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93-621: According to Martin Litchfield West , the "most plausible etymology" derives "Zagreus" from zagre , which is "properly a pit for catching animals, but perhaps also one used for depositing animal remains or offerings to a chthonic deity", making Zagreus literally the "god of pitfalls". Based on this etymology, Karl Kerényi concludes that zagreus was the Greek word for a "hunter who catches living animals", and that "an exact translation" of "Zagreus" would be "catcher of game". As West notes,

186-505: A votive offering which later became a constellation, the Coma Berenices ("Hair of Berenice"). Another notable story from the second half of the work is the love story of Acontius and Cydippe . At the close of his Aetia , Callimachus wrote that he would proceed to a more pedestrian field of poetry. By this, he referred to his collection of 13 Iambs , drawing on an established tradition of iambic poetry whose defining feature

279-508: A "better work" ( Latin : maius opus ). Vergil's formulation leaves open whether he sought to write an epic with the refinement called for by Callimachus or whether he had turned his back on Callimacheanism as his career progressed. Having referred to himself as a "Roman Callimachus" ( Latin : Romanus Callimachus ), the elegist Propertius follows the example of Callimachus's Aetia by introducing obscure mythological material and numerous recondite details into his erotic history of Rome. At

372-801: A book on the fragments of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women . West edited Homer 's Iliad and Odyssey for the Bibliotheca Teubneriana , and the Homeric Hymns for the Loeb Classical Library . West was a DPhil and DLitt of Oxford University , and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy , a Corresponding Member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Göttingen, and a Member of

465-527: A few lines to extensive narratives, they are unified by a common metre—the elegiac couplet . With few exceptions, the collection is the earliest extant source for most of the myths it presents. Throughout the work, the poet's voice repeatedly intrudes into his narratives to offer comments on the dramatic situation. This pattern is described by the Hellenist Kathryn Gutzwiller as one of the poem's most influential features. The poem

558-455: A goatherd. He often mixes different metaphors to create effects of "wit and incongruity", such as when a laurel tree is described as "glaring like a wild bull". Ferguson also notes the poems' witty use of proverbs in dialectic passages of dialogue. Callimachus made only one attempt at writing a narrative poem, a mythological epic entitled Hecale . Since the poem is estimated to run to have had around 1000 lines, it constitutes an epyllion ,

651-705: A junior research fellow at St John's College from 1960 to 1963. His doctoral thesis, a commentary on Hesiod 's Theogony , won the Conington Prize for the best classical dissertation of the year in 1965, and was edited as a printed book the following year. From the mid-sixties, West took especial interest in the relation of Greek literature to the Orient, and over several decades, culminating in his masterpiece The East Face of Helicon (1997), defended his view that Greek literature derives significant influences and inspiration from Near Eastern literature. He took up

744-577: A part in mysteries which claimed a Cretan origin." The Zagreus from the Euripides fragment is suggestive of Dionysus , the wine god son of Zeus and Semele , and in fact, although it seems not to occur anywhere in Orphic sources, the name “Zagreus” is elsewhere identified with an Orphic Dionysus, who had a very different tradition from the standard one. This Dionysus Zagreus was a son of Zeus and Persephone who was, as an infant, attacked and dismembered by

837-432: A particular god; examples of this genre can be found in most Greek lyric poets . A typical hymn would contain an invocation of the god, praise of his or her attributes, and a concluding prayer with a request for a favour. Callimachus wrote six such hymns, which can be divided into two groups: his Hymn to Apollo , to Demeter and to Athena are considered mimetic because they present themselves as live re-enactments of

930-583: A period of relative poverty while working as a schoolteacher in the suburbs of the city. The truthfulness of this claim is disputed by the classicist Alan Cameron who describes it as "almost certainly outright fiction". Callimachus then entered into the patronage of the Ptolemies , the Greek ruling dynasty of Egypt, and was employed at the Library of Alexandria . According to the Suda , his career coincided with

1023-482: A position as tutorial fellow at University College, a position he filled from 1963 to 1974. In 1973 he became the second youngest person to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy , at the age of 35. He obtained a chair at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College , which he held from 1974 until 1991, when he became a fellow of All Souls College . West retired formally in 2004, but remained active in All Souls until

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1116-593: A prominent family in the Greek city of Cyrene in modern-day Libya , he was educated in Alexandria, the capital of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt . After working as a schoolteacher in the city, he came under the patronage of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus and was employed at the Library of Alexandria where he compiled the Pinakes , a comprehensive catalogue of all Greek literature. He is believed to have lived into

