Hellenistic Elegy: Out from Under the Shadow of Callimachus

This chapter entirely foregoes the backward glance from Roman poetry and instead broaches this issue, the distinctiveness of Hellenistic elegy, by looking forward from earlier manifestations of the genre. It considers the tangible influence of changes to poetic production in the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE on the development and demarcation not only of elegy but also the adjacent genres of epigram and epic, in the third century and beyond. By the third century, elegy had lost most of its variety. Following Antimachus’ Lyde, the main form of elegy became the long subjective catalogue poem, culminating in Callimachus’ long catalogue of “origins,” the four-book Aetia. The success of the Aetia in revising the history of elegy and establishing itself as the aition of Hellenistic elegy is evident in Quintilian’s canon of Greek elegists, quoted in the chapter.