Callimachus (ca. 280 b.c.–245 b.c.)

An ancient Greek scholar and librarian, Callimachus was known in the Renaissance for his poetry and for a lost work known as the Pinakes, or Lists, a guide to the collection of the Library of Alexandria. Born in North Africa, Callimachus may have belonged to a noble family, although historians know few details of his life. He was well educated as a youth and eventually made his home in Alexandria, a city on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt established by Alexander the Great, and which became the center of Greek scholarship, science, and philosophy. Callimachus joined the court of Ptolemy II, the king of Egypt, and also became a member of the Museum, the Alexandrian school of philosophy and science that was built by Ptolemy I, founder of Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty.

The hundreds of thousands of scrolls at the Alexandrian Library had been gathered from all corners of the Greek world and were meant to include every important literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific work in the world. Callimachus organized the collection and compiled the Lists to include the names of the books and some information about the lives of their writers. The authors were arranged according to their field, such as law, poetry, history, mathematics, or rhetoric, and listed in alphabetical order, as were their works.

His poetic works, unlike the “Lists,” survived in the form of fragments and quotations into the Renaissance. Aetia was a group of narrative poems describing legendary figures and events, while Iambi was a collection of shorter poems, some of them describing the scholars and students Callimachus knew or heard about in Alexandria. He was also the author of a short epic, Hecale, and a collection known as Hymns. As a scholar, he wrote short studies in various fields of knowledge and collected them into the Epigrams. Callimachus engaged in a famous and longstanding debate with one of his own students, Apollonius of Rhodes, over the proper form and length of poetry, with Callimachus ridiculing the traditional longer epic poems and Apollonius mocking his rival's preference for shorter forms. Jealous of Apollonius's securing the job of librarian, Callimachus endlessly needled Apollonius for his pretentious and oldfashioned manner of writing. The work of Callimachus in the Library of Alexandria provided a foundation for later studies of ancient Greek writers; his debate with Apollonius over the nature of poetry was also well remembered and provided scholars and authors of the Renaissance with one of their most common points of debate.

See Also: classical literature