Someone told me, Heracleitus, of your end; and I wept, and thought how often you and I sunk the sun with talking. Well! and now you lie antiquated ashes somewhere, Carian friend. But your nightingales, your songs, are living still; them the death that clutches all things cannot kill.[2]
Only once was this exquisite career interrupted. There was among his pupils a young man from Rhodes with thin legs, by name Apollonius. Apollonius was ambitious to write an Epic—a form of composition detested by Callimachus, and opposed to all his theories. In vain he objected; Apollonius, then only eighteen, gave in the Mouseion a public reading of the preliminary draft of his poem. A violent quarrel was the result, Apollonius was expelled, and Callimachus wrote a satire called the Ibis, in which his rival’s legs and other deficiencies were exposed. The friends of Apollonius retorted with equal spirit, and the tranquillity of the Mouseion was impaired. Callimachus won, but his victory was not eternal; after his death Apollonius was recalled to Alexandria, and in time became librarian there in his turn.
The Epic Apollonius insisted on writing has survived. It is modelled on Homer and deals with the voyage of the Argo to recover the Golden Fleece. But there is nothing Homeric in the treatment and though we are supposed to be in barbaric lands we never really leave the cultivated court of the Ptolemies. Love is still the ruling interest. He slips, the naughty little boy, into the Palace of Medea, and shoots his tiny dart at her, to inspire her with passion for Jason. So might he have inspired Queen Berenice or Arsinoe. Pains, languors, and raptures succeed, and the theme of the heroic quest is forgotten. Callimachus can have found nothing to object to in such a poem except its length, for it is typical of his school. Its pictorial method is also characteristic of Alexandria; many of the episodes might be illustrated by terra cotta statues and gems.
But one of the poets who worked in the Mouseion—Theocritus—was a genius of a very different kind, a genius that Alexandria matured but cannot be said to have formed. Theocritus came here late in his career. He had been born at Cos and had lived in Sicily, and he arrived full of memories that no town-dweller could share—memories of fresh air and the sun, of upland meadows and overhanging trees, of goats and sheep, of the men and the women who looked after them, and of all the charm and the coarseness that go to make up country life. He had thrown these memories into poetical form, sometimes idealising them, sometimes giving them crudely, and he had called these poems Idylls—little pictures of rural existence. Love, mythological fancies, decorative treatment—he liked these things too, but he backed them with a width of experience and a zest for it that Callimachus and Apollonius never knew. While they are “Classics” who have to be studied, Theocritus appeals to us at once; his Fifteenth Idyll, describing life in the Greek Quarter at Alexandria, is as vivid now as when he wrote it. The dialogue with which it opens can be heard to-day in any of the little drawing rooms of Camp de César or Ibrahimieh. Praxinoe, a lady of the middle classes, is discovered seated, doing nothing in particular. In comes Gorgo, her friend.