CHAPTER 6
Literature in the Hellenistic World

Anatole Mori

1. Literary Contexts

The Hellenistic period is usually framed by the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE and the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE. These political markers are not arbitrary: the kingdoms of the Successors emerged after Alexander’s conquest and ended with the rise of the Roman Empire. Alexander dominated the politics and society of his day, but his exploits may lead us to overlook other, less obvious but no less significant, causes and effects. Our focus on these two dates narrows our perspective, obscuring the many diverse interactions between newer states and older cultures that offer a clearer understanding of how and why the world changed at that time. A more expansive chronological and geographical framework is likely to take us some distance from what is typically expected of an introduction to Hellenistic Greek literature. This chapter attempts to combine an overview of third-century Hellenistic poetry (Section 2: Literary Constructs) with an acknowledgment of the shifting social and political contexts of literary cultures in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Bactria, as well as the more familiar intellectual communities of Egypt, Macedonia, and Pergamon.

c6-fig-0001 — **Map 6.1** The Hellenistic World.

Admittedly, the term “Hellenistic” reinforces hierarchical notions: it simultaneously places the era below those that were more authentically Hellenic and at the same time obscures the influence of non-Hellenic cultures (North African, Western European, Indian, Persian, and so forth). Antiquity established cultural distinctions that help to reinforce these hierarchies, contrasting, for example, attikizein, speaking a (traditional, refined, elegant) Attic dialect, with hellenizein, speaking the modified, common (koine) dialect spread by Alexander’s armies.¹ One hopes to avoid as much as possible relapses into the chauvinistic tendencies to which every age is susceptible, and satisfactory alternatives to “Hellenistic” are hard to imagine and equally liable to fall short in one way or another. In any case, most classicists today would probably not wish to claim that the poetry of classical Athens was somehow “purer” than that of Alexandria, given our familiarity with, for example, the Near Eastern antecedents of Homeric epic.² Even so, many still find it difficult to shake the feeling that when we speak of Greek culture, we are talking about the works of the (classical) poleis and colonies of the Aegean islands and the Greek mainland rather than those of hybrid kingdoms like Ptolemaic Egypt or the Seleucid Empire, with their diverse territories and (un-Greek) institutions, such as ruler cult.

Such sensibilities seem to have come into being, or at least sharper focus, with the expanding horizons of the Hellenistic world itself.³ This was a time that saw, for better or worse, a rapid diffusion of Hellenic culture. It goes without saying that interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks pre-date the third century BCE, and that through trade and colonization ancient Greeks had been interacting with non-Hellenic communities long before the new Greco-Macedonian kingdoms governed much of the known world. Moreover, Greek speakers (from Macedonia and elsewhere)⁴ would continue to influence these regions throughout the Roman and Byzantine eras. The philosopher Sextus Empiricus (second century CE) defined the ability to speak Greek as a fundamental index of Hellenism (Hellenismos),⁵ and language, along with common customs, kinship, and cult practices, had long been recognized as a marker of Greekness (to hellenikon) (Hdt. 8.144). Recent scholarship on the economy, politics, and society of Hellenistic states has accordingly done much to reassess the influence of local communities on the Hellenistic dynasties. Modes of assimilation and interpenetration work in various ways, at different speeds, and in more than one direction. Even as members of other ethnic groups adopted Greek customs, took Greek names, and employed the Greek language (not always voluntarily), Hellenistic Greeks were themselves being influenced by new homelands: adopting their customs, learning their languages, and translating their writings.

Exactly how intentional (and how comprehensive) these processes actually were has attracted much scholarly discussion. How exactly did Hellenistic dynasties interact with local cities and administrations? And how did these interactions affect the development of literary culture? Were the dynamics primarily “top-down,” or were there complementary networks exerting influence upwards from the local communities? Are we right to see the Successors as cultural elitists? Did they exploit different ethnic groups by suppressing local traditions and giving preferential treatment to Hellenes? The Ptolemies, for example, did not impose a unified legal code on the diverse ethnic groups under their rule. Greek identity conferred a favored tax status, and onomastic studies demonstrate some degree of Hellenization,⁶ although elite Alexandrian Greeks would not necessarily recognize provincial Greco-Egyptians as Hellenes whether or not they could speak Greek.⁷ On the other hand, in the third and second centuries several Greeks complained (rightly or not) that they had been assaulted or mistreated simply because of their Hellenic identity: ‘Hellene’ was usually, but not always, a positive designation.⁸

Relations between Jews and non-Jews were peaceful, at least in third-century Alexandria, where integrationist members of the Jewish community lobbied for the inclusion of their writings in the Great Library.⁹ But Jewish social relations varied within Mediterranean society (however one defines it),¹⁰ and reactions to the aggressive imposition of Greek cultural programs elsewhere were not favorable. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, includes the only extant version of 1 Maccabees (the original Hebrew text is lost).¹¹ The author of 1 Maccabees (who is not the same as the author of 2 Maccabees) describes the coercion of the Jewish community by the second-century Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215–164 BCE). “What happened in Jerusalem between 168 and 164 B.C. went beyond the ordinary internal conflicts of the Seleucid state,” as Momigliano observes. “The Temple of Yahwe was turned into a temple of Zeus Olympios, the inhabitants of Jerusalem were called Antiochenes, … traditional Jewish practices, such as circumcision and observance of the Sabbath, were prohibited.”¹² To make matters worse, Antiochus held extravagant parties in the new gymnasium that now abutted the Temple (Athen. 5.195c; 10.439b; 1 Maccabees 20). Herodotus’ four criteria of Greek identity were very much on display there, as they would be in any gymnasium, a space where males of all age groups came together not only to exercise, train, and compete, but also to socialize, take part in cult activities, attend lectures, musical and theatrical events, and so on.¹³ The Jewish population of Jerusalem accordingly took Antiochus’ decadence as normative: as an expression of the depravity typical of Greek life. Some, like Antiochus’ agent, the high priest Jason the Oniad, signaled their embrace of Hellenismos by frequenting the gymnasium, but many, like the Maccabees, refused and would eventually rebel (2 Maccabees 4.7–15; Josephus, AJ 12.5.1).

