(12/5/95)
Exact details of Callimachus's and Apollonius's relationship are difficult to recontruct. Two biographies of Apollonius exist, one of which claims that Apollonius was a student of Callimachus. A rivalry or enmity has been supposed to have existed between the two poets. The extent to which a personal hostility existed is probably not retrievable, and in any case, it is less important than the circumstances ofthe contemporary Alexandrian literary circle which they shared, which make the possibility of their disagreement over poetic principles at least plausible.
"The specific problem that confronted [i.e. the Alexandrian poets Callimachus and Theocritus] was the validity of post-Homeric epic as this had been 'revived' by the late fifth-century poet, Antimachus of Colophon, and exemplified in their own literary circle by Apollonius of Rhodes" (Otis 9). Callimachus's influential poetic program, as set out in the preface to his Aetia, exalts short poetry over long poetry, discontinuous, familiar, light style over continous and high-flown epic. Apollonius's Argonautica, a continuous epic poem imitating Homeric language and style is, on the surface at least, in direct contradiction to Callimachus's poetic ideal, like the poems in the Epic Cycle.
The Argonautica, however, cannot be treated as completely antithetical to the Callimachean program. The many correspondances between Apollonius' and Callimachus poetry include similar subject matter, a "familiar/ironical tone" (Briggs 952), and the way in which both poets deploy their considerable learning, including Apollonius's incorporation of aitia into his poem. The Argonautica has a "Callimachean narrator" who "reveals his literary adherence by praising Callimachus or by subverting the genre of epic poetry" and "makes the epic devices absurd by applying Homeric forms to non-heroic people" (DeForest 7, 9).
Apollonius's Argonautica, then, while at first glance it seems to contradict completely the dominant poetic voice in contemporary Alexandria, is not as antithetical to Callimachus as it may appear. In fact, we might use the way in which Apollonius is conventionally considered to contradict Callimachus, but actually both follows and diverges from him, as a model for understanding the often-pondered "mystery" of Vergil's career. The 'Vergil Question' is frequently posed in a form like: "how could the entirely neoteric (and therefore Callimachean) poet of the Eclogues and the Georgics later write the long, continuous (and therefore anti-Callimachean) epic, the Aeneid? What is true for Apollonius's Argonautica-- that the poem is in fact not entirely anti-Callimachean--is also true for Vergil's Aeneid. It would be as improper to see the Aeneid as a 'rejection' of Callimachus as it would be to view the Argonautica in the same way...both Virgil and Apollonius learned how to avoid the unoriginal, the long, the dull" (Briggs 980). Both the Argonautica and the Aeneid, though perhaps to different extents and in different ways, may be called "Callimachean epics."
Literary critics often polarize the influences of Callimachus and Apollonius on the Aeneid as if they were opposing forces. Since Apollonius was not entirely un-Callimachean, however, this cannot be true. Vergil, in fact, did not begin to use Apollonius only when he embarked upon the epic Aeneid. He used the Argonautica as a source in his "Callimachean" poems, the Eclogues and the Georgics, as well (Briggs 953-58). In light of the fact that Vergil used both Callimachus and Apollonius in all three of his poems, Vergil's career begins to seem more integrated and less contradictory.
Tracing and analyzing Vergil's use of Apollonius's Argonautica is important for several reasons. Particular references to the Argonautica throughout the Aeneid can elucidate individual themes and passages. In a larger sense, speculating about why and how Vergil used Apollonius's epic can contribute to an understanding of the poetic developments in Vergil's career as a whole.
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