Muse without Measure: Callimachus and the Greek Prose Traditions

Modern scholarship has shown that Callimachus' poetics is a poetics of reinvention, one that demands to be read against other specific literary works. In the past, scholars have focused on Callimachus' relationship to his poetic antecedents, while studies of the poet's engagement with prose texts have been comparatively rare. In an effort to understand this often overlooked dimension of Callimachean poetics, this dissertation evaluates the various ways in which Callimachus incorporates prose material and prose references into his poetic works. Through close readings of representative examples I cumulatively demonstrate that, for Callimachus, prose texts could offer the same literary opportunities as poetic texts.;In my first chapter I evaluate Callimachus' debt to Herodotus. In addition to discussions of Callimachus' appropriation of Herodotean thaumata , space is devoted to other literary and cultural points of contact, including analyses of the poet's reconfiguration of Herodotus' Egypt in light of Hellenistic political and cultural developments. The second chapter details Callimachus' use of other historical sources with special focus upon local historians and the Atthidographers. I show that Callimachus is invested in dramatizing his relationship to these histories and that poetic representations of historical sources are often intrinsically linked to issues of aesthetics and his larger poetic agendas. In the third chapter I turn to the sciences and consider the poet's incorporation of Herophilean and Hippocratean medical theories, Peripatetic zoology, and scientific terminology. Rather than serving to flaunt the poet's erudition, I argue that such references serve context-specific literary functions. The fourth chapter considers Callimachus' representation of philosophy and philosophers. In addition to evaluating the poetic functions of allusions to such principles as Hellenistic rationalism and Platonic literary theory, I also interpret Callimachus' frequent casting of philosophers as poetic characters and even as analogues to himself.;The conclusion features a discussion of the anachronistic modern understanding of a prose/poetry dichotomy and instead presents an interpretation of Callimachus' inclusive poetic aesthetic. I conclude with a reading of the Aetia as a "poetic history" fundamentally shaped by the genres of local and universal historiography.