The situation in Jerusalem was more complicated than this brief discussion suggests, but the point here is simply that Antiochus was an atypical ruler: the majority of Hellenistic kings were less coercive – or at least no more coercive – than their (non-Greek) predecessors. While Hellenistic rulers relied on Greek advisors and sought to preserve Greek culture and customs in these new communities, they made better use of local networks and social structures than was the case in Jerusalem, where Hellenization was decidedly counterproductive, inasmuch as it contributed to a civil war and the resurgence of an independent Jewish state. Political activity within and between Hellenistic states was neither uniform nor systematic; civic groups and institutions were connected via complex networks of peer polities. Peer polity interaction, as Davies writes, amounts to “an untidy set of individual responses to specific situations (whether threats, needs, or opportunities) which were by their nature public and visible to neighbors, were imitated if they were seen to be effective, and therefore came to show certain family resemblances.”¹⁴

The complexity of politics in the Hellenistic period suggests that our consideration of Hellenistic literature should do more than explain who wrote what; as classicists we are liable to characterize Hellenistic literature more narrowly than perhaps we should. Hellenists are traditionally concerned, for the most part, with linguistic practices and the structure and development of Greek literature. The focus of this chapter, too, for a number of reasons, is Greek literature and not that of the Jews (as the preceding paragraphs might suggest). But why is it that we typically locate the literary epicenter of the third-century Greek world in Egypt, rather than Greece, Macedon, or Syria? If all the eastern states had greater resources and were stronger than those of the west, it is reasonable to ask what it was that set Ptolemaic culture apart from that of other urban centers. Was the Great Library of Alexandria¹⁵ an extraordinary response to the Greek diaspora and the loss of traditional performance contexts? Was it a unique expression of the legacy of Aristotelian thought, of Greek paideia and the philosophical tradition? Such arguments have been made, and not without reason, but it is easy to forget that Ptolemaic wealth, fondness for spectacle (e.g., the extravagant Grand Procession of Ptolemy II), and emulation of Athenian culture were not atypical for third-century dynasts, and that in many ways, Alexandria was not unique. Hundreds of new Greek-style communities complete with temples, theaters, and gymnasia were founded in Asia during the fourth and third centuries. The archaeological remains of the Greek community of Ai Khanoum, originally one of Alexander’s military installations (possibly known in antiquity as Alexandria-on-the-Oxus) in what is now northeastern Afghanistan, show that Greeks maintained their cultural heritage by, among other things, living in a separate district, attending a large theater, and maintaining a gymnasium: “the quintessential public institution of the Greek world.”¹⁶ Public buildings in Ai Khanoum included a Mesopotamian-style temple, and a Persian-style administrative center, but Greek influence is clear from the archaeological remains, which include a royal library, a gymnasium and a 5,000-seat Greek theater, the largest in the East.

The Seleucids established many more new cities than the Ptolemies did, but Ptolemy I Soter did found a second Greek capital, Ptolemaïs Hermeiou, in the Thebaid, in order to maintain control over southern Egypt.¹⁷ Although Alexandria remained the center of intellectual life in Egypt long after its holdings are believed to have been lost,¹⁸ Ptolemaïs, together with its neighbor Panopolis, became the center of a new Hellenic literary community in the third – sixth centuries CE, producing a new generation of epic poets including Nonnus, Triphiodorus, and Musaeus.¹⁹ Alexandria, in other words, was not unique as a cultural center, even in Egypt. And while it is true that the Ptolemies promoted scholarship and were the patrons of poets, historians, and intellectuals, the same can be said of the Antigonids in the Macedonian capital of Pella, and the Attalids in the hilltop kingdom of Pergamon.²⁰ Political rivalries manifested in cultural as well as political and military conflicts. Thus, the conspicuous display of Greek culture was driven in part by inter-state (and inter-city) competition, and this in turn leads us to ask why it is that Alexandria remains uppermost in discussions of Hellenistic literature.

The political advantages, both practical and intangible, of having a reputation for cultural sophistication and for employing musicians, painters, and sculptors, had long been apparent to those in power throughout the Mediterranean world. Some leaders, like Pisistratus of Athens, may or may not legitimately be given the credit for such cultural advancements, but the intentional patronage of others, like Hieron I of Sicily, is well known. The Macedonian kings, dismissed as barbarians by their Greek neighbors to the south, responded by hosting intellectual luminaries: Euripides accepted Archelaus’ invitation in the fifth century, and in the third century poets (Antagoras of Rhodes, Alexander the Aetolian), philosophers (Bion of Borysthenes, Menedemus of Eretria), and philosophically inclined poets (Aratus of Soli, Timon of Phlius) spent time at Antigonus Gonatas’ court in Pella. Any kingdom with enough coin could become a new cultural center despite any geographical disadvantages. Indeed, actually importing culture may have been less crucial than being known for importing it. Sources report that Zeno turned down a sojourn in Pella (Persaeus went in his stead), and that Theophrastus, Stilpon of Megara, and Cleanthes of Assos all declined invitations to Alexandria.²¹ Such refusals have been taken as condemnations of autocratic power (conflicts between kings and intellectuals were not unknown),²² but an invitation in itself, regardless of acceptance, could indirectly promote a court’s cultural sophistication.

That said, some locations are better for cultural preeminence than others. One practical reason for Alexandria’s reputation was its foundation on the coast of a comparatively stable region. There would be no significant internal uprisings against the Ptolemies until the end of the third century BCE, and Egypt had always been hard to invade: the shoreline was perilous and the watchtowers in the Delta were well fortified. Memphis, long regarded by Egyptians as the best-situated city in the land (Diod. Sic. 15.43), was 150 miles from the sea, considerably closer than Thebes. But with access to the economic activity of the Mediterranean safeguarded by the Ptolemaic fleet, Alexandria soon supplanted Memphis as Egypt's main port. Alexandria’s two large harbors replaced the ancient Egyptian harbor Thonis-Heracleion, and their favorable location west of the Delta was free from the annual silt that choked those nearer the mouths of Nile distributaries. Canals connected the city with the Nile, the best mode of transport for Egypt’s other capitals and villages. Accordingly, in its early years Ptolemaic Egypt was more easily managed politically, economically, and socially than the diverse populations of the Seleucid Empire, whose contested borders ranged from Syria to India. While Memphis and Thebes would continue to be important cultural centers, they gradually lost revenue as the good fortune of Egypt increasingly flowed through its new harbors. And we can understand Alexandrian literary culture in much the same way, as a set of works and practices not only engaged with the Greek world, but also nourished and sustained by the riches of the Egyptian cultural climate.

