A.-H. and S. address four fundamental questions in this volume. The common thread is Callimachean aesthetics as viewed through four different lenses: intertextuality (focused on Plato), performance, Ptolemaic Alexandria and Roman reception. Taking into account the changes that have taken place in Hellenistic scholarship during the last decade, A.-H. and S. aspire to update our ideas about Callimacheanism by recontextualising it into the intellectual, social and political frames of third-century Alexandria. Methodology shifts from cataloguing allusions or excessive theorisation of poetics to either close reading of texts or eclectic selection and study of extratextual factors.

Beginning with biographical data about Callimachus and a presentation of the cultural centres Cyrene and Alexandria, A.-H. and S. assert the project ‘Recontextualizing Callimachus’. Old wine in new vessels one might think – but the book achieves far more than this. The introduction brilliantly remaps the Mediterranean cities where Callimachus lived and wrote in providing a comprehensive study of archaeological, epigraphical, historical and literary evidence. The section dedicated to Cyrene, for example, highlights unknown aspects of dramatic performances and the religious environment of Callimachus' native city (also bringing older bibliography into play, e.g. F. Chamoux, Cyrène sous la monarchie des Battiades [1953]). This overview is enriched by premises upon which the entire book is based such as, for example, that the ‘Homeric moment’ is long ago past in the era of Callimachus and that the prominence of prose is critical for the interpretation of his aesthetics (cf. p. 21 ‘Callimachus’ greatest genre violation was to contaminate poetry and prose').

Originality strongly figures in the first chapter, ‘Literary Quarrels’, where Callimachean literary criticism is considered anew by the evaluation of the major role played by philosophy, especially Plato, in its formulation. Callimachus' engagement with Plato, A.-H. and S. argue, is deep and consistent, and it is the narrative and stylistic variety of Platonic critical discourse that provides Callimachus with templates and strategies for the articulation of his own literary standards in poetry. A.-H. and S. examine all Callimachean passages of literary polemic (Aetia Prologue and the narrative frames in frr. 43 and 178 Pf., the Iambi, the epigrams on Cleombrotus and Lysanias, the closure to the Hymn to Apollo) in a systematic parallel reading with numerous Platonic passages from a great range of dialogues (Ion, Laws, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Republic, Symposium, Theages and even the spurious Minos). Several passages from the Iambi suggest the Callimachean narrator as a Socrates in disguise, especially when he adopts a moralising stance in erotic contexts, whereas symposia serving as the background for intellectual discussion in the Aetia may specifically refer to the sympotic settings of the Platonic dialogues where Homer often becomes a matter of debate. Despite offering a thorough analysis of Platonic reception in Callimachus, A.-H. and S. only briefly touch upon Aristotelian and Peripatetic influence, which is still a desideratum in the field of Hellenistic studies.

In the second chapter A.-H. and S. consider the possible performative frames of Callimachus' poetry as well as the dramatisation of performance in it as juxtaposed to its explicitly stated textuality; what they attempt to do is to explain the paradox instead of arguing for one of the two standard oppositions (e.g. the prominence of text for which see B. Gentili, Poetry and its Public in Ancient Greece [1988] as opposed to the performance hypothesis put forward by A. Cameron in Callimachus and his Critics [1995]). Performance practice in Alexandria is of key importance to their interpretation; especially the thorough discussion of the Hellenistic reception of various types of lyric song (Euripides and Timotheus' New Music, paean, choral song, epinician) demonstrates why and how Callimachus and his contemporaries create authentic performative moments through their poetry. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to the symposium/banquet as a public or private performative venue fictionalised in several Callimachean passages of the Aetia and the Hymns.

De-centring Greece and bringing Cyrene and Alexandria into focus is the subject matter of the third chapter, ‘Changing Places’. Colonialism and the subsequent shifting identities in the Mediterranean (what A.-H. and S. appositely call ‘the southern drift’) are of central concern to Callimachus, a fact mirrored in the topographies and genealogies of Hellenism found in his poetry. In ‘writing’ Cyrene Callimachus builds on earlier mythical traditions, also known to Pindar for example. Alexandria is a more complex case: with the exception of previous stories involving Helen and Proteus, to provide a Greek past for this Egyptian city must have presented Callimachus with a challenge. A great part of the third chapter elaborates on how the Aetia, through the remapping of Greek mythology, reconstructs the different historical and cultural layers that eventually converge into the new empire of Egypt: the thalassocracy of Minos, the Colchian settlements, the return of the Heracleidae, the nostoi of the Trojan heroes; a shorter section explores the same ideas about Athenian civic myths and values as marginalised in the Hecale. A.-H. and S. conclude that the return to the Greek past is not nostalgic, as previous scholarship has argued, but an attempt to establish Ptolemaic Alexandria as a new geopolitical centre of the present.

Chapter 4, ‘In my End is my Beginning’, reconsiders the Roman reception of Callimachus. Callimacheanism is indeed a term coined to explain Catullan poetry or Augustan aesthetics, and A.-H. and S. aim to demonstrate why and how Callimachus became a cultural icon for the Romans. What is significant from a methodological point of view is that the history of Callimachean reception is traced back to its beginnings, including Ennius and the epigrammatist Q. Lutatius Catulus – it should be noted, however, that the impact of Callimachus' Iambi on the satires of Lucilius is a hypothesis greatly undermined by A.-H. and S., despite the detailed argumentation offered by the 1949 monograph of M. Puelma on the subject. The ways in which Callimachus figures as a model of non-heroic, elegiac poetry in Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and especially Propertius and Ovid, and the overwhelming influence of erotic tales like the one of Acontius and Cydippe and the portrayal of royal women such as Berenice on their poetry, are meticulously examined in this concluding chapter.

The volume is a comprehensive and well-argued study, based on extensive discussion of primary sources from the entire range of Greek and Roman literature. A.-H. and S. take a fresh look at the evidence aspiring to provide a modern answer to an old question: why Callimachus and why Alexandria? Drawing on their expertise in Callimachean poetry and Ptolemaic contexts, A.-H. and S. offer a book that is highly intellectual and engaging – a must read for academics and non-specialists alike.