Introduction

Summary

This book offers four interrelated case studies of the reception at Rome of the Greek poetry of the last three centuries bc, most notably that of Callimachus; my principal concern is how Roman poets both imitated and distanced themselves from those Greek models, how as a result Roman poetry is both comfortingly familiar but also, upon closer inspection, unsettlingly ‘other’ for someone approaching it from the Greek background. Many of the ideas (e.g. Dionysus/Bacchus) and techniques (e.g. similes) which Roman poets used to reflect upon their relationship to Greek models precisely foreground issues of integration and separation, of sameness and difference, of the familiar and the foreign; I hope therefore that this book will be seen as a contribution to the very lively contemporary debate about the ‘Hellenisation’ of Rome and of Italy more generally. Although the focus will be the stimulus which Callimachus gave to Roman poets, I hope also that the book will convey some of the richness of Greek poetry of this period and some small sense of just how much we have lost.

Callimachus has, very rightly, held a special position in modern discussion of the Roman imitation of Hellenistic poetry; in their different ways, and in some poetic modes though not in others, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid all explicitly look to Callimachus as a principal model, to be imitated in both the letter and the spirit.