Callimachus (ca. 303-ca. 235 BC), a proud and well-born native of Cyrene
in Libya, came as a young man to the court of the Ptolemies at
Alexandria, where he composed poetry for the royal family; helped
establish the Library and Museum as a world center of literature,
science, and scholarship; and wrote an estimated 800 volumes of poetry
and prose on an astounding variety of subjects, including the Pinakes,
a descriptive bibliography of the Library's holdings in 120 volumes.
Callimachus' vast learning richly informs his poetry, which ranges
broadly and reworks the language and generic properties of his
predecessors in inventive, refined, and expressive ways. The
"Callimachean" style, combining learning, elegance, and innovation and
prizing brevity, clarity, lightness, and charm, served as an important
model for later poets, not least at Rome for Catullus, Virgil, Horace,
Ovid, and the elegists, among others.
This edition, which replaces the earlier Loeb editions by A. W. Mair
(1921) and C. A. Trypanis (1954, 1958), presents all that currently
survives of and about Callimachus and his works, including the ancient
commentaries (Diegeseis) and scholia. Volume I contains Aetia,
Iambi, and lyric poems; Volume II Hecale, Hymns, and Epigrams;
and Volume III miscellaneous epics and elegies, other fragments, and
testimonia, together with concordances and a general index. The Greek
text is based mainly on Pfeiffer's but enriched by subsequently
published papyri and the judgment of later editors, and its notes and
annotation are fully informed by current scholarship.
