McKay Kenneth John. Erysichthon. A Callimachean Comedy

Brill, 1962. — x, 202 p. — (Mnemosyne, Supplements 7).This study of Kallimachos' Sixth Hymn is, through the poet's use of the story of Erysichthon, complete in itself. It was, however, impossible to examine it entirely in isolation, for I believe that Hymns 5 and 6 are companion pieces, and in a recent study of the former hymn ('The Poet at Play: Kallimachos, The Bath of Pallas' 1) I have tried to defend this viewpoint. It needs to be mentioned briefly now, but borne in mind during the whole of the subsequent discussion. Hymn 5, I suggested, has turned out to be not nearly as shallow as our first impressions led us to believe. It is an attempt to explain away a savage tale, the Pherecydean version of the blinding of Teiresias, by making the humane Athene Oxyderkes the offended deity. At the same time Kallimachos has carefully, and mischievously, led us to expect that he will praise the deity by telling the story in its original, gruesome form - an expectation which must have astounded his first audience; to make this false belief the more inevitable he has presented Athene in a martial image and cast the whole composition in a plaintive form which I can only construe as Doric Threnodic Elegy. But no, he has found a means to pull the mat from under our feet, to justify Athene's action as humane; and should we complain that his piece is no longer a unity, he may gravely point to signposts in his opening stanzas to the very nature of the goddess which he has portrayed.