Chapter 5 - Impossible Worlds? Hellenistic Reconfigurations

Summary

The fifth chapter is chiefly concerned with the creative instantiations of Hyperborea in the Hellenistic and later periods, studied there as examples of a more thoroughly textualised, literary process of worlding. It looks at changing strategies of composing worlds through an archive of libraries and canons. The first section of the chapter starts with an overview of the transformations of the Hyperborean material in geographical literature after Herodotus, from Eratosthenes and Strabo to Pliny the Elder. The second section examines two equally productive, creative strategies of appropriation of the Hyperborean nexus in the post-Classical archive: Solinus' De mirabilibus mundi and the Philippica of Theopompus. The third section is concerned with the distinctive cosmographical usages of Hyperborea in early Hellenistic utopias, and their deep engagement with the archive: Hecataeus of Abdera's On the Hyperboreans, Callimachus' Hymn to Delos, and Simias of Rhodes' Apollo. All support the wider considerations of the chapter on the continued relevance of Hyperborea for thinking the worlds of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms. The fourth section brings us back to Athens, with detailed study of two cosmographical texts written over and through the archive: the Delian Oration of Lycurgus and the pseudo-Platonic Axiochos.