Callimachus: The Nerd of Alexandria

 After the completion of the Oedipus at Colonus, the group chose to take an 'interregnum' before starting the Hippolytus of Euripides. In this period the group is studying Callimachus' Epigrams. This involves a changes in meter and in dialect. For more than a thousand lines, the meter has been iambic trimeter admixed with the complex yet partly predictable meters of the Chorus. The meter of epigrams, however, is elegiac couplet, a topic which this blog has addressed in previous posts. For those who might not be familiar with the elegiac couplet in Greek literature, it might be best compared to a limerick - a poem of predictable pattern but not constrained to the frivolity of the latter. A couplet, as one might guess from the name, has two lines. The first is a dactylic hexameter similar to that of epic poetry. The second is a pair of two and a half feet, of which the second must be two dactyls and the beginning of a foot. That consistency drives home the identity of the couplet as a unit. The end of the unit must reinforce the nature of the poetry. In longer works, such as epic poetry, extending to hundreds or thousands of lines, there may be exceptions; but if there were such in a poem of six lines, the irregularity could be construed as poor composition. 

The matter of length raises a different matter: the form is called a couplet because it is short. The minimum length of a couplet is two lines. There is no specific maximum length, but the form implies brevity, especially in the Callimachean school of aesthetics, where a big book is a bad book. This limitation of space drives a further phenomenon, that of the hapax legomenon. There is less room for description in a shorter form of poetry, nor does Callimachus deem it desirable, so references must be brief and potent. A word or phrase in such poetry invokes an entire scene of Homer or Hesiod. Critically, this invocation only works if the audience has what one would call today media literacy. The circumstances in the epigram may be different in way subtle or gross from the passage so invoked, but this method only works if the original source is known. There was no annotated Aeschylus in the era of Callimachus!

The other change is that of dialect. For those who start Greek from Attic, which is most learners, they may know the rule about etas and alphas after vowel and rho, but they may not realize that Attic's rule is a sign of incomplete linguistic change which the Ionic dialect fulfilled (whether or not Zeus was involved). It is a minor difference which does not affect meter. The next difference does affect meter. The adjective for singular you in Attic is 'sos'. In Ionic it is 'teos'. Even without extensive linguistic training, it is easy to note that the first is one syllable, while the second is two. In a meter as constricted as elegiac couplet, this difference has an oversize impact. The first may be short or long and therefore combined with a suitable element as the poet desires, but the second must be a pyrrhic if the second syllable is short and an iamb if the second syllable is long. In The Ionic option, that means one syllable of flexibility down!