Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/404

 38o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE time to its highest imaginative achievements. The late Greek elegy was not only a thing of singular beauty, it was also a great literary influence ; and Callimachus, Euphorion, and Philetas are the chief inspirers of the long-lived Roman elegy. Philetas, a younger contem- porary of Demosthenes, is perhaps the first typical Alexandrian elegist ; a pale student, wasted in body, who " would have been blown away if he had not worn leaden soles to his boots " ; a Homeric critic ; tutor to Ptolemy II. and to Theocritus ; a writer of love elegies, which he called by the name of his own beloved * Bittis,' and of an idyll about Odysseus and Polymele. He and Asclepiades, whose graceful love- verses are well represented in the Anthology, were the only poets of this age whom Theocritus frankly con- fessed to be his superiors. A friend of Philetas, Herme- SIANAX, has left us one long fragment, giving little more than a list of bygone lovers, which will have startled many readers of Athenaeus by a certain echoing and misty charm. Callimachus, librarian, archaeologist, critic, and poet, was perhaps the most influential per- sonality in literature between Plato and Cicero. He realised and expressed what his age wanted, and what it was able to achieve. The creative time had gone ; it was impossible to write like Homer or Hesiod or /Eschylus ; they suited their epoch, we must suit ours, and not make ourselves ridiculous by attempting to rival them on their own ground. What we can do is to write short unambitious poems, polished and perfected in every line. The actual remains of Callimachus are dis- appointing, save for a few fine epigrams, and the elegy on the Bathing of Pallas. For the rest, a certain wit and coldness, a certain obviousness in reaching effects, spoil