I wept as I remembered how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
Here sleeps Saon, of Acanthus, son of Dicon, a holy sleep: say not that the good die.
Nothing unattested do I sing.
I abhor, too, the roaming lover, nor do I drink from every well; I loathe all things in common
Set a thief to catch a thief.
Two goddesses now must Cyprus adore; The Muses are ten, and the Graces are four; Stella's wit is so charming, so sweet her fair face, She shines a new Venus, a Muse, and a Grace.
You're walking by the tomb of Battiades, Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.
A great book is like great evil.
Big book, a big bore.
A good man never dies.
More lightly do his sorrows press upon a man, when to a friend or fellow traveller he tells his griefs.
A big book is a big misfortune.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
O Charidas, what of the under world? Great darkness. And what of the resurrection? A lie. And Pluto? A fable; we perish utterly.
Someone spoke of your death, Heraclitus. It brought me Tears, and I remembered how often together We ran the sun down with talk . . . somewhere You've long been dust, my Halicarnassian friend. But your Nightingales live on. Though the Death world Claws at everything, it will not touch them.
To little men, gods send little things.
Author details
Callimachus: Biography and Life Work
Callimachus was a notable ancient Greek poet.
Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet, scholar, and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period , he wrote over 800 literary works, most of which do not survive, in a wide variety of genres. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy , known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on poets of the Roman Empire and, through their reception, on later Western literature .
Philosophical Views and Reflections
The poem is thought to have had about 4,000 lines and is organised into four individual books, which are divided in halves on stylistic grounds. In the first book, Callimachus describes a dream in which, as a young man, he was transported by the Muses to Mount Helicon in Boeotia . The young poet interrogates the goddesses about the origins of unusual present day customs. This dialogue frames all aetiologies presented in the first book. The stories in the book include those of Linus and Coroebus , Theiodamas, king of the Dryopes and the voyage of the Argonauts . The second book continues the first's dialectic structure. It may have been set at a symposium at Alexandria , where Callimachus worked as a librarian and scholar . Since most of its content has been lost, little is known about Book 2. The only aetiology commonly assumed to have been placed in the book are the stories Busiris , king of Egypt , and Phalaris , the tyrant of Akragas , who were known for their excessive cruelty.
Classical scholars place Callimachus among the most influential Greek poets. According to Kathryn Gutzwiller, he "reinvented Greek poetry for the Hellenistic age by devising a personal style that came, through its manifestations in Roman poetry, to influence the entire tradition of modern literature". She also writes that his lasting importance is demonstrated by the strong reactions his poetry elicited from contemporaries and posterity. Richard L. Hunter , an expert on Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, states that the selective reception of Callimachus through Roman poets has led to a simplified picture of his poetry. Hunter writes that modern critics have drawn up a false dichotomy between the "content-laden and socially engaged poetry of the archaic and classical periods " and a sophisticated, but meaningless style proposed by Callimachus. Echoing Hunter's assessment in their 2012 book on the reception of Callimachus, the Hellenists Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens comment that the scarcity of primary evidence and the reliance on Roman accounts has created a label of Callimacheanism that does not accurately represent his literary work.