Then, too, the Ptolemies were distinguished not simply by an impulse to promote Greek literary culture, but also by the grand scale that their enterprises attained. Egyptian influence regarding not only the association of divinity with the colossal and monumental but also the veneration of the written word should not be underestimated. The Egyptians first used writing for administrative purposes connected with the royal house and also to preserve important religious performances,²³ a practice that contrasts with those of ancient Greeks, who regulated cult practices by oral transmission rather than by archiving performance texts. Some sacred regulations (leges sacrae) were inscribed at Greek cult sites,²⁴ but, in general, writing played a greater role in Egyptian cult, for it was the responsibility of Egyptian priests (or at least certain classes, since not all were literate) to mark sacred spaces with hieroglyphs. These “divine words” were specifically reserved for such sites, and differed from commonly used Egyptian demotic, the script used in graffiti, narratives,²⁵ legal contracts, and funerary texts, and for administrative purposes at the local level even in the Ptolemaic period, when it was partially replaced by Greek.

To be sure, Egyptian deities were mostly represented as “preliterate” and thus were not so different (in this regard) from Greek gods.²⁶ However, as Henrichs comments:

the representations of divinities in art and literature suggest strongly that Greek gods did not write and were not expected to write. Their apparent indifference to the art of writing sets them apart from the highly literate gods of the Hittite pantheon, and from Thoth, the divine scribe of Egyptian religion.²⁷

Nevertheless, the association of writing with divinity was visually represented by sculptures of an ibis-headed Thoth, the scribe of Osiris, and Seshat, the guardian goddess of writing, which stood in Thebes at the entrance to the royal library of the thirteenth-century pharaoh Rameses II. The Egyptian view of Thoth changed over time, but he was primarily thought of as the inventor and lord of “divine words” (hieroglyphs), and associated with the knowledge of creation, the afterlife, magic, divine and human order.

Greek tradition (rightly) attributes the invention of writing to foreign lands, which helps to explain its association (from a Greek perspective) with translation and deception. Plato is said to have studied mathematics in Cyrene and astronomy in Egypt (Diog. Laer. 3.6; Strabo 17.29), and it is tempting to see his characterization of written texts as degraded transcriptions or simulations of reality as, at least in part, a response to Egyptian insistence on the truth-value of hieroglyphs. In any case Herodotus credits Cadmus, the Phoenician founder of Boeotian Thebes, with importing writing to Greece (5.58; cf. Lind. Chron. B15 [Higbee 2003]), while the Latin writer Hyginus writes that Mercury, the god of thieves and tradesmen, first brought it from Egypt (Fab. 277). Other trickster figures, like Prometheus or Palamedes, are also credited with its invention. As Vasunia observes, “Numerous Greek texts demarcate writing as an area of anxiety, in contrast to the Egyptian traditions surrounding the god Thoth that reflect the vital and cosmic power of writing within the culture.”²⁸ Thoth is not a trickster figure, though Greeks identified him with Hermes. Herodotus regards Thoth’s temple in Bubastis as a temple of Hermes (2.138); Diodorus Siculus, whose history preserves much of a fourth-century book on Egypt by the historian Hecataeus of Abdera, reports that it was Thoth who taught the Greeks about hermeneia, or “interpretation,” meaning the verbal expression of thoughts as well as translation from one language to another (Diod. Sic.1.16).

This sketch of ancient Greek attitudes to writing demonstrates not only regional differences in attitudes to the ethos of writing, but also the potential impact of cultural cross-pollination with Egyptian authors. Egyptian demotic narratives (e.g., the Petese cycle: 70 moralizing tales about good and bad women) were produced in response to Greek writers, such as Herodotus. That literate Greeks were interested in Egyptian theology is clear from Greek epigrams inscribed on four late-second-century BCE stelae from the necropolis of Nag’ El Hassaia. The author, Herodes, mentions individuals who are also referred to in Egyptian hieroglyphs on stelae from Edfu.²⁹ Then, too, histories of Egypt could be written in Greek, as was the fragmentary Aegyptiaca, a history of Egypt by an Egyptian priest, Manetho.³⁰ Some Egyptian authors went so far as to re-imagine the Ptolemaic dynasty as fundamentally Egyptian: The Tale of Nectanebos’ Dream presents Alexander as the son of an Egyptian pharaoh. In effect, the Hellenic literary culture of Ptolemaic Alexandria was influenced, to some extent, not only by writers of Egyptian tales but also by the country’s intellectual climate. The systematic collection of writings in temple libraries was most probably the most significant impetus for the creation of the Alexandrian Library.³¹ While the desire to preserve a Hellenic heritage was no doubt integral to the collection and development of Greek literature in non-Greek lands, the literary culture of Alexandria, like that of other Hellenistic capitals, emerged from a confluence of wealth, political stability, and regional traditions in which writing had long played a more central role than it had in Greece.³²

There are parallels that justify a similar, and possibly more surprising, reappraisal of literary culture in the Seleucid Empire. In 323 BCE Seleucus received Babylon, a rich prize that was crucial for control of the Iranian plateau, but another of Alexander’s generals, Antigonus the One-Eyed, inherited a larger swath of western Asian territory. In 315 Antigonus won Babylon as well, but from the perspective of peer polity interaction, Seleucus’ subsequent exile in Egypt was well spent, for there he observed Ptolemy’s cultural program and cooperative interaction with the temple bureaucracy and other Egyptian institutions.³³ After Antigonus’ death in 301, Seleucus came to control much of the former Persian Empire. His destruction of Antigoneia (the only Greek city in Syria at the time) and relocation of its entire population suggest the extent of his hostility to his aggressive predecessor.³⁴ Seleucus turned out to be much more effective at empire management than Antigonus had been, maintaining royal courts at Babylon and the older Achaemenid capitals (Ecbatana, Susa, and Sardis) while also founding new cities in central Asia and Syria.³⁵ Within a year Seleucus had secured Syria with four strategically located cities (all named for himself and members of his family): Antioch and Seleucia-in-Pieria to the north; the military installation Apamea-on-the-Orontes and a second port, Laodicia-on-the-Sea, to the south.³⁶

