Framing and polyphony: readings in Hellenistic poetry

Abstract

‘Then babble, babble words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three…” Beckett.In this paper, I intend to discuss three central Hellenistic poems: Callimachus'Hymn to Zeus, Theocritus'Idyll11 andIdyll7. Each of these poems holds a privileged position in the discussion of the Hellenistic era as well as in each poet's corpus. I am certainly not offering here what could be called complete or exhaustive readings of these works – that would be far beyond the scope of a paper of this length; rather, I want to focus on a key point of interpretation in each poem. In theHymn to Zeus, I am going to investigate the language of truth; inIdyll11, the poem's structure of frame and song; and inIdyll7, the poem's programmatic force. There are two aims in this strategy: the first is to investigate the topic of the ‘poet's voice’ in Hellenistic poetry. The three poems and the three topics of my discussion are linked in the concern for how a poet places himself within his poetry – ‘Who speaks?’, as Roland Barthes put it. The interest in poetry and how a poet relates to his poetry is a constant and fascinating theme through these works, and each of the topics I have chosen to discuss will illuminate this interest from a different aspect. Secondly, through a consideration of these three key moments of interpretation, I shall be arguing for an increased awareness of the complexity and subtlety of Hellenistic poetry. I intend to show how critics' approaches and decisions with regard to these nodes of interpretation, which may be regarded as paradigmatic, have led to a worrying oversimplification of Hellenistic poetry. I hope to show in some measure how the intellectual complexity which makes these poems so hard to read and to criticize, can also be a source of their continuing interest and delight for us.