Seeing Double [antikvár]

Preface I began to think about the relationship of Alexandrian writers to their contemporary Greco-Egyptian milieu at least twenty years ago, but 1 was unable to provide answers that satisfied myself or colleagues and students. In the interim 1 learned a great deal about Egypt and the construction of pharaonic kingship. Some of this material provided intriguing parallels and overlaps with what 1 understood of Hellenistic poetic practice. The question of whether there was a relationship between the two—which a few scholars had already articulated and others had denied, with varying degrees of vehemence or disdain—gradually evolved into conviction that one did exist, but this in turn led to other questions. Why was there a connection? How important was it? Could parallels with Egyptian culture tell us anything about the poetry that we did not already know? This study sketches an answer, in the belief that grounding a selection of poems of Callimachus and Theocritus and the epic of Apollonius in their contemporary social and political context opens up the poetry in a number of ways, not the least of which is to remove it from the ivory tower and locate it more centrally within contemporary intellectual debates and within the political life of the city. 1 have characterized my reading as "seeing double." This capitalizes on what has become a standard formulation for the twin aspects of Ptolemaic culture: in 1987, for example, W. Peremans wrote about the "bicephalous" nature of Ptolemaic administration, and in 15193 L- Koenen wrote of "The Janus Head of Ptolemaic Kingship." This is more than a