1209-521: A religious ritual in which both the speaker and the audience are imagined to take part. The Hymn to Zeus , to Demeter , and to Delos are viewed as non-mimetic since they do not re-create a ritual situation. It is contested among scholars of ancient literature whether Callimachus's hymns had any real religious significance. The dominant view holds that they were literary creations to be read exclusively as poetry, though some scholars have linked individual elements to contemporary ritual practice. This issue

1302-422: A sanctuary to Zeus in honour of his host. Since most of Callimachus's poetry is critical of epic as a genre, there has been some speculation about why he chose to write an epic poem after all. The author of the scholia , an ancient commentary on the work of Callimachus, stated that Callimachus abandoned his reluctance after being ridiculed for not writing lengthy poems. This explanation was probably derived from

1395-527: A scholium on Lycophron 355, Athena manages to save the heart of Dionysus, from which, according to Clement and the scholium, Athena received the name Pallas from the still beating ( πάλλειν ) heart. In Proclus' account Athena takes the heart to Zeus, and Dionysus is born again from Semele. According to Hyginus , Jupiter (the Roman equivalent of Zeus) "ground up his heart, put it in a potion, and gave it to Semele to drink", and she became pregnant with Dionysus. In

1488-432: A shorter form of epic poetry dealing with topics not traditionally present in larger-scale works. It recounts a story about the Greek hero Theseus , who, after liberating the city of Marathon from a destructive bull, was hosted by a poor but kindly old woman named Hecale . They form a friendship as she recounts her former life as a member of the upper class . At the end of the poem, Theseus establishes an annual feast and

1581-520: A similar allegorical interpretation, whereby the dismemberment represented the crushing of the grapes, and the rejoining of the dismembered pieces into a single body, represented the pouring of the juice into a single container. Diodorus also reports a rationalized account of the older Dionysus. In this account this Dionysus was a wise man, who was the inventor of the plough, as well as many other agricultural inventions. And according to Diodorus, these inventions, which greatly reduced manual labor, so pleased

1674-490: A unique style of poetry: favouring small, recondite and even obscure topics, he dedicated himself to small-scale poetry and refused to write longwinded epic poetry , the most prominent literary art of his day. Callimachus and his aesthetic philosophy became an important point of reference for Roman poets of the late Republic and the early Empire . Catullus , Horace , Vergil , Propertius , and Ovid saw his poetry as one of their "principal model[s]" and engaged with it in

1767-421: A variety of genres. This is made explicit in the final poem of the collection, where the poet compares himself to a carpenter who is praised for crafting many different objects. The Iambs are notable for their vivid language. Callimachus couches his aesthetic criticism in vivid imagery taken from the natural and social world: rival scholars are compared to wasps swarming from the ground and to flies resting on

1860-523: A variety of ways. Modern classical scholars view him as one of the most influential Greek poets. According to the Hellenist Kathryn Gutzwiller , he "reinvented Greek poetry for the Hellenistic age by devising a personal style that came, through its manifestations in Roman poetry, to influence the entire tradition of modern literature". An entry in the Suda , a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopaedia ,

1953-558: A wide range of topics. While some of them are dedicatory or sepulchral , others touch on erotic and purely literary themes. Most of them were transmitted in the Palatine Anthology , a 10th-century manuscript discovered in 1606 at Heidelberg containing a collection of Greek epigrams and poems. Often written from a first-person perspective, the Epigrams offer a great variety of styles and draw on different branches of

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2046-414: Is further complicated by Callimachus's purposeful amalgamation of fiction and potential real-world performance. The Greek word αἴτιον ( aition , 'cause') means an attempt to explain contemporary phenomena with a story from the mythical past . The title of Callimachus's work can be roughly translated into English as "origins". The Aetia contains a collection of origin stories. Ranging in size from

2139-426: Is sometimes subsumed under the term of Alexandrianism , describing the entirety of Greek literature written in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. In spite of their differences, his work shares many characteristics with that of his contemporaries including the didactic poet Aratus , the epicist Apollonius of Rhodes , and the pastoral poet Theocritus . They all interacted with earlier Greek literature, especially

2232-473: Is the 6th century AD Neoplatonist Olympiodorus , who, as part of an argument against committing suicide, states that to take one's life is "forbidden" because human bodies have a divine Dionysiac element within them. He explains that, in the Orphic tradition, after the Titans dismember and eat Dionysus, Zeus, out of anger, "strikes them with his thunderbolts, and the soot of the vapors that rise from them becomes