In the east the newly founded Seleucia-on-the-Tigris was lost to the Ptolemies in 245. Its central location, not far from Babylon, would have made it a good choice for the principal Seleucid capital.³⁷ The size of the Greek population of Babylon during the Seleucid dynasty is difficult to estimate (non-Greeks sometimes adopted Greek names), as is the extent to which the city was Hellenized. But the Seleucids were evidently practical with respect to the use of local languages and political hierarchies and institutions, even elevating non-Greeks to key administrative positions.³⁸ Although they are often thought to have been less energetic with regard to cultivating Greek literary culture in their new capitals than the Ptolemies and Antigonids were,³⁹ there is some evidence for royal patronage. One of the lost works of Simonides of Magnesia (FGrHist 163) is a poem celebrating the defeat of the Gauls by Seleucus’ son (and co-ruler) Antiochus 1 Soter (281–61).⁴⁰ Literary culture was also promoted in Antioch, as in Alexandria, through the installation of a library. Casson notes that the library at Antioch “was important enough to entice Euphorion, a distinguished scholar–poet (b. 272 BCE), into accepting Antiochus’ offer of the post of director. Nothing else is recorded about it [the library]; apparently it never acquired much of a reputation.”⁴¹ The question is: why didn’t it? Euphorion’s entry in the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia, notes that he studied with the Theban lyric poet Archeboulus, and enjoyed renown both during and after his lifetime. Only two of his epigrams survive (Anth. Pal 6.279, 7.651), but he wrote short epics and a compendium of oracles, and was a notable figure interested, like Callimachus, in allusive narrative and esoteric myths.⁴² Literary culture was if anything even more closely tied to political prestige at this time than it had been in previous centuries. Finkelberg observes:

it would be hard to imagine circumstances under which, say, a Seleucid king might choose to educate his heir by using an edition of Homer imported from the court of his arch-enemy (six wars were waged between Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria between 264 and 168 B.C.E.): it is much more likely that he would wish to emphasize his state’s cultural self-sufficiency by adopting an edition produced by a Homeric scholar working at his own court or at that of one of his predecessors.⁴³

Our current evidence for the resources of the library at Antioch is limited, but we do know that the city itself was a thriving cultural center from the very beginning. Indeed, of Seleucus’ four Syrian settlements (called the “Tetrapolis”) only Antioch would eventually become a cosmopolis.⁴⁴ Sources mention traditional Greek civic institutions such as an agora, gymnasium, and bouleuterion (see Cohen 2006); in the Roman era Antioch became the capital of Syria, and coins from the royal mint bore the honorific title metropolis (Cohen 2006). Cicero describes the city as renowned (celebri) and filled with learned men and scholarly pursuits (Arch. 3.1). It remained a vital urban center of education as a center of the early church in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, a time when much of the western empire went into decline.

There are other good reasons to imagine the literary culture (native as well as Hellenic) of the Seleucid Empire was able to flourish and to rival that of Ptolemaic Egypt. Writing originated in Mesopotamia in approximately 3200 BCE, and written works of one kind or another had flourished there for thousands of years. There is evidence to suggest a minimum ability to read and write among the merchant, elite, and royal classes, although it is true that the literacy rate of the general population, apart from professionally trained scribes, may have been very low (less than 1 percent).⁴⁵ The oral Akkadian epic Gilgamesh was preserved on twelve tablets housed in Ashurbanipal’s royal library in Nineveh.⁴⁶ It was performed on special occasions, like the Enuma Elish, which celebrated the rise of the god Marduk, and was recited each April in celebration of the New Year. Like the Egyptians, the Babylonians traditionally associated writing with divinity (the goddess Nisaba). Pictograms and then cuneiform clay tablets recorded religious, literary, divinatory, and medical writings in Mesopotamian schools, palaces, and temple libraries.⁴⁷ Royal literacy, it is true, was not the norm: “The integration of the highest elite with literacy in Egypt contrasts with the more narrowly scribal use of writing in less monolithic Mesopotamia, whose rulers did not rise through a bureaucracy and were not normally literate.”⁴⁸ Yet literacy was linked with certain royal figures: some Assyrian kings described themselves as scholars and maintained royal collections, such as Tiglath-Piliser I (twelfth century BCE) and especially the seventh-century BCE ruler Ashurbanipal, whose palace effectively housed the first professional reference library in the Near East.⁴⁹ Thus, during the Hellenistic period the Babylonian scribal community viewed the libraries in Antioch and Alexandria as the recipients of a Babylonian tradition.⁵⁰

As we know, things looked different to the Greeks. Of importance is the extent to which Mesopotamian reading practices differed from those of the Greeks. Charpin observes: “there was no ‘free’ reading: no one is ever depicted reading for pleasure.”⁵¹ Differences in audience expectation and in the ethos, function, and style of literature may go some way toward explaining why, for example, Berossus’ annalistic Babyloniaca failed to attract a wide readership in the Greco-Roman world. Berossus, a third-century Babylonian priest and Chaldaean astrologer, wrote a history of Babylon, one presumably intended not only to correct fifth-century representations by Herodotus and Ctesias (a Greek doctor who lived in the court of Artaxerxes), but also to introduce the guiding principles of Babylonian civilization to Antiochus I.⁵² As Kuhrt comments, Berossus’ history, like Manetho’s history of Egypt, helped the Macedonian rulers to adapt local ideology, generating their own “distinctive political-cultural entities.”⁵³ Yet his history contributed little to the views of the wider classical audience. King lists do not make for lively reading (again, reading pleasure was apparently not a priority) and in any case Berossus’ Greek was poor. Thus Berossus’ Greek audience, such as it was, largely encountered his history second-hand through other writers: the Stoic Posidonius of Apamea (135–51 BCE), or Alexander Polyhistor (b. 105 BCE).

The limited influence of the Babyloniaca among Hellenic readers undoubtedly owes something to its stylistic and thematic differences, but it also owes something to the fortunes of the region. By the second century BCE the Parthians had conquered Babylonia, and Babylon seems to have lost the interest of the Greco-Roman audience.⁵⁴ Babylon and Antioch are similar in this regard. The equal of the (continuously inhabited) Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople, Antioch played an important role until the thirteenth century when the Mamluks destroyed the Christian community; the site was essentially abandoned until the Ottoman foundation of Antakya in 1800.⁵⁵ As western heirs to the Greco-Roman classical tradition, then, we are less likely to be familiar with Babylon and Antioch than Alexandria or the hilltop kingdom of Pergamon.

