Museum and the Libraries, with their hundreds of thousands of
volumes, were hot-houses of grammarians and of learned poets.
Callimachus, the head librarian, was also the most eminent man of
letters. Unable, himself, to compose a poem of epic length and
copiousness, he discouraged all long poems. He shone in epigrams,
pedantic hymns, and didactic verses. He toyed with anagrams, and won
court favour by discovering that the letters of 'Arsinoe,' the name
of Ptolemy's wife, made the words [Greek], the violet of Hera. In
another masterpiece the genius of Callimachus followed the stolen
tress of Queen Berenice to the skies, where the locks became a
constellation. A contemporary of Callimachus was Zenodotus, the
critic, who was for improving the Iliad and Odyssey by cutting out
all the epic commonplaces which seemed to him to be needless
repetitions. It is pretty plain that, in literary society, Homer was
thought out of date and rococo. The favourite topics of poets were
now, not the tales of Troy and Thebes, but the amorous adventures of
the gods. When Apollonius Rhodius attempted to revive the epic, it
is said that the influence of Callimachus quite discomfited the young
poet. A war of epigrams began, and while Apollonius called
Callimachus a 'blockhead' (so finished was his invective), the
veteran compared his rival to the Ibis, the scavenger-bird. Other
singers satirised each others' legs, and one, the Aretino of the
time, mocked at king Ptolemy and scourged his failings in verse. The
literary quarrels (to which Theocritus seems to allude in Idyl VII,
where Lycidas says he 'hates the birds of the Muses that cackle in
vain rivalry with Homer') were as stupid as such affairs usually are.
The taste for artificial epic was to return; although many people
already declared that Homer was the world's poet, and that the world
needed no other. This epic reaction brought into favour Apollonius
Rhodius, author of the Argonautica. Theocritus has been supposed to