Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/405

ALEXANDRIAN ELEGY AND EPOS 381 the poetry of the great critic ; and after ages, on the whole, will care more for the unsuccessful rebel, Apollo- nius, who refused to accept his veto. Apolloxius attempted an epic in the old style, long, rather ambitious, absolutely simple in construction, and unepigrammatic in language. That was the kind of poetry he liked, and he meant to write it himself. The Argon- autica failed in Alexandria, and Apollonius left the country for Rhodes, where he worked up a second version of his poem. He had a small band of admirers in his lifetime ; but taste in general followed Callimachus in favour of the brief and brilliant style. Even Catullus and Propertius were Callimacheans. It was for Vergil to conquer the world with a poem in Apollonius's spirit, with much of its structure and language borrowed line by line from him. Of course Vergil had in a sense a 'call' to write the national epic of his country, whereas no one had called upon Apollonius to celebrate the Argonauts ; and this in itself gives Vergil a superior interest. But the Medea and Jason of the Argonautica are at once more interesting and more natural than their copies, the Dido and ^neas of the j^neid. The wild love of the witch-maiden sits curiously on the queen and organiser of industrial Carthage ; and the two qualities which form an essential part of Jason — the weakness which makes him a traitor, and the deliberate gentleness which contrasts him with Medea — seem incongruous in the father of Rome. There are perhaps two passages which might be selected as specially characteristic of Alexandrian poetry. One would be the protest of Callimachus : ^ " Great is the sweep of the river of Assyria ; but it bears many scourings of earth on the flood of it, and much driftwood to the sea. Apollo's bees draw not ^ Call. Hymn Apollo, 107 ff. 26