Callimachus

Who is Callimachus?

Callimachus was a Greek poet, critic, and scholar born in Cyrene, a Greek colony on the coast of what is now eastern Libya. He moved to Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt, where he worked at the famed Library of Alexandria under the patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Ptolemy III Euergetes. Although he was never appointed chief librarian himself, his greatest scholarly achievement was the Pinakes, a monumental 120-volume bibliographic catalogue of the Library's holdings organized by author and subject, which effectively founded the discipline of bibliography and became the model for cataloguing literary history in the ancient world. As a poet, Callimachus championed brevity, precision, and polish over the sprawling epic style of earlier Greek poetry, famously declaring that 'a big book is a big evil.' His major surviving work, the Aitia ('Causes'), explored the origins of obscure myths, customs, and place names in short, elegant episodes, and he also composed hymns and epigrams, of which around sixty survive. His aesthetic principles proved enormously influential on later Roman poets such as Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid, shaping the course of Western lyric poetry for centuries after his death.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Callimachus" · Britannica, "Callimachus" · World History Encyclopedia, "Callimachus of Cyrene"