Callimachus, Euhemerus, âEuhemerismâ1
The earliest extant reference to Euhemerus and his Hiera Anagraphè is in the works of Callimachus of Cyrene, who was active as a poet and scholar in Ptolemaic Alexandria during the first half of the 3rd century BCE. It is not a nice reference. The first of Callimachusâ thirteen Iambs begins, abruptly and programmatically, not in the voice of Callimachus himself but in the borrowed voice of the archaic satiric poet Hipponax of Ephesos; he addresses the âmen of todayâ in unflattering terms and calls them out to join him,
hither in a throng, to the temple outside the wall where the old man who made up the ancient Zeus of Panchaea is nonsensically scribbling his misleading books.2
A papyrus commentary on the first Iamb helpfully identifies the âmen of todayâ as the scholars of Alexandria,3 and the âtemple before the wallâ as the Serapeum of Parmenion.4 The commentator does not tell us, however, what business Euhemerus had there, or why this extra-mural sanctuary is deemed an appropriate place for Hipponax to gather his quarrelsome audience and tell them, as he proceeds to do, the tale of Bathyclesâ cup â a precious object that, after the death of its original owner, passed through the hands of the Seven Sages of Greece and was finally dedicated to Apollo at Didyma.
The lines following the ones previously cited would have explained the appropriateness of the Serapeum as a meeting-place, but they are very fragmentarily preserved.5 The most we can say, given the state of the text, is that Hipponaxâ summons involves a significant change of venue for the restive scholars, who would normally have been working and congregating inside the city perimeter, at the royal palace or the adjacent sanctuary of the Muses; and that the (alleged) presence of Euhemerus marks this alternative venue as somehow disreputable â as if the âtemple outside (or: before) the wallâ is where bad scholarship happens, or where bad scholars end up. The cautionary tale of Bathyclesâ cup is about preserving something valuable by respectfully passing it on among the like-minded;6 and it sets a standard of good conduct that the quarreling Alexandrians prove themselves unable to meet even as they take note of the story being told (toward its end, the poem dissolves in mayhem). The upshot seems to be that if you donât want to spend your days as Euhemerus does, impiously scribbling his misleading books someplace outside the City, then youâd better shape up to the task at hand and not waste your time quarreling.
A discussion of the reception of the Hiera Anagraphè in the works of Callimachus could well end here â and I may have already made too much of the scant evidence.7 As far as we can tell from their fragmentary remains, the Iambs make no further reference to Euhemerus; and even in the first Iamb, Euhemerus is not among the targets of the poetâs polemics, merely part of the foil.8 Strictly, we cannot even say that Callimachus thought of the Hiera Anagraphè as a âmisleading bookâ and of its author as âimpiousâ, as these qualifications are voiced by Hipponax redivivus, not by the poet speaking for himself:9 so there we are. On the other hand, it might well be thought that the really interesting questions only begin at this point. Callimachus worked in a period of radical socio-political upheaval; he was professionally involved in the broadcasting of several newly created religious cults and practices, some of them concerning deified mortals; and he wrote more extensively and innovatively about long-established (and long-forgotten) cults and practices than did any of his contemporaries. Put on the spot, what would he have had to say about Euhemerus and his controversial ideas about the nature and the history of the Olympian gods? What role would Euhemerus and his intellectual legacy have had to play in the actually attested philosophical/religious/poetical controversies of the early 3rd century BCE, had they been deemed sufficiently respectable to be allowed to have a part in them?
Given the silence of the literary record, there are no straightforward and easy answers to these questions; but we may yet hope to gain from a review of said controversies a sharper focus on what, in the period under discussion, was that elusive phenomenon, âEuhemerismâ â and as Callimachus is the only actor involved in these controversies who actually mentions Euhemerus at all, his work is as good a place to start as any. In what follows, therefore, we shall examine in some detail a number of topics in Callimachusâ religious poetry, notably the Hymn to Zeus and the Hymn to Artemis, and its interaction with Stoic and Platonic philosophy, not with a view to uncovering previously unnoticed references or allusions to the Hiera Anagraphè (I do not think there are any of those to be found), but with an eye out for where and how this interaction runs in parallel or even in overlapping tracks with what Euhemerus was, supposedly, doing.
