This book, commissioned for Bloomsbury Academic's Ancients in Action series, has as its goal to provide a ‘much-needed clear introduction to Callimachus’ poetry … intended for the non-specialist reader and student, assuming no knowledge of Greek’ (jacket blurb). Assuming, for the sake of argument, that such readers exist, R. does a credible job of explaining Callimachus’ poetry in a clear and approachable way. His virtues include: a pleasing and accessible narrative style that privileges useful information over the theoretical or conjectural (unlike the majority of writers on this poet); chapter topics that focus on a few distinctive features of Callimachus’ style and reception: ‘Philology and Poetics’, ‘Voices’, ‘Religion and the Gods’, ‘People and Places’ and ‘The End of the Aetia, and Callimachus in Rome’; well-crafted chapters that integrate historical information with literary analysis. Finally, he illustrates his arguments for the most part with selections from the hymns and epigrams and a few of the more intact fragments, including nice readings of the debate between the olive and the laurel trees in the fragmentary fourth Iambus (pp. 58–63) and the Molorchus episode from the Victory of Berenice in Aetia III (pp. 106–12). Each chapter concludes with ‘Further Reading’, though most of these sources would not be user-friendly for a Greekless, non-specialist reader.

The difficulty in writing about this poet for the non-specialist is that, unlike Homer, Virgil or Apollonius of Rhodes, Callimachus has almost no post-classical afterlife in the western literary tradition. His hymns were not even translated into English until the eighteenth century, and whatever influence he does have resulted almost entirely from adaptations by Roman poets (one thinks of Catullus 66, a ‘translation’ of the Lock of Berenice into Latin, or Ovid's version of the tale of Erysichthon, based on the Hymn to Demeter). Callimachus’ most influential works, his Aetia, Iambi and Hecale, are now fragments that require some technical skill to appreciate. He also wrote in a time and place (Cyrene and Alexandria) that fall outside of the familiar Classical spaces of Athens and Rome. Because there are no easy frames of reference, authorial choices of how much and what kind of background information to provide determines not just the accessibility of the poetry, but also how it is to be understood. Similarly, the limited size of the book means that what gets left out is often as important as what is included. The focus on the Hymns to Apollo and to Delos allows R. to talk about Callimachus’ poetic emphasis of the small and well-crafted over the large and bombastic (pp. 18–20), and he does discuss the prologue to the Aetia at some length (pp. 28–40). This is an essential section. But without any discussion of hymns to the goddesses (Artemis, Athene and Demeter), one misses the deftness of Callimachus’ humour interlaced with strong moral sensibilities.

R. begins with brief explanations of the early Hellenistic period, Alexander's conquest as ushering in a new age of monarchs, Cyrene as an old Greek colony and Alexandria as a new city, before turning to a summary of what we know about Callimachus’ life (very little). It might have been useful to stress more forcefully the uniqueness of writing within and for a newly established city, one that was being built even as the poet wrote. While R. is good on the ways in which myths function as cultural markers of place, he has opted to talk about more familiar Greek places like Delphi and Delos (using the Hymn to Delos as his main exemplar) in a way that obscures Callimachus’ originality in writing for this new space. For example, explaining the prophecy of the birth of Ptolemy II that sits at the centre of the Hymn to Delos, he concludes that ‘while [Ptolemy II's] rule is and will be world-wide, he remains a Hellene and a mighty defender of Hellas against the barbarian’ (p. 98). Certainly, this is true, but it both misses the oddity of the god prophesying from the womb and the significance of defeating the Gauls. The topic was ideologically central for Hellenistic monarchs, who consistently used their skirmishes with these Gaulish invaders to underscore their roles as the defenders of the Hellas against these new Persians (see Pausanias 10.19–20).

In a similar vein, in discussing Iambus 1, which opens with Callimachus summoning the sixth-century bc iambicist Hipponax to Alexandria, R. focuses on the ‘unconventional opinions about religion’ expressed in the poem, but concludes that ‘it is not obvious that Callimachus is sympathetic to such views’ (p. 67). Subtending these remarks is an unstated assumption that there is, in the third century, a ‘traditional’ Greek religion, as opposed to specific polis-centred practices, as evidenced by the Carneia at Cyrene (which is not celebrated at Athens). Such a view also fails to take into account philosophical speculation about the nature of the divine that had been going on in Greek writers for centuries (a speculation to which Euhemerus contributed), the cultural specificity of Alexandria (the temple of Serapis) and, most importantly, that the lines in question were a very small part of a much larger poem the ultimate trajectory of which is not obvious.

On the whole, R.’s Callimachus fits comfortably into a Greek classical model – writing traditional forms with predictable antecedents (epic, Pindar, elegy), and even his poetic agendas do not so much break with tradition as take up one strand: the emphasis on non-epic, small poetic formats. What is missing is the sheer audacity of Callimachus’ poetic vision, the boldness of his generic experiments and the elegance of his craftsmanship. This is hard to capture without recourse to Greek. But in terms of an introduction to a difficult poet (difficult not because of his poetry, but because he is a fragment), R. does an admirable job of showcasing many of his virtues. For those who are familiar with Greek poetry (but are non-specialists or students), this is a helpful introduction to an understudied artist.