The ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy in Callimachus' Hymn to Zeus

The age of Callimachus, the third century BC, was one which experienced a widespread revival of poetry. This was the case in the Greek world generally, but particularly so in Alexandria, the new political, economic, and cultural capital. This renaissance can be seen in the large number of poets, and in the development of new poetic genres, new forms, and new metres. In the theoretical realm, poetry's new importance is attested to by the Alexandrian project of collecting, editing, and interpreting all known Greek texts, and by the vitriolic debates among poets, scholars, and philosophers on the function and value of poetry, of methods of poetic interpretation and evaluation. I examine the place of Callimachus' Hymns in that revival, the ways in which they engaged in the critical cultural debates of the third century BC concerning the place and value of poetry, and the challenge they offer to the rationalistic philosophers who had appropriated the poet's traditional cultural authority. This revises the traditional view of Callimachean poetics as the declaration of the autonomy of art and the demand that poetry be judged only by aesthetic and technical criteria.;I begin by surveying the origin and terms of the debate between poetry and philosophy. I then analyze how all of the hymns, in different ways, raise questions about the value, function and even the very possibility of poetry in a rationalistic age. These questions, in turn, center on the problem of establishing or defining the nature of the poetic voice, which I address in a detailed interpretation of the first, and in my view programmatic, Hymn to Zeus. This hymn sets up the collection by subordinating the voice of transcendental truth, pragmatic probability, moral and generic appropriateness, and political exigency to that of the poet, whose unique power is shown to derive from poetry's capacity for continual deception. In turn, the Hymn to Zeus demonstrates that it is that capacity alone which can speak to and for the multivocal mythopoetic tradition and the community which inherited it.