Callimachus Biography

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Callimachus

Callimachus was the most influential Alexandrian poet, scholar, and literary critic of his time, a figure who exerted an enormous influence on Greek, Roman, and, eventually, European literature. The author of more than eight hundred works (about forty survive in fragmentary form), he left literary works largely in the field of poetry, a genre in which he is in the front rank of ancient authors in terms of influence, if not poetic art. Called by the Roman poet Ovid "less gifted than skilled," Callimachus filled his verses with what a later Greek poet called "astringent honey"; and he celebrated the human aspects of myth for a world in which myth was largely ceremonial, if not religiously irrelevant. One of the phrases used against Callimachus is his fragment 612, "I sing nothing unattested." It is true that he offers the reader virtuoso displays of vast erudition and carefully polished work, but his human sensibility is always present, particularly in his most famous poem, the epigram on the death of his friend Heraclitus (fragment 2).

Read the rest of this Biography with our Callimachus Access Pass.