Writing the history of the gods
What readers of Euhemerus have taken away over the centuries from their perusal of the Hiera Anagraphè (or what remained of it) is, predominantly, the idea that the Olympian gods were originally mortal royalty who were offered divine honours by their subjects, perhaps in return for gifts bestowed; a position readily equated in one form or another with the charge of âatheismâ.10 Yet, as recent scholarship has emphasized, there is more to the Hiera Anagraphè than merely this ârationalizingâ account of traditional Greek divinity. While Euhemerusâ work, if not simply dismissed as fiction, has often been characterized as a political or utopian essay contained in a ludic framing device â the narrator travelling to the island of Panchaia and there learning from local authorities and by observing a local monument about the alleged origin of the Olympians â Honigman 2009 compellingly argues that Euhemerus himself must have conceived of the Hiera Anagraphè as a work of historiography. Diodorus Siculus, the 1st-century-BCE historian who is our main source for the contents of the Hiera Anagraphè, obscured the nature of Euhemerusâ work by paraphrasing the description of Panchaia â its history, its geography, its customs â in one place (Appendix 2a), and the account of the gods (mostly) in another (Appendix 2b): so, given the persistent notoriety of the latter, it could easily be assumed that the Panchaia travelogue paraphrased in the fifth book of Diodorusâ History was mere framing. On the other hand, as Honigman 2009, 7 observes, Diodorus takes both accounts equally seriously; and other ancient writers, too, seem to have regarded Euhemerus as a bona fide â though misguided â âgeographerâ.11 As far as they were concerned, Euhemerus apparently adhered quite conscientiously to the canons of traditional scholarly presentation: whatever they thought about his thesis about the Olympians, they would have agreed with Honigman 2009, 9 that âthe travelogue ⌠was there to provide the factual context that confirmed the authenticity of the second part of the work and the philosophical theory embedded in itâ.
On this view of it, the Hiera Anagraphè was never merely about the true nature of the Olympian gods (viz., âthey are deified mortalsâ). It was also, and perhaps more importantly, about their spatio-temporal location in the oikoumenè:12 long ago, when still a mortal king, Zeus set out from Crete and brought the ancestors of the present-day Panchaean priestly caste to the island,13 where another mortal king, Uranus, had already established a multi-ethnic polity;14 Zeus then reached out to other nations, accumulating divine honours accorded to him in tribute or in gratitude;15 left a full record of his exploits in his sanctuary on Panchaia (later supplemented with a record of the exploits of Apollo and Artemis by Hermes);16 and presumably died back in Crete, where a tomb bearing his name can still be seen.17 If this is correct, then what was truly novel about Euhemerusâ project in the Hiera Anagraphè is not so much its ârationalismâ â which in fact had plenty of precedents in earlier speculative writing about the gods (see Henrichs 1984, 145â52) â as the radical assumption that the Olympians could be made the subject of conventional historiographical inquiry.
It is in this respect, as we shall presently see, that Euhemerus anticipated a set of concerns that featured very prominently in the poetry of Callimachus and his contemporaries, and that were very much concerns of the times in which they lived. Inevitably, with the spectacular expansion of the Greek-speaking world in the wake of Alexanderâs conquests of the 330â320s, Greek socio-religious thinking took a new spatial turn. Beginning with Homer, poets and thinkers had always mapped the comings and goings of the gods and heroes onto the actually existing geographies of their times; but the rapid establishment of significant hubs of Greek culture and power outside the conceptual âheartlandâ centered around the Aegean basin called for new configurations of the imaginary landscape.18 Callimachusâ two great fragmentarily preserved collections, the Aitia and the Iambs, offered a resounding answer to that call. The successive episodes of the Aitia, detailing the foundation stories of diverse cultic practices and sites as well as including occasional and programmatical poems, have us travelling the oikoumenè, ânot ⌠in a well-organized, predictable way but on a zigzagging route that includes constant surprise takeoffs and sudden landingsâ (Asper 2011, 160â61). The Iambs alternate aetiological stories and occasional poems set in Thrace, Olympia, Aegina, Sicily, and Miletus, with satirical numbers located in Callimachusâ contemporary Alexandria, and so constitute less of a geopoetical tour de force, but still manage to cover a lot of ground.
What is dist...
