Hellenistic Poetry: Authors, Themes, and Influences
Hipponax of Ephesus
Hipponax of Ephesus lived most of his life outside his homeland as an exile. In the surviving fragments, he is very critical and mocks everything, including his life as a cynical beggar who knows the depths of the places where he lived.
Elegy
It was originally a song of mourning, perhaps sung at the funeral banquet. This genre was influenced by the epic form and the subject, used for expressing the needs and problems of the polis. The meter is the elegiac couplet.
Several poets wrote elegies on very different subjects:
- Callinus of Ephesus (7th century BC): The history of the elegy begins with poems encouraging citizens to defend their city, and where we can see the influence of the Homeric language. He is placed in the mid-7th century BC.
- Tyrtaeus (7th century BC): He calls for the Spartans to fight with courage and at the forefront in the war against Messenia. The Homeric influence is also important, especially in writing in the Ionian dialect, with few Doricisms, so it is thought that he was not Spartan but a migrant from Asia Minor.
- Mimnermus of Colophon (7th century BC): He complains of the passage of time and the loss of fleeting youth. The supreme joy for him is “the beloved Aphrodite.” He was widely imitated by the Latin love poets Propertius and Ovid.
- Solon of Athens (7th-6th century BC): He lived in a period of great change in his city. He was entrusted with drafting a constitution to resolve social tensions between different social classes in Athens. He embodied his political, moral, and social ideals in his elegies and iambs, with exhortations to good governance and moderation.
- Theognis of Megara (6th century BC): He reached his peak in the second half of the 6th century BC. His poems are short elegies, typical of the symposium or banquet, with different themes: love, longing for times past, wine, nostalgia for the aristocratic ideal, resentment and protest by the traditional nobility, exhortations to friendship, and reflections on the limitations of man, etc. Many of his poems have survived.
The Hellenistic Lyric
The poets will also be scholars; Hellenistic writers will be philosophers and poets, who explore the classics and intentionally emulate them. This imitation or the appearance of clear references to the great Greek authors is known as “Art Allusiva.”
Regarding the topics, eroticism is included, particularly love as a tragic disease. Also remarkable is the emergence of humor and irony.
Callimachus’ Aitia and Hymns
The hymns are praises to the gods that often include a request and a mythological story. With respect to the traditional model of a hymn, Callimachus brings a heavy burden of learning, develops “Art Allusiva,” and gives them a didactic tone. Aitia is a compilation of stories from various minor or marginal issues. Its main features are constant interruptions, variatio, interventions in direct style, dialogues and speeches, and a variety of speakers.
Theocritus
Theocritus is characterized by the exploration of various issues, attention to detail, the humble, and the sentimental.
He composed poems of mythological epic and mimes. His fundamental work is bucolic. Under the name of Theocritus, poems are grouped featuring pastoral and other mythological themes.