A resourceful Paphlagonian Greek named Philetaerus was the founder of the Pergamene dynasty. Philataerus first served as an officer of Antigonus the One-Eyed, and subsequently maintained the treasury in the fortress of Pergamon for Lysimachus, another of Alexander’s Successors. Eventually Philetaerus switched allegiance to the Seleucids and gained control of the citadel. A eunuch as a result of a childhood accident (Strabo, Geog. 13.4.1), Philetaerus made his nephew, Attalus, his royal heir. With its cult of Athena, its monumental Altar of Zeus, and its extensive library, Pergamon rivaled the artistic and scholarly activity of its models Athens and Alexandria.⁵⁶ Like the Phrygian Philomelids or the Teucrids of Cilicia, the Attalids were dynastic “power holders” who helped stabilize the Seleucid Empire (from which they were independent by 283) before eventually aligning themselves with Rome.⁵⁷ For all its glory, our greater familiarity with Pergamon undoubtedly owes a good deal to its inclusion within the Roman Empire (Strabo 13.4.2).

The larger point to be drawn from this discussion is that although institutional libraries, both the collections of written works housed in temples and palaces and the various kinds of readers and writers associated with them, had existed in Asia and northern Africa for centuries before the Hellenistic dynasties, the prominence of literary culture in those realms has often been perceived as a marker of (newly imported) Hellenic sophistication. This is not to say that in Greece there were no public collections or state archives, like those housing the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The sixth-century tyrant Pisistratus was said to have invited Athenians to read works in his personal library (Aulus Gellius 7.17.7), and even if this story is untrue, other individuals, gymnasia, philosophical schools curated library collections that were open to select groups of people.⁵⁸ We need to exercise caution, however, regarding what has long been (and continues to be) the dominant view held by classicists: that the primary impetus for the installation of public Hellenistic libraries was Greek.⁵⁹ So, for example, Demetrius of Phalerum and Strato of Lampsacus, Peripatetic advisors to Ptolemy I Soter, are commonly credited with the foundation of the Library of Alexandria.⁶⁰ The fortunes of the Alexandrian Library likewise tend to be romanticized: we hear a variety of explanations for its decline that exaggerate not only its holdings but also the impact of its destruction, whether by political upheaval, cataclysmic disaster, or simply the slow and inevitable deterioration of papyrus in a Mediterranean climate.⁶¹ At the same time we hear little or nothing about either the rise or the fall of the Library of Antioch. Its influence seems to have been underestimated, in part because classicists have been less concerned with Seleucid settlements, which experienced a comparatively high failure rate. Our focus on Ptolemaic Alexandria as well as our gaps in knowledge regarding the literary culture of Hellenistic Antioch may be attributed to accidents of survival and the vagaries of history as well as differences in disciplinary interests.

2. Literary Constructs

In the Hellenistic period writing played a role in the preservation of what was gradually becoming a literary (rather than oral) tradition, and not just within the ambit of patronage and royal libraries. Production and consumption were not so closely linked, spatially and temporally, as they had been in previous years. If Greek poets were leaving Greece behind, Greek poetry in turn was leaving the poets behind. With the loss of original performance contexts, familiarity with what was increasingly seen as canonical (e.g., Homer) became a more mobile sign of Hellenic identity. The movement from public composition and recitation to (relatively private) reading by no means diminished the appeal of heroic epic – despite the fact that, for the most part, popular culture in antiquity, as Harris points out, “had little to do with reading” (1989, 126). It is true that literacy rates were never high in antiquity: according to one estimate probably less than ten percent of the male population could read well enough to appreciate literature even in communities with a comparatively high literacy rate (such as fifth-century Athens or second-century CE Rome).⁶² But the Greek audience who appreciated and had access to literature most commonly read Homer, to judge from extant literary papyri down through the sixth century CE.⁶³ Thus the Iliad and the Odyssey formed the core of Greek paideia before and after the Hellenistic period,⁶⁴ and these epics continue to be more popular than any other ancient Greek poems down to the present day.

Yet when we refer to Hellenistic literature we are referring not to works that were popular at that time, but rather those that were written then and appreciated by elite and fairly specific communities of writers. Such communities would have included the better known scholar–poets associated with the Alexandrian Library as well as circles of book collectors and “readers with scholarly interests.”⁶⁵ Contemporary writing included histories (e.g., Polybius) and philosophy (Posidonius); technical writing on medicine, geography (Eratosthenes); or astronomy, mathematics, and engineering (Archimedes, Euclid) as well as paradoxography, discussions of natural wonders and the marvelous.⁶⁶ What we most commonly encounter on a reading list of Hellenistic literature, however, are poems: the bucolic poetry of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion ; epigrams by (among others) Posidippus, Asclepiades, Anyte, and Leonidas;⁶⁷ Herodas’ mimes; poems by Callimachus in numerous genres (hymn, iambus, elegy, epigram, epic); Aratus’ Phaenomena; the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes;⁶⁸ Lycophron’s Alexandra; with the relatively popular comedies of Menander rounding out the list.

These works all participate to varying degrees in what we refer to as “Hellenistic poetics,” meaning not only that the mode of composition had shifted from oral to written, but also that despite generic differences we find commonalities in the selection and treatment of subject matter as well as form and tone. Broadly speaking, Hellenistic poetry avoids linear narrative and plays with character, perspective, and the knowledge of the writer and the reader; it imagines an informed audience, and draws attention to the narrator, his sources, and the various constraints on mortal (and even divine) knowledge. Hellenistic poets were self-conscious about their debts to performance-based genres, primarily epic and lyric and drama, but in their own writings sophistication was tied to reconfiguration rather than close emulation of traditional forms. The blending of generic registers and mixing of elements associated with different traditions is often cited as a common characteristic. The lowborn herdsmen of Theocritus’ pastoral Idylls, for example, use Homeric dactylic hexameter to celebrate their loves and rivalries; Apollonius infuses his heroic epic with elements drawn from Attic tragedy and Ionian ethnography. Callimachus in particular is known for polyeideia, for writing a variety of different types of poems in contrast to earlier figures, like Hesiod, Sappho, Pindar, or Aeschylus, who specialized in one genre.

At the same time, despite or probably because of their distance from the mainland, Hellenistic poets display the same kinds of Hellenocentric biases we associate with earlier periods. As we noted above, in both modern and ancient definitions of Hellenism and Hellenic identity, a single geographical origin (along with language, customs, and kinship) determines linguistic and social affinity. Such definitions are of course complex and vary from place to place, but consider, for example, how Theocritus’ character Praxinoa rebukes an Alexandrian stranger for mocking her accent (Id. 15.90–93):

You don’t own us! These are Syracusans you are ordering about – as Corinthian as Bellerophon I’ll have you know. Our accent is pure Peloponnesian, and Dorians, I expect, are allowed to speak like Dorians.⁶⁹

In this passage Praxinoa does not define herself as an Alexandrian or even as a Greek living in Egypt, but as a Syracusan, of Corinthian stock. Praxinoa’s self-definition likewise extends to Theocritus himself, whose employment of what Willi refers to as “generic Doric” throughout the Idylls marks him as well as his characters as a Sicilian.⁷⁰ For an ancient Greek the line between living in Egypt and actually being Egyptian was thus very clear. It is not surprising that Praxinoa would construct her identity in this way, even though – or perhaps especially because – she was living at not one but two removes from the Peloponnese.⁷¹ Greeks living in Alexandria identified themselves not by their current address but by ancestral linguistic and kinship groups. From their point of view Alexandria was in Egypt (or perhaps beside it), but it was not precisely of it.

One of the main virtues of Alexandria’s location was, as we have seen, its proximity to the Nile, but from an ancient Greek perspective Alexandria looked outward to the greater Mediterranean world. In his praise for the Pharos lighthouse, the Macedonian poet Posidippus makes no mention of Egyptians: the lighthouse, he says, was meant to be Hellenõn sotera, a savior of the Greeks (Ep. 115.1):

As a saviour of the Greeks, this watchman of Pharos, O lord Proteus,

Was set up by Sostratus, son of Dexiphanes, from Cnidos.

For in Egypt there are no look-out posts on a mountain, as in the islands,

But low lies the breakwater where ships take harbour.

Therefore this tower, in a straight and upright line,

Appears to cleave the sky from countless furlongs away,

During the day, but throughout the night quickly a sailor on the waves

Will see a great fire blazing from its summit.

And he may even run to the Bull’s horn, and not miss

Zeus the Saviour, O Proteus, whoever sails this way.

(tr. Austin and Bastianini 2002)

Egyptians naturally had been sailing along maritime trade routes for thousands of years, but the Greeks saw things differently, and the foundation of the new Greco-Macedonian capital changed the picture. Posidippus picks up the stereotype of Egypt as self-absorbed and inward looking and represents it as a low-lying country lacking in perspicacity and self-definition. The lighthouse, one of the wonders of the world, now connects the land with the heavens (cleaves the sky: aithera temnein, Pos. Ep. 115.5) and even produces its own astral fire. Callimachus’ fragmentary lyric poem, “The Deification of Arsinoe” (F 228 Pf), similarly constructs the Pharos as a cosmic hub: the news of the queen’s death reaches the gods as the smoke of her funeral pyres rises from the Pharos to the heavens.

Posidippus thus presents the lighthouse as a divine beacon, one intended not to guide Egyptians to their ancestral homeland, but Greeks (and gods) to the harbors of Alexandria, the rising star of a newly Greek world. What attracted many Greeks to Egypt was the splendor of the Ptolemaic kingdom, and the financial opportunities it afforded.⁷² The scholar–poets associated with the Great Library were no exception. According to one resilient (although now no longer dominant) view of the period, dependence on royal patronage was detrimental to the native genius of Greek poetry, more properly strengthened by the political struggles and festival competition of the homeland. Hidden away in the recesses of the Great Library, scholar-poets were reduced to petty squabbles and displays of bookish erudition. More recently their work has been recast as an allusive, boldly experimental poetics of exile, rupture, and displacement. Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica is an epic poem that mythologizes Greek contact with foreign lands, providing an origin story for the Greek presence in Asia and Africa as it narrates the voyage of the Argo from Thessaly to the Black Sea, the Adriatic, and the Libyan coast. Set in the generation before the Trojan War, the poem provides an explanatory framework for the events in Homeric epic as well as the contemporary world. Aetiological digressions; inconsistent or even flawed characterization; an intrusive, unreliable narrator; abrupt shifts and breaks in generic style and narrative tone – all of which were viewed by scholars in the recent past as weaknesses and signs of the poem’s limitations – are now celebrated as intentional points of discontinuity, as breaks with generic tradition that both respond to and strengthen continuity with it.⁷³

It is certainly possible to overstate the extent to which exile and displacement define Hellenistic poetry. Travel was traditionally associated with the life of the ancient singer, or aoidos. In the Odyssey Eumaeus describes poets as wanderers, as strangers brought to communities for the sake of their specialized knowledge, as skilled workers (demiourgoi) like seers, doctors, and shipwrights (Od. 17.382–7). Travel is in fact a common feature in biographical stories about later Greek poets, who performed in various festivals, courts, and cities, accompanied patrons, and even carried out diplomatic activities.⁷⁴ As itinerant clients of wealthy patrons and monarchs, poets were necessarily mobile, long before the third century and far from the ambit of northern Africa. Apollonius, a native Alexandrian, was himself rumored to have retreated to Rhodes (hence his epithet “Rhodius,” “the Rhodian”). The motivation and evidence for his relocation are not secure, but the exile story persists, in part perhaps because traveling was the sort of thing that poets were expected to do, whether from financial necessity or professional obligation.

Yet why, really, would Apollonius have wanted to leave Alexandria?⁷⁵ As Gyllis, a character in one of Herodas’ mimes observes (1.26–33):

All things – or, if I’m not mistaken, as many things as there are and exist – are in Egypt: fortune, wrestling-schools, power, fine weather, fame, theater, philosophers, gold, young men, a sanctuary of the Theoi Adelphoi, the worthy king, a museum, wine, all good things, as many as one could want – and women, by Persephone, like the stars in looks and number …

Gyllis says she admires Egypt, but her praise is limited to the Greek part of it. What is more, with the exception of the references to the king and the cult of the Theoi Adelphoi, Gyllis’ description would fit nearly any prosperous Greek city of the day.⁷⁶ Even Ptolemaic ruler cult, a Hellenic graft onto pharaonic stock, could be transplanted from one region to another. What is missing from this catalogue of “all things Egyptian,” in other words, are things that actually are Egyptian, such as, for example, mummies, or pyramids, or even the Nile.

By contrast, the history of Egypt by Hecataeus of Abdera, who visited Egypt in the time of Ptolemy I, contains a lengthy discussion of the pyramids (Diod. Sic.1.63–4).⁷⁷ Hecataeus did not know Egyptian but sought to correct Herodotus’ account by using Egyptian records; his enthusiasm is exceptional for a Greek writer. Hecataeus’ discussion of the pyramids, whose grandeur, as he says, would stun onlookers (1.63.3–4), contrasts with the account of Strabo, a first-century BCE Greek writer from Amaseia (a Persian city near the Black Sea that was itself Hellenized in the second century BCE). Strabo is normally grouped with Roman rather than Hellenistic authors, but his treatment of Egypt illustrates the resilience of Greek cultural chauvinism. In his discussion of the pyramids (Geog. 17.1.33–5), a metonym for Egypt if ever there was one, Strabo briefly notes that the tombs of kings are exceptional in size and construction. However, the bulk of his discussion suggests that he (like his audience, presumably) was more interested in how the pyramids confirm the wonders of Greek life and culture: a love story, a natural marvel, the Trojan War.⁷⁸ This is not to say that he had no interest in Egypt, but it does suggest more interest in the links between exotic Egypt and the realities of his own world.⁷⁹

Scholars have accordingly considered the extent to which court poets like Posidippus, Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius drew on Egyptian material. Zanker argues against the claim that the Ptolemies encouraged poets to adopt Egyptian mythology in order to reconcile Greeks to their ideological program: “Would Theocritus [or any of the Alexandrians] be attempting a symbiosis and a harmonization of Greek and Egyptian culture to prove to the Greeks of Alexandria that they need fear no threat to their national identity from Ptolemaic encouragement of Egyptian ritual?” (1989, 84). For one thing, it is unclear whether Greek names or narratives are actually referring to something that is in fact Egyptian. While we do know that Egyptian royal portraits represent Macedonian Ptolemies, it is harder to be sure that Callimachus is in fact repackaging an Egyptian myth in the absence of an explicit assertion. This raises the further complication of motivation: would a Greek audience, even an Alexandrian court audience, necessarily have been expected to appreciate parallels with Egyptian mythological material? Exactly how conversant with the themes of Egyptian pharaonic narratives were Callimachus and his audience? And what would the poet’s motivation have been for suppressing explicit references to Egypt – beyond a characteristic literary playfulness?

Explicit references to a properly Egyptian Egypt are not as frequent in Hellenistic literature as one might perhaps expect. In addition to the Argonautica, Apollonius, who served as Head Librarian and the royal tutor to Ptolemy III Euergetes, wrote foundation narratives about a number of Greek settlements. Only one passage in the Argonautica mentions Egypt, and even there explicit references are downplayed and the focus is on Greek origins and nomenclature. The Colchian Argos tells the Argonauts that Eërie, “Hazy,” was the ancient name for Egypt, that Triton was the ancient name for the wide-flowing river (i.e., the Nile) by which all Eërie is watered, and that “a man” (meaning the Egyptian king Sesostris) traveled from Eërie to Europe and Asia and founded many cities (Argon. 4.267–76). This last observation alludes to a section in the history of Herodotus, who tells us that the Colchians were descended from Egyptians (2.102–6). Although Apollonius omits this information from Argos’ speech, it is likely that a learned audience is being constructed here, one that is sufficiently knowledgeable to recall this connection, and to read Egypt into the poetic figuration of Colchis.

Allusion and selectivity are hallmarks of Hellenistic poetry, yet one may reasonably wonder why Apollonius employs such subtlety with respect to Egypt in particular, not least because much of Book 4 is set in Libya. We find no coy or allusive games in references to Libya, which is mentioned explicitly more than fifteen times. As Stephens has shown, in poetic usage “Libya” figuratively comprised a large swath of African territory that included Alexandria,⁸⁰ yet one wonders whether Apollonius is consciously avoiding references to Egypt in order to distance it, figuratively, from the Ptolemaic state. After all, he represents Libya as a harsh land that tests the Greek heroes and nearly destroys them. We hear about the dangers of the Libyan Syrtis Gulf, where the Argo is stranded and two Argonauts die: Canthus, who is killed by Caphaurus, a descendant of Apollo, and Mopsus, bitten by a venomous snake, a descendant of the snakes spawned by drops of blood from Medusa’s head. The other Argonauts owe their survival to the intervention of demigods and largely local divinities: the Libyan nymphs, the Hesperides, Poseidon’s son Triton, and Zeus’ son Heracles (himself an erstwhile Argonaut). Indeed, the only god explicitly angered by the Argonauts during their voyage is Zeus, whose sanction against kin murder is broken by Jason and Medea when they ambush her half-brother. The poem thus attributes the Greek presence in North Africa not to the imperial ambitions of Greeks or Macedonians, but to the vagaries of sea travel and the mandates of fate. Apollonius’ Hellenizing inclinations are also apparent here: on the one hand native Libyan gods welcome and aid Greek heroes; on the other, Zeus is angered by the murder of a non-Greek prince (although Apsyrtus does have some standing as the grandson of the god Helius). Apollonius represents the Argonauts, the mythical antecedents of his own (Greco-Macedonian, Alexandrian, royal) audience, as though they have no desire to rule other lands, and he goes so far as to map conquest and imperial pride onto the Egyptian Sesostris and the Colchian king Aietes. His Jason swiftly rejects Hypsipyle's offer of kingship in Lemnos, and his Heracles, who claims that he seeks glory, abruptly drops the quest to search for Hylas. The poem suggests that although Greeks originally had no desire to rule in Africa in general or Egypt in particular, the whole of Libyan territory was already pre-colonized for them by Greek gods and monsters, in the age before the disinterested heroes set in motion Cyrene’s foundation.⁸¹

The aetiological focus of Hellenistic poetry on the origins of Greek cults and practices is well known. Callimachus, born in Cyrene, apparently spent most of his life in North Africa, but his poetry, like that of his contemporary Apollonius, addresses the lives and concerns of the Greeks who lived there. Callimachus commemorates his family, notable citizens of Cyrene, other communal ties, and the kings and queens of a dynasty only two generations old. Like Apollonius he tends not to name Egyptian gods, although he does mention Isis in two epigrams (Ep. 57 and 49 Pf). Epigram 49 describes the narrator as scorched in love like the lamps of Isis (l. 4), referring to the Egyptian festival of Isis the Bright, Aset Webenut, called the Lychnapsia in the Greco-Roman period. Lamps and torches were lighted during the night festival, which also involved processions in which the barque of Isis was carried in a larger boat (cf. Hdt. 2.62; Witt 1971, 122). Yet it is telling that Epigram 57 refers not to the temple of Isis, but to the temple of Inachean Isis. Isis the daughter of Inachos, forefather of the Argives, literally outshines Isis the sister-wife of Osiris in the midst of an Egyptian festival.⁸² The figure is the same, but the patronymic “Inachean,” much like Apollonius’ use of the name Eërie for Egypt, appropriates it by defining it in Greek terms. Subtext, allusion, and inference are integral to the construction of meaning in Hellenistic poetry, but what Callimachus and Apollonius do say explicitly is as expressive as what they do not. Callimachus’ pupil, Istrus, also from Cyrene, was interested in Egyptian antiquities “almost uniquely among”⁸³ the Alexandrians, writing works on Egyptian colonies with Greek mythological origins as well as Greek colonies with Egyptian origins.

The passages we have considered so far show how Egypt and Libya serve as poetic constructs that demonstrate the dynamics of Greek cultural exchange. These poets have less to say about Libya and Egypt and more about Greeks in Libya or the original Greek names for Egyptian gods and landscape features. Their Hellenocentrism and the subtlety of their references come into focus when we think of more explicit acknowledgements of Egyptian society and culture, such as Herodes’ epigrams on the stelae from Edfu (noted above), or the prominence of Egyptian sculpture and architecture in Alexandria, particularly in the royal quarter of the city. Images of Egypt were everywhere. The Ptolemies legitimated their rule by adopting Egyptian style and appropriating Egyptian statues and emphasizing the continuity of their rule with that of previous dynasties. This kind of appropriation was in keeping with Egyptian tradition, and they were not the first pharaohs to recycle material from earlier eras.⁸⁴ Tradition and ties to the past, in other words, were crucial to the legitimation of the royal house, whether Macedonian or Egyptian.

Questions concerning legitimation and the role of alterity in the formation of cultural identity have been the focus of studies on the Hellenocentric perspective of those Greek intellectuals – poets, historians, and philosophers – who have read Egypt as a kind of primitive society yielding insights into the development of a more sophisticated Greek culture. The tensions between homage to Egypt and an Egyptian mirage, or between the preservation of things Egyptian and their appropriation, or between the assimilation and implicit domination of things Egyptian are never far from a consideration of the nuanced cultural interactions that have been and continue to be intensified, if that is possible, when we consider Ptolemaic Alexandria. As Vasunia has shown, earlier representations of Egypt in works by Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, Plato, and Isocrates constructed it as an other, and its otherness served in turn as a foil for the definition of Greek identity. Yet as we have seen, an interest in Egypt per se, whether it is figured as same or other, seems less pronounced for Greek poets who were born in North Africa but seem, like Theocritus’ character Praxinoa, principally concerned with things Greek.

These concerns have generated much work on Egyptian subtexts in recent years. Reed 2000, for example, traces the intrusion of Egyptian ritual codes into the royal celebration of Adonis that is described in Theocritus Idyll 15. Some have seen links between the prophecies of Cassandra in Lycophron’s Alexandra and eastern apocalyptic literature, such as the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible or the Egyptian “Oracle of the Potter.”⁸⁵ In “Alibis,” an extensive study of the tropes of displacement and dislocation in Callimachus, Selden (1998, 386) sees the duality of the Ptolemaic monarchy reflected in what he sees as Callimachus’ equivocations, arguing that in the Coma Berenices, “it is Egyptian political ideology and religion that ultimately explain what has transpired as Hellenic history” (1998, 329). Stephens (2003, 9) suggests that for the Alexandrian poets Egypt was losing its otherness: cults like the Apis bull were “incorporated into the allusive matrix of what has become an extended Greco-Egyptian mythological family”. On the other hand, Greek stories might well resonate differently in Egypt than they would have on the mainland. In Berenice’s vow to dedicate a lock of hair upon the victorious return of her husband Ptolemy III, for example, an Attic audience might hear echoes of Achilles’ broken vow to dedicate a lock of hair to the river Spercheios upon his safe return (Il. 24.143–51), but an Alexandrian court audience, one that was attuned to the co-presence of Egyptian themes, might also hear the mourning of an Isis who cuts her hair to honor the dead Osiris.⁸⁶ On Stephens’ view, “The habit of syncretism and allusion to an Egypt already embedded in Greek texts are two means by which poets create a discursive field that can serve to accommodate two different cultural logics. Within this framework a poem that nowhere explicitly names Egypt or an Egyptian idea nonetheless frequently presents a set of incidents that are entirely legible within the framework of Egyptian myth” (2003, 9). From this perspective Egyptian cultural elements are not simply disguised by Greek names but essentially interchangeable with them, privileging neither one side nor the other.

But whether or not we see the resonance of Egyptian and Near Eastern elements, however explicit or embedded they may be, as essential to our understanding of the original significance of Alexandrian poetry for Greek-speaking audiences, it is crucial that we acknowledge the roles played by non-Greek cultures in shaping the institutions that constitute what we think of as the Hellenistic world. Hellenistic literature is not always as Hellenic as we assume, nor is Alexandria, for all its brilliance, unique as we might think. The reputation of Hellenistic literature and also our sense of the prestige of Alexandria have been (and continue to be) shaped by our understanding of a multiplicity of factors. These factors include not only poetic innovation, reception, manuscript tradition, and accidents of survival, but also the reconfiguration of Hellenic identity, the influence of local traditions and political structures, and the competition and peer polity interactions (of various kinds and at various levels) both within and between the Successor states.

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