1 The Reception of Hellenistic Love Poetry in Rome Alexander Kirichenko Introduction As Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens remark in their sixty-six-page-long survey of Callimachus’ Roman afterlife, “[t]o review the scholarship on Callimachus in Latin poetry or to catalogue every Callimachean resonance is a task whose magnitude lies well beyond the scope of this study.” 1 This would obviously be all the more true of an attempt to discuss a related, yet much more comprehensive, topic in a much shorter text. Rather than undertaking the impossible task of sifting through all of Roman literature for allusions to Hellenistic love poetry, this chapter will, therefore, offer what can only be a highly schematic overview of the historically conditioned transformations that the poetic discourse of love underwent from Ptolemaic Alexandria to the Roman Empire. 1. Erotic Callimacheanism and Ptolemaic Alexandria Archaic love poems, both elegy and lyric, tend to cast themselves as oral utterances performed in the context of the symposium. 2 Hellenistic amatory epigram, by contrast, is deeply conscious of its inscriptional pedigree – its status as a written fixation of what would otherwise be an ephemeral expression of a spontaneous sentiment. 3 In other respects, however, there is a high degree of continuity between the new Hellenistic genre and its archaic models. 4 Despite its great tonal diversity (from Asclepiades’ straightforward statements of desire to Meleager’s emotionally subtle “thumb-nail mimes”), 5 Hellenistic epigram shares with archaic love poetry the conception of erotic fulfilment as the only thing that infuses with meaning both poetry and life. This goal-oriented approach to love accounts for the emphatic performativity of Greek love poems, both archaic and Hellenistic, which 1 Acosta-Hughes – Stephens 2012, 205. In addition to Acosta-Hughes – Stephens 2012, 204-69, the standard studies of “Callimachus in Rome” include Wimmel 1960; Hutchinson 1988, 277-354; Cameron 1995, 454-84; Fantuzzi – Hunter 2004, 444-85; Hunter 2006. See also Barchiesi 2011. 2 Calame 1999, 13-38; Stehle 2009, 66-71; Colesanti 2011, 16-33. For a more detailed version of the argument presented in the first section of this chapter, see Kirichenko 2022b, 169-236. 3 Gutzwiller 1998, 115-182; Gutzwiller 2007; Tueller 2008, 117-13. 4 Bowie 2007. 5 Gutzwiller 2007, 328-329.