειτε τεὸν μόρον», “someone told me, Heraclitus, of your death” (our translation), and ends in comfort: «αἱ δὲ τεαὶ ζώουσιν ἀηδόνες», “but your nightingales live on” (our translation), and Hades, who snatches everything, will not lay a hand on them.^4,21 In 1858 William Johnson (later William Cory) put it into English in his Ionica: “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead”.^4,22

Quarrels, real and imagined

Debated among scholars The Suda says that his lost poem Ibis was «ποίημα ἐπιτετηδευμένον εἰϲ ἀϲάφειαν καὶ λοιδορίαν», “a poem worked up to be obscure and abusive” (our translation), against Apollonius, the author of the Argonautica.² An epigram under the name of “Apollonius the grammarian” hits back: «Καλλίμαχος τὸ κάθαρμα, τὸ παίγνιον, ὁ ξύλινος νοῦς», “Callimachus the scum, the plaything, the wooden brain” (our translation).^23,24 Mair, in 1921, told of a bitter feud that drove Apollonius from Alexandria to Rhodes.⁴ Most scholars now think the feud has been greatly exaggerated, if it happened at all: the evidence is slight, the ancient lives of Apollonius stress the two poets' friendship, and the epigram may not be by Apollonius of Rhodes.²⁴

Why he matters

The Roman poets read him closely.¹ Catullus sent a friend “haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae”, “these songs of Battiades, put into Latin for you” (our translation); his poem 66 is a Latin version of The Lock of Berenice.^7,25 Propertius called Umbria “Romani patria Callimachi”, the homeland of the Roman Callimachus, meaning himself.^1,26 Ovid judged that Battiades would be sung all over the world for ever: not strong in genius, but strong in art.^1,27 Through Catullus the Lock reached Alexander Pope, whose The Rape of the Lock (1712) it inspired.⁷ Kathryn Gutzwiller sums him up: he “reinvented Greek poetry for the Hellenistic age by devising a personal style that came, through its manifestations in Roman poetry, to influence the entire tradition of modern literature”.¹

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Papyri. The Aetia was copied for centuries: some 37 papyri of it are known. The oldest, the Lille papyrus, was copied within a generation of the poet's death, with notes between the lines; a roll of the first century BC is the main source of The Lock of Berenice; a second-century roll from Oxyrhynchus holds the prologue; a codex (a book with pages) of the sixth or seventh century AD once held a collected edition of his poems.⁸ Ancient scholars wrote notes on the poem, and a papyrus of the first or second century AD, the Milan Diegeseis, gives prose summaries of the stories of the Aetia and the Iambi, each starting with the poem's first line; it is our main guide to the order of Aetia Books 3–4.⁸

Lost in the Middle Ages. The Aetia was still read about AD 500, and the twelfth-century scholar Eustathius of Thessalonica is the last reader who shows first-hand knowledge of it; it vanished in the thirteenth century.⁷ In the fifteenth century the Florentine scholar Politian tried to rebuild it from quotations; the breakthrough came only with the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.⁷ The Hecale came back the same way: a wooden tablet in Vienna, with lines of Euripides' Phoenician Women on its back, was first published by Theodor Gomperz in 1893.^4,34

The Hymns. Every surviving manuscript of the Hymns goes back to a Byzantine collection that also held the Homeric Hymns and the hymns of Orpheus and Proclus. A copy of that collection was brought from Constantinople to Venice in 1423 by Giovanni Aurispa; neither it nor any direct copy survives. The manuscripts fall into three families, and one, in the Lavra monastery on Mount Athos, is of the fourteenth century.⁴ The epigrams came down chiefly in the Palatine Anthology.¹

Print. The Hymns were first printed at Florence by Lorenzo de Alopa, edited by Janus Lascaris, in elegant capital letters that Lascaris designed; the book is undated and is put between 1494 and 1496.^29,30 Mair reports that the leaves of one Florentine manuscript (Laurentianus 32.45) holding Callimachus were torn out to be used as printer's copy, so that the printed book now stands for the lost manuscript.⁴

