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Humanities

Honoring Artemis

Fragments from Callimachus

by Stephanie Burt

6.13.20

In an “Imitator’s Note” prefacing her new collection, After Callimachus: Poems, professor of English Stephanie Burt writes, “These pages reflect, interpret, adapt, respond to, and sometimes simply translate the poems, and parts of poems, that the ancient poet Callimachus wrote.” Among them are works honoring the goddess Artemis, the member of the Greek pantheon to whom, Burt suggests, Callimachus may have felt closest: “icon of skill and erotic fulfillment and wildness, and of adventure in a world without adult men.” The selections reprinted* are from the Aetia, his most famous poem and “a big book of explanations,” writes classicist Mark Payne in his foreword: “a four-volume collection of curiosities from the Greek world at large, spliced with poetic theory and polemics, and enlivened with episodes from his own life.”

~The Editors

 

*Aetia, book 1, frag. 31g, and frag. 620 and 731
 Aetia, book 3, frag. 80-82

Excerpted from AFTER CALLIMACHUS: Poems by Stephanie Burt. Foreword by Mark Payne. Copyright © 2020 by Stephanie Burt. Published by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

 

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(Click on arrow at right to view full image) No true likeness of Callimachus is known to exist, but the Libyan-born poet probably resembled the men whose faces appear on the Hellenistic coffins unearthed in Fayum, Egypt, including this one.

Photograph by Agis/Alamy Stock Photo

Callimachus

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Painted portrait of a man from a Hellenistic coffin found in Egypt

(Click on arrow at right to view full image) No true likeness of Callimachus is known to exist, but the Libyan-born poet probably resembled the men whose faces appear on the Hellenistic coffins unearthed in Fayum, Egypt, including this one.

Photograph by Agis/Alamy Stock Photo

Callimachus

The St. Louis, Missouri, skyline on the Mississippi River with the Gateway Arch visible, as seen from across the Mississippi River in East St. Louis, Illinois

(Click on arrow at right to see additional images)
(1 of 7) The St. Louis, Missouri, skyline on the Mississippi River, as seen from East St. Louis, Illinois 

Photograph by Visions of America/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Walter Johnson writes about “The Broken Heart of America”

An original eighteenth-century colonial map of Jamaica

Vincent Brown adapted several eighteenth-century maps of Jamaica to create his own narrative map of Tacky’s Revolt. 
Map courtesy of Vince Brown

 

 

Vincent Brown writes war and empire into the history of slavery