Callimachus

Pliny refereth it to Scythes the son of Jupiter.

Better and more noble writers bring shooting from a more noble inventor, as Plato, Callimachus, and Galen from Apollo.

Yet long afore those days do we read it in the Bible of shooting expressly, and also, if we shall believe Nicholas de Lyra, Lamech killed Cain with a shaft.

So this great continuance of shooting doth not a little praise shooting.

and although shooting may be meet some time for some scholars, and yet so forth, yet the fittest always is to be preferred.

Therefore, if you will need to grant scholars pastimes and recreation of their minds, let them use, as many of them doth, music and playing on instruments, things most seemly for all scholars, and most regarded always for Apollo and the Muses.

Toxophilus said, Even as I cannot deny but some music is fit for learning, so I trust you cannot choose but grant that shooting is fit also, as Callimachus doth signify in this verse, Both merry songs and good shooting delighteth Apollo.

But as concerning whether of them is most fit for learning and scholars to use, you may say what you will for your pleasure.

As the library grew, it became possible to find information on more subjects than ever before, but also much more difficult to find information on any specific subject.

Luckily, a scholar named Callimachus of Cyrene set to work on a solution, creating the Pinnex, a 120-volume catalogue of the Library's contents, the first of its kind.

Using the Pinnex, others were able to navigate the Library's swelling collection.

They made some astounding discoveries.

Maternal death was commonplace in the ancient world, and in Ephesus it was taught that faithfulness to Artemis would protect women through the risks of childbirth.

We see this, for example, in the Greek poet Callimachus' hymn to Artemis, written in the 3rd century BC.

In 1 Timothy 2.15, could Paul then simply be assuring the Ephesians that God will keep them safe through pregnancy and that they need not fear turning from their worship of Artemis? Just interesting possibilities to consider, but ones that would help explain why Paul needed to write what he did.

Two last comments before we move on to 1 Timothy 3.

It kind of looks like Virgo is reaching out towards it to grab it.

Now, the oldest writings come to us from the poet Callimachus, who was based in the Ptolemaic court.

And he wrote this down to celebrate the events of the story in a poem.

which was titled The Lock of Berenice, but unfortunately we've lost a lot of it and there's only a few lines of it that remain.

And the ancient Greeks, much of their sky mythology is inspired from places like ancient Babylon and other surrounding regions that were close to them.

And so I don't think it's a stretch to say that those ancient cultures, the ones who are ancient to us, like ancient Mesopotamia, I don't think it's a stretch to say that they inherited their night sky mythology from a culture much older than them.

Tonight's story comes to us from the Greek poet Callitus, who translated a version of this tale in the 1st century BCE, two centuries after Callimachus wrote about it in his work The Lock of Berenice.

I've taken some liberties with the pacing and detail to tell it in a modern format, but I've done