2325-499: Is the main source about the life of Callimachus. Although the entry contains factual inaccuracies, it enables the re-construction of his biography by providing some otherwise unattested information. Callimachus was born into a prominent family in Cyrene , a Greek city on the coast of modern-day Libya. He refers to himself as "son of Battus" ( Ancient Greek : Βαττιάδης , romanized :  Battiades ), but this may be an allusion to

2418-525: Is thought to have had about 4,000 lines and is organised into four individual books, which are divided in halves on stylistic grounds. In the first book, Callimachus describes a dream in which, as a young man, he was transported by the Muses to Mount Helicon in Boeotia . The young poet interrogates the goddesses about the origins of unusual present day customs. This dialogue frames all aetiologies presented in

2511-545: The interpretatio graeca Dionysus is often identified with the Egyptian god Osiris , and stories of the dismemberment and resurrection of Osiris parallel those of Dionysus Zagreus. According to Diodorus Siculus, Egyptian myths about Priapus said that the Titans conspired against Osiris, killed him, divided his body into equal parts, and "slipped them secretly out of the house". All but Osiris' penis, which since none of them "was willing to take it with him", they threw into

2604-528: The Academia Europaea , London. Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Member of the Order of Merit (OM) in the 2014 New Year Honours. His works also include contributions to dictionaries and books and more than 200 articles and papers since 1960. Callimachus Callimachus ( Ancient Greek : Καλλίμαχος , romanized :  Kallimachos ; c.  310  – c.  240 BC )

2697-450: The Greek underworld . The earliest is in a single quoted line from the (6th century BC?) epic Alcmeonis : Mistress Earth [Gaia], and Zagreus highest of all the gods. Perhaps here meaning the highest god of the underworld. Evidently for Aeschylus , Zagreus was, in fact, an underworld god. In a fragment from one of Aeschylus' lost Sisyphus plays (c. 5th century BC), Zagreus seems to be

2790-496: The Titans , but later reborn as the son of Zeus and Semele. This dismemberment of Dionysus Zagreus (the sparagmos ), together with an assumed Orphic anthropogony, in which human beings arose from the ashes of the Titans (who had been struck by Zeus with his thunderbolt in punishment for the dismembering), sometimes called the "Zagreus myth", has often been considered the most important myth of Orphism, and has been described as "one of

2883-623: The Victory of Berenice . Composed in the style of a Pindaric Ode , the self-contained poem celebrates queen Berenice's victory in the Nemean Games . Enveloped within the epinician narrative is an aetiology of the games themselves. The end of Book 4 and the Aetia as a whole is marked by another court poem, the Lock of Berenice . In it, Callimachus relates how the queen gave a lock of her hair as

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2976-489: The 'Upper Eighth' and sat for a scholarship to Balliol College a year early. His tutors included Donald Russell , Michael Stokes and Russell Meiggs . Among his peers were future Nobel Prize winner Anthony J. Leggett , and future Permanent Secretary Peter Gregson . West married fellow scholar Stephanie Pickard in 1960 at Nottingham , after meeting her at a lecture given by Eduard Fraenkel at Corpus Christi College , Oxford, whose seminars he attended. He became

3069-469: The 1st century AD writer Dio Chrysostom writes that humans are "of the blood of the Titans", while the Orphic Hymns call the Titans the "ancestors of our fathers". Earlier allusions to the myth possibly occur in the works of the poet Pindar , Plato , and Plato's student Xenocrates . A fragment from a poem, presumed to be by Pindar, mentions Persephone accepting "requital for ancient wrong", from

3162-541: The 2020 video game Hades . In the game, Zagreus is the son of Hades and is attempting to escape the underworld to find his mother Persephone , who disappeared before his time, and learn why she left. Martin Litchfield West Martin Litchfield West , OM , FBA (23 September 1937 – 13 July 2015) was a British philologist and classical scholar . In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he

3255-525: The 4th century euhemeristic account of the Latin astrologer and Christian apologist Firmicus Maternus , the Titans cooked the "members in various ways and devoured them" ( membra consumunt ), except for his heart. In the version of the story apparently told by Callimachus and Euphorion, the cauldron containing the boiled pieces of Dionysus, is given to Apollo for burial, who placed it beside his tripod at Delphi. And according to Philodemus , citing Euphorion,

3348-519: The 5th century AD, the Greek epic poet Nonnus , who tells the story of this Orphic Dionysus, calls him the "older Dionysos ... illfated Zagreus", "Zagreus the horned baby", "Zagreus, the first Dionysos", "Zagreus the ancient Dionysos", and "Dionysos Zagreus", and the 6th-century AD Pseudo-Nonnus similarly refers to the dismembered Dionysus as "Dionysus Zagreus". The 1st century BC historian Diodorus Siculus says that according to "some writers of myths" there were two gods named Dionysus, an older one, who

3441-520: The Eating of Flesh , Plutarch writes of "stories told about the sufferings and dismemberment of Dionysus and the outrageous assaults of the Titans upon him, and their punishment and blasting by thunderbolt after they had tasted his blood". Other sources have been taken as evidence for the anthropogony having been part of the story before Olympiodorus. The 5th-century AD Neoplatonist Proclus writes that, according to Orpheus, there were three races of humans,

3534-533: The Hesiodic Titanomachy. Damascius , after mentioning the Titans' "plot against Dionysus", recounts that "lightning-bolts, shackles, [and] descents into various lower regions" are the three punishments which it has been said the Titans suffered, and then states that humans are "created from the fragments of the Titans", and "their dead bodies" have "become men themselves". Passages from earlier sources have also been interpreted as referring to this idea:

3627-589: The Iliad appeared ten years later, and one on The Making of the Odyssey was published in 2014. Martin Litchfield West was born on 23 September 1937 at Eltham General Hospital ( Eltham , London ), the elder child (there being a younger daughter) of civil engineer Maurice Charles West and Catherine Baker, née Stainthorpe. His parents lived at that time in Orpington , but moved in 1939 to Hampton , where his father

3720-606: The allegory are two reasons why Callimachus did not write in this genre: firstly, to Callimachus, poetry required a high level of refinement which could not be sustained over the course of a drawn-out work; secondly, most of his contemporaries were writers of epic, creating an over-saturation of the genre which he sought to avoid. Instead, he was interested in recondite, experimental, learned and even obscure topics. His poetry nevertheless surpasses epic in its allusions to previous literature. Although Callimachus attempted to differentiate himself from other poets, his aesthetic philosophy

3813-463: The anthropogony, however, whether men are supposed by Plato to "display and reproduce" this lawless character because of their Titanic heritage, or by simple imitation, is unclear. Xenocrates' reference to the Titans (and perhaps Dionysus) to explain Plato's use of the word "custody" ( φρούρα ), has also been seen as possible evidence of a pre-Hellenistic date for the myth. Zagreus is the protagonist of

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3906-420: The birth of a "Dionysos Zagreus", explaining that "Zagreus" was the poet's name for a chthonic Dionysus, the son of Zeus by Persephone. The earliest certain identification of Zagreus with the dismembered Dionysus occurs in the writings of the late 1st century – early 2nd century AD biographer and essayist Plutarch , who mentions "Zagreus" as one of the names given to the figure by Delphic theologians. Later, in

3999-467: The book are the stories Busiris , king of Egypt , and Phalaris , the tyrant of Akragas , who were known for their excessive cruelty. The second half of the Aetia does not follow the pattern established in Books 1 and 2. Instead, individual aetiologies are set in a variety of dramatic situations and do not form a contiguous narrative. The books are framed by two well known narratives: Book 3 opens with

4092-408: The boy's charge, the king's jealous wife Juno (Hera), conspired with her servants, the Titans, to murder the bastard child. Beguiling him with toys, the Titans ambushed and killed the boy. To dispose of the evidence of their crime, the Titans chopped the body into pieces, cooked, and ate them. However the boy's sister Minerva (Athena), who had been part of the murder plot, kept the heart. When her father

4185-466: The broad categories of 'poetry' and 'prose'. Both categories were further broken down into precise subcategories. For poets, these included, among others, 'drama', 'epic', and 'lyric'; for prose writers, 'philosophy', 'oratory', 'history', and 'medicine'. Entries were sorted alphabetically, giving an author's biography and a list of his works. According to the classicist Lionel Casson , the Pinakes were

4278-531: The celebrants howling and feigning insanity tore to pieces a live bull with their teeth, and the basket in which boy's heart had been saved, was paraded to the blaring of flutes and the crashing of cymbals, thereby turning a mere boy into a god. Most sources make no mention of what happened to the Titans after the murder of Dionysus. In the standard account of the Titans, given in Hesiod's Theogony (which does not mention Dionysus), after being overthrown by Zeus and

4371-668: The characterization of the main character. Frequent allusions to the Odyssey and the Iliad appear, for example reference to Antilochus in Hymn 6. Some Homeric influences can be seen through the use of Homeric hapaxes , such as katōmadian. Callimachus and his aesthetic philosophy became an important point of reference for Roman poets of the late Republic and the early Empire . Catullus , Horace , Vergil , Propertius , and Ovid saw his poetry as one of their "principal model[s]". Due to

4464-479: The city's mythological founder Battus rather than to his father. His grandfather, also named Callimachus, had served the city as a general. His mother's name was Megatima, falsely given as Mesatma by the Suda . His unknown date of birth is placed around 310 BC. During the 280s, Callimachus is thought to have studied under the philosopher Praxiphanes and the grammarian Hermocrates at Alexandria , an important centre of Greek culture. He appears to have experienced

4557-430: The complexity of his poetic production, Roman authors did not attempt to reproduce Callimachus's poems but creatively reused them in their own work. Vergil, in his Aeneid , an epic about the wanderings of Aeneas , repeatedly alludes to Callimachus when contemplating the nature of his own poetry. Having followed Callimachus's example by rejecting traditional epic poetics in his 6th Eclogue , Vergil labels his Aeneid as

4650-408: The dancing Curetes . Zeus intended Dionysus to be his successor as ruler of the cosmos, but a jealous Hera incited the Titans to kill the child. Distracting the infant Dionysus with various toys, including a mirror, the Titans seized Dionysus and tore (or cut) him to pieces. The pieces were then boiled, roasted and partially eaten, by the Titans. But Athena managed to save Dionysus' heart, by which Zeus

4743-401: The dead, which might be a reference to humans' inherited responsibility for the Titans' killing of Dionysus. Plato, in presenting a succession of stages whereby, because of excessive liberty, men degenerate from reverence for the law, to lawlessness, describes the last stage where "men display and reproduce the character of the Titans of story". This Platonic passage is often taken as referring to

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4836-476: The end of his life. West died of a heart attack in 2015 in Oxford at the age of 77. Fellow Oxford academic Armand D'Angour paid tribute to him as "a man of few words in seven languages". West edited and commented Hesiod 's Theogony and Works and Days . In 1967, he published with Reinhold Merkelbach Fragmenta Hesiodea , an edition containing other fragmentary poems attributed to Hesiod. He also edited

4929-605: The epigrammatic tradition. According to the Callimachus scholar Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, "[t]heir intelligent play on language, meter, and word placement" have placed the poems among the most prominent works of the Hellenistic period . Among the oldest forms of religious writing, hymns were "formal addresses to a god or group of gods on behalf of a community". Cultic hymns were written and performed in honour of

5022-472: The exception of his Epigrams and Hymns . All other works mentioned below have been preserved in fragments . Callimachus was an admirer of Homer , whom he regarded as impossible to imitate. This could be the reason why he focused on short poems. Epigrams , brief, forceful poems originally written on stone and on votive offerings , were already an established as a form of literature by the 3rd century BC. Callimachus wrote at least 60 individual epigrams on

5115-419: The fate of the Titans came a momentous event, the birth of humankind. Commonly presented as a part of the myth of the dismembered Dionysus Zagreus, is an Orphic anthropogony, that is, an Orphic account of the origin of human beings. According to this widely held view, as punishment for the crime of the sparagmos , Zeus struck the Titans with his thunderbolt , and from the remains of the destroyed Titans humankind

5208-564: The first book. The stories in the book include those of Linus and Coroebus , Theiodamas, king of the Dryopes and the voyage of the Argonauts . The second book continues the first's dialectic structure. It may have been set at a symposium at Alexandria , where Callimachus worked as a librarian and scholar . Since most of its content has been lost, little is known about Book 2. The only aetiology commonly assumed to have been placed in

5301-510: The first comprehensive bibliographic resource for Greek literature and a "vital reference tool" for using the Alexandrian Library. In his poetry, Callimachus espoused an aesthetic philosophy that has become known as Callimacheanism. He favoured small-scale topics over large and prominent ones, and refinement over long works of poetry. At the beginning of the Aetia , he summarised his poetic programme in an allegory spoken by

5394-431: The god Apollo : "my good poet, feed my victim as fat as possible, but keep your Muse slender. This, too, I order from you: tread the way that wagons do not trample. Do not drive in the same tracks as others or on a wide road but on an untrodden path, even if yours is more narrow." The allegory is directed against the predominant poetic form of the day: heroic epic , which could run to dozens of books in length. Contained in

5487-687: The god". The tenth-century Etymologicum Gudianum interpreted the name as "great hunter", deriving the word from za- ("very") and agreuein ("hunt"), an etymology rejected by both West and Kerényi. Others have suggested a relationship with the Zagros Mountains of western Iran . While Michael C. Astour suggests a derivation from the Ugaritic Sġr (pronounced ṣaġru ?) meaning "the Young One". The early mentions of Zagreus, which occur only in fragments from lost works, connect Zagreus with

5580-443: The king returned, the sister turned informer and gave the boy's heart to the king. In his fury, the king tortured and killed the Titans, and in his grief, he had a statue of the boy made, which contained the boy's heart in its chest, and a temple erected in the boy's honour. The Cretans, in order to pacify their furious savage and despotic king, established the anniversary of the boy's death as a holy day. Sacred rites were held, in which

5673-403: The last of which is the "Titanic race", which "Zeus formed [ συστήσασθα ] from the limbs of the Titans". Proclus also refers to the "mythical chastisement of the Titans and the generation of all mortal living beings out of them" told by Orpheus, connecting the birth of mankind with the punishment of the Titans, though it is unclear whether this punishment comes after the dismemberment of Dionysus or

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5766-435: The library's shelf-lists. His catalogue, named Pinakes after the plural of the Greek for 'tablet' ( Ancient Greek : πίναξ , romanized :  pinax ), amounted to 120 volumes or five times the length of Homer 's Iliad . Although the Pinakes have not survived the end of antiquity, scholars have reconstructed their content from references in surviving classical literature. Authors and their works were divided into

5859-429: The matter from which men are created", meaning that, because the Titans ate the flesh of Dionysus, humans are a part of Dionysus, and so suicide is "forbidden because our bodies belong to Dionysus". The 2nd century AD biographer and essayist Plutarch , does make a connection between the sparagmos and a subsequent punishment of the Titans, but makes no mention of the anthropogony, or Orpheus, or Orphism. In his essay On

5952-403: The most enigmatic and intriguing of all Greek myths". As pieced together from various ancient sources, the reconstructed story of the sparagmos , that is the dismemberment of Dionysus Zagreus, usually given by modern scholars, goes as follows. Zeus had intercourse with Persephone in the form of a serpent, producing Dionysus. He is taken to Mount Ida where (like the infant Zeus) he is guarded by

6045-411: The most important attributes of a poet. Classical scholars place Callimachus among the most influential Greek poets. According to Kathryn Gutzwiller, he "reinvented Greek poetry for the Hellenistic age by devising a personal style that came, through its manifestations in Roman poetry, to influence the entire tradition of modern literature". She also writes that his lasting importance is demonstrated by

6138-640: The mountain Mother among the Curetes, and were consecrated and received the title of "bacchus". This passage associates Zagreus with the cult of Zeus at Cretan Mount Ida , where the infant Zeus was guarded by the Cretan Curetes . According to West, Zagreus here is "a god of nocturnal mystery-rites, associated with a sacramental feast of raw flesh (and thus with the dismemberment of an animal victim)" and infers from this Euripidean passage that Zagreus "played

6231-408: The myth involved the Titans cooking and/or eating at least part of Dionysus. In the account attributed to Callimachus and Euphorion, the dismembered pieces of Dionysus were boiled in a cauldron, and Euphorion is quoted as saying that the pieces of Dionysus were placed over a fire. Diodorus also says that the pieces were "boiled", and the late 2nd century Christian writer Clement of Alexandria says that

6324-440: The myth of the dismemberment of Dionysus as representing the production of wine. Diodorus knew of a tradition whereby this Orphic Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Demeter, rather than Zeus and Persephone. This parentage was explained allegorically by identifying Dionysus with the grape vine, Demeter with the earth, and Zeus with the rain, saying that "the vine gets its growth both from the earth and from rains and so bears as its fruit

6417-622: The other Olympian gods, in the ten-year-long Titanomachy , the Titans are imprisoned in Tartarus . This might seem to preclude any subsequent story of the Titans killing Dionysus, and perhaps in an attempt to reconcile this standard account with the Dionysus Zagreus myth, according to Arnobius and Nonnus, the Titans end up imprisoned by Zeus in Tartarus, as punishment for their murder of Dionysus. However, according to one source, from

6510-419: The people that they "accorded to him honours and sacrifices like those offered to the gods, since all men were eager, because of the magnitude of his service to them, to accord to him immortality." The Christian apologist Firmicus Maternus gives a rationalized euhemeristic account of the myth whereby Liber (Dionysus) was the bastard son of a Cretan king named Jupiter (Zeus). When Jupiter left his kingdom in

6603-446: The pieces of Dionysus were "reassembled by Rhea , and brought back to life", while according to Diodorus Siculus, the reassembly and resurrection of Dionysus was accomplished by Demeter. Later Orphic sources have Apollo receive Dionysus' remains from Zeus, rather than the Titans, and it was Apollo who reassembled Dionysus, rather than Rhea or Demeter. In the accounts of Clement, and Firmicus Maternus cited above, as well as Proclus , and

6696-442: The pieces were "first boiled" in a cauldron, then pierced with spits and roasted. Arnobius , an early 4th century Christian apologist , says that Dionysus' severed parts were "thrown into pots that he might be cooked". None of these sources mention any actual eating, but other sources do. Plutarch says that the Titans "tasted his blood", the 6th century AD Neoplatonist Olympiodorus says that they ate "his flesh", and according to

6789-508: The poems of Homer and Hesiod . Drawing on the Library of Alexandria, they all displayed an interest in intellectual pursuits, and they all attempted to revive neglected forms of poetry. Callimachus used both direct and indirect characterization in his works. The use of comparisons and similes is rather sparse. The use of intertextuality is observed in Hymn 6 , where descriptions of other characters are offered in order to provide contrast to

6882-463: The poet's own intimation at the start of the Aetia and is therefore of limited authority. According to Cameron, Callimachus may have conceived the Hecale as a model epic according to his own tastes. When working at the Library of Alexandria, Callimachus was responsible for the library's cataloguing. In this function, he compiled a detailed bibliography of all existing Greek literature deriving from

6975-411: The private preparatory school of Denmead . At 11, he lost a scholarship at Colet Court (now St Paul's Juniors ), but was offered a feepaying place instead. West discovered at Colet his interest in languages and invented at 14 a competitor of Esperanto he labelled 'Unilingua'. In 1951, he won a scholarship to the main school, St Paul's . Excelling at both linguistics and mathematics, he was advanced to

7068-473: The reconstitution of Indo-European mythology and poetry and its influence on Ancient Greece , notably in the 2007 book Indo-European Poetry and Myth ( IEPM ). West also produced an edition of Homer 's Iliad for the Bibliotheca Teubneriana , accompanied by a study of its critical tradition and overall philology entitled Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. A further volume on The Making of

7161-472: The reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus , who became sole ruler of Egypt in 283 BC. Classicist John Ferguson puts the latest date of Callimachus's establishment at the imperial court at 270 BC. Despite the lack of precise sources, the outlines of Callimachus's working life can be gathered from his poetry. Poems belonging to his period of economic hardship indicate that he began writing in the 280s BC, while his poem Aetia shows signs of having been composed in

7254-449: The reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes , who ascended to the throne in 246 BC. Contemporary references suggest that Callimachus was writing until about 240 BC, and Ferguson finds it likely that he died by 235 BC, at which time he would have been 75 years old. According to the Suda , Callimachus wrote more than 800 individual works in prose and poetry. The vast majority of his literary production, including all prose output, has been lost with

7347-562: The reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes . Although Callimachus wrote prolifically in prose and poetry , only a small number of his poetical texts have been preserved. His main works are the Aetia , a four-book aetiological poem, six religious hymns , around 60 epigrams , a collection of satirical iambs , and a narrative poem entitled Hecale . Callimachus shared many characteristics with his Alexandrian contemporaries Aratus , Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus , but professed to adhere to

7440-444: The river. Isis , Osiris' wife, hunted down and killed the Titans, reassembled Osiris' body parts "into the shape of a human figure", and gave them "to the priests with orders that they pay Osiris the honours of a god". But since she was unable to recover the penis she ordered the priests "to pay to it the honours of a god and to set it up in their temples in an erect position." Diodorus Siculus reports an allegorical interpretation of

7533-435: The same time, he challenges Callimachean learnedness by depicting lowbrow details of contemporary nightlife such as strippers and dwarfs kept for entertainment purposes. Ovid described Callimachus as "lacking in genius but strong in art" ( Latin : Quamvis ingenio non valet, arte valet ). His statement, though seemingly a criticism of the poet, pays homage to Callimachus's belief that technical skill and erudition were

7626-473: The son of Hades, while in Aeschylus' Egyptians ( Aigyptioi ), Zagreus was apparently identified with Hades himself. A fragment from Euripides ' lost play Cretan Men ( Kretes ) has the chorus of Cretan men describe the "pure life" they have led since they became initiates ( mystai ) of Idaean Zeus and celebrants of: night-ranging Zagreus, performing his feasts of raw flesh; and raising torches high to

7719-442: The strong reactions his poetry elicited from contemporaries and posterity. Richard L. Hunter , an expert on Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, states that the selective reception of Callimachus through Roman poets has led to a simplified picture of his poetry. Hunter writes that modern critics have drawn up a false dichotomy between the "content-laden and socially engaged poetry of the archaic and classical periods " and

7812-411: The wine which is pressed out from the clusters of grapes". According to Diodorus, Dionysus' dismemberment by the Titans represented the harvesting of the grapes, and the subsequent "boiling" of his dismembered parts "has been worked into a myth by reason of the fact that most men boil the wine and then mix it, thereby improving its natural aroma and quality." The Neronian-era Stoic Cornutus relates

7905-490: The word zagre , which only survives in Hesychius , has an Ionic ending. So if "Zagreus" does derive from zagre , then this would suggest an Ionian origin for Zagreus. But, according to Kerényi, Hesychius' definition of zagre , "proves that the name contains the root zoë and zoön ", the Greek words for "life" and "Living thing", and according to West "the vocalism, Zā- for Zō-, points to a Doric or North-west Greek home for

7998-403: Was able to contrive his rebirth from Semele. Although the extant Orphic sources do not mention the name "Zagreus" in connection with this dismembered Dionysus (or anywhere else), the (c. 3rd century BC) poet Callimachus perhaps did. We know that Callimachus, as well as his contemporary Euphorion , told the story of the dismembered child, and Byzantine sources quote Callimachus as referring to

8091-606: Was an ancient Greek poet , scholar , and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period , he wrote over 800 literary works, most of which do not survive, in a wide variety of genres. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy , known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and, through them, on all subsequent Western literature . Born into

8184-580: Was appointed resident engineer at the Metropolitan Water Board -operated waterworks . West's father's family were from the Home Counties , and his mother's family from Yorkshire and Durham . His paternal grandfather, Robert West, lectured in electrical engineering; his maternal grandfather, John Stainthorpe, was a railwayman from Pickering . Litchfield was the maiden name of his paternal grandmother. Aged four, West entered

8277-592: Was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2014. West wrote on ancient Greek music , Greek tragedy , Greek lyric poetry , the relations between Greece and the ancient Near East , and the connection between shamanism and early ancient Greek religion , including the Orphic tradition. This work stems from material in Akkadian , Phoenician , Hebrew , Hittite , and Ugaritic , as well as Greek and Latin. West also studied

8370-405: Was born, which resulted in a human inheritance of ancestral guilt, for this original sin of the Titans, and by some accounts "formed the basis for an Orphic doctrine of the divinity of man." However, when and to what extent there existed any Orphic tradition which included these elements is the subject of open debate. The only ancient source to explicitly connect the sparagmos and the anthropogony

8463-451: Was the first to attempt the yoking of oxen and by their aid to effect the sowing of the seed", and the younger was "called Dimetor (Of Two Mothers) ... because the two Dionysoi were born of one father, but of two mothers". He also said that Dionysus "was thought to have two forms ... the ancient one having a long beard, because all men in early times wore long beards, the younger one being youthful and effeminate and young." Several accounts of

8556-421: Was the son of Zeus and Persephone, but that the "younger one [born to Zeus and Semele] also inherited the deeds of the older, and so the men of later times, being unaware of the truth and being deceived because of the identity of their names thought there had been but one Dionysus." According to Diodorus, this older Dionysus, was represented in painting and sculpture with horns, because he "excelled in sagacity and

8649-459: Was their aggressive, satirical tone. Although the poems are poorly preserved, their content is known from a set of ancient summaries ( diegeseis ). In the Iambs , Callimachus critically comments on issues of interest, revolving mostly around aesthetics and personal relationships. He uses the polemical tone of the genre to defend himself against critics of his poetic style and his tendency to write in

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