The poets of Alexandria were tasked with a unique set of challenges: to write for and of a new city and kingdom, one situated on the margins of the Greek world and populated by a mixture of immigrants and a native population. First time readers of Alexandrian poetry likewise face their own set of challenges as they attempt to make sense of texts and authors that are scripting a past for a people and place interested in a new and different future. The interpretative toolbox – outfitted with an understanding of Greek literary traditions, Ptolemaic culture and Egyptian history – required for reading these texts is difficult for students of Greek poetry to stock, which explains why the works of Alexandrian poets are often given limited treatment in the curricula of survey courses on Greek civilisation or literature. In The Poets of Alexandria S. introduces Posidippus, Theocritus, Callimachus and Apollonius to students and general readers of Greek literature as innovators and disruptors. Wisely eschewing narratives of belatedness, ivory tower navel-gazing and imperialist mouthpieces, S. engagingly makes the argument for understanding the poets of Alexandria as an experimental vanguard for Ptolemaic culture and myth-making.
Difference is the repeated refrain in the introductory chapter (‘Changing Places’). Audience/readership (Greek, Macedonian and Egyptian), political institutions (monarchy), means of artistic production (rise of physical texts), language (koine and dialectal mixture), geography and social context are all different from the ‘old world’ of mainland Greece and Macedon. These differences were often a product of the newness of Alexandria – both physically (it did not exist before 333 bce) and culturally (a city of immigrants on what had been the margins of the Greek world). Alexandria was a place without a history. On this point S. makes a swift and powerful case for the cultural import of early Alexandrian poets: they are Alexandria's ‘place-makers’ as much as Alexander and the Ptolemies. In and through their works, these poets constructed Alexandria ‘by articulating its relationship to old Greece and older Egypt, by giving it ancestors, by celebrating its unique here and now’ (p. 11). The Alexandrian poets as well-read agents of cultural memory is a core theme and contribution of the book that S. returns to in each of her author-based chapters.
The core of the book consists of four chapters on Posidippus, Theocritus, Callimachus and Apollonius (other Alexandrian poets, such as Philitas, get shout-outs in the introduction, but S. explains that she restricts her focus to these four since their connection to the city is quite certain and their works survive to such an extent that informed statements about their aesthetic and poetic programmes can be made). Each chapter balances the introduction of the author and a survey of his works with insightful treatments that stress the author's role as an innovator in Greek poetry and contributor to the construction of Alexandrian culture and history.
S. herself innovates by focusing on Posidippus in the opening chapter. Posidippus’ (incomplete) authorially organised poetry book epitomises for S. the aesthetic and cultural preoccupations of Alexandrian poetry. S. likens the collection to a mosaic. Composed of poetic tesserae on a variety of topics and places – gems, statuary, equestrian victories, shipwreck victims –, the bookroll, when read collectively, reveals a vibrant picture of life and death in the Ptolemaic empire. S. lucidly treats each section, highlighting both its own internal organisation and logic and its contribution to the broader Ptolemaic narrative for which she argues. An inescapable feature of Posidippus’ artistic world are the figures and symbolic power of the Ptolemaic royal house. Precious stones from the east make their way to Alexandria and the possession of Ptolemaic elites; Ptolemaic queens and kings are celebrated for their victories and consistently evoked throughout the collection. The Ptolemaic resonance of the Milan papyrus (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309), then, ‘requires us to re-evaluate the received notion that Alexandrian poetics was exclusively about a slender art (leptotês) for its own sake’ (p. 29). In her ability to seamlessly toggle between close readings of individual epigrams and broader cultural and aesthetic implications, S. presents the best introduction to Posidippus’ collection that I have read.
Posidippus’ poetics are a touchstone in the similarly nuanced chapters on Theocritus, Callimachus and Apollonius that follow. Drawing a parallel with the thematically intertwined epigrams of Posidippus’ bookroll, S. sees in the Idylls a shared set of values operational across the Theocritean corpus which transcend simple divisions drawn by genre, metre or dialect. S. uses her patented sensitivity to the political and cultural resonances of places and mythological figures to nuanced effect, even if the line of argumentation could have benefited from a fuller treatment in certain instances. The poetic geography of the Idylls puts the pastoral, political and mythological realms into both harmonious contact and disruptive tension. Cos, for example, is a nurturing island both for pastoral poetics (Idyll 7) and Ptolemaic rule (Idyll 17) and thus an ideal embodiment of the values of Theocritean poetics. At other times the contemporary realities of a site, such as Croton (Idyll 4) or Sybaris (Idyll 5), intrude into the leisurely calm of the pastoral locus amoenus. The next chapter on Callimachus is a lucid accounting of the Cyrenaean's oeuvre and based in large part on S.’s important recent work. Callimachus is presented to the reader as a radical innovator, whose works are poetic monuments to new modes of art, inquiry and rule at the new city of Alexandria. The poetics and politics of space are again the focus in S.’s adept treatment of Apollonius’ Argonautica as a ‘new epic space’ (p. 140) for a new Greek-Egyptian world. Partly inspired by Pindar's narrative in Nemean 4, Apollonius constructs a version of the Argonauts’ journey that culminates on the islands of Thera and Anaphe, which are symbols of Greek colonisation of North Africa.
In fitting fashion for a book on ‘poets [who] took the stuff of earlier Greek poetry and reworked it to suit a radically new world’ (p. 160), S. concludes (‘Afterwards’) with a brisk treatment of the reception and transformation of the Alexandrian poets from Rome to Constantine P. Cavafy, Alexandria's modern Callimachus. Reading like a professor offering an inquisitive student an annotated list of book recommendations, here S. wears her deep knowledge of Alexandrian culture and its Nachleben most easily.
As an introduction to Alexandrian poetry in its literary and cultural contexts, the volume is successful. I could imagine assigning individual chapters, particularly those on Posidippus and Callimachus, in upper-level courses on Greek literature or the Hellenistic world. At points, however, S.’s interpretations require a level of familiarity with the texts under discussion, Hellenistic history and academic discourse that may well exceed those of most undergraduate or generalist readers. Notable on this account is the compressed treatment of the complex relationship between Pindar's Pythian 4, Apollonius and the islands of Thera and Anaphe. I must also (sheepishly) admit that I did not know the dates of the Chremonidean War (p. 68), which S. does not supply (267–261 bce). ‘Amoebean’ (p. 68), ‘Planctae’ (p. 120), ‘proleptic’ (p. 96) and ‘parerga’ (p. 97), among other terms, might have benefited from either glosses or replacement altogether. The occasional unevenness in the level and detail of material is the result of a book stitched together from earlier publications for more expert audiences. Accordingly, experts and graduate students will already be familiar with much of what is argued in this slim volume. Nevertheless, I found it intellectually reinvigorating to spend some renewed time with S.’s account of Alexandrian poetry. In short, this book – read in part or in whole – makes a strong and compelling case for reading and appreciating the innovative poetry of Alexandria in our ‘here and now’.