Modern editions. Rudolf Pfeiffer gathered the papyri then known in 1923, and his landmark two-volume Oxford edition followed: the fragments in 1949, the hymns and epigrams in 1953.³² Since then new papyri have kept coming: the Lille papyrus was published in 1976,⁹ the Supplementum Hellenisticum of Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Peter Parsons (1983) includes further pieces of the Aetia,^9,35 and Annette Harder's Aetia (2012) gives the text, a translation and a commentary of more than a thousand pages.³³

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

Two editors, two spellings. The reader has two Greek texts of the hymns and epigrams, Wilamowitz's of 1897 and Mair's Loeb of 1921.³⁶ They even number the epigrams differently: the “cyclic poem” epigram is 28 in Wilamowitz and 30 in Mair.^15,37 In its third line Wilamowitz prints «μισέω καὶ περίφοιτον ἐρώμενον», Mair «μισῶ καὶ περίφοιτον ἐρώμενον»: the same word, “I hate”, with its two vowels kept apart or run together.^15,37 In the Heraclitus epigram Wilamowitz writes the small iota beside the eta, «ἐν λέσχηι», where Mair writes it beneath: «ἐν λέσχῃ».^21,37

Pelagonians or clay-born? In the third line of the Hymn to Zeus both texts print «Πηλαγόνων ἐλατῆρα», “router of the Pelagonians” (Mair's translation), the giants Zeus drove off.^4,19 The manuscripts have Πηλογόνων, which the ancient commentator explained as “the giants”, born from clay (πηλός); Salmasius and others corrected it from the Etymologicum Magnum, which quotes Callimachus' words with Πηλαγόνων.⁴

Whose fragment 1? Numbers for the fragments change from edition to edition. The prologue is fragment 1 in Pfeiffer, Massimilla and Harder alike, but a piece numbered 253 in the Supplementum Hellenisticum is 137m in Harder, and Harder prints an ancient prose retelling of Acontius and Cydippe as fragment 75b.^9,12 The Aetia in the reader is Mair's of 1921, printed before the prologue was found: its “fragment 1” is a dinner-party scene, and the lines that follow it come from a papyrus, P.Ryl. 13, which Pfeiffer numbered fragment 26 in his edition of 1949.^32,38

Debated among scholars When was the prologue written? Pfeiffer held that Callimachus reissued the Aetia late in life, adding the prologue to an older poem, and many scholars follow him;⁸ Alan Cameron argued instead that the prologue was simply the first part of the next section, and Peter Knox that the lines once taken as the epilogue of the whole poem closed Books 1–2.⁹

Books to read it in

U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Callimachi Hymni et Epigrammata (Berlin: Weidmann, 1897).³⁶ One of the two Greek texts of the hymns and epigrams in the reader.
A. W. Mair, Callimachus and Lycophron, with G. R. Mair, Aratus (Loeb Classical Library; London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921).^4,36 The other Greek text in the reader, and the source of its Aetia, Iambi and Hecale; A. W. Mair translated Callimachus.
R. Pfeiffer, Callimachus, vol. 1, Fragmenta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949); vol. 2, Hymni et Epigrammata (1953).³² Pfeiffer's landmark edition, on which later numbering builds.
C. A. Trypanis, Callimachus: Aetia, Iambi, Lyric Poems, Hecale, Minor Epic and Elegiac Poems, Fragments of Epigrams, Fragments of Uncertain Location (Loeb Classical Library 421; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).³⁹ Greek text of the fragments with an English translation.
H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons, Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1983).³⁵ A collection of Hellenistic poetic fragments, including pieces of the Aetia (cited as “SH”).
A. S. Hollis, Callimachus: Hecale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990; second edition, Oxford University Press, 2009).^40,41 Text, translation and commentary.
A. Harder, Callimachus: Aetia, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).³³ Introduction, text and translation; commentary.
S. A. Stephens, Callimachus: The Hymns (Oxford University Press, 2015).⁴² A modern book on the six hymns.

Where this comes from

Sources (42)

We checked every statement above against these sources on 7 October 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

Callimachus

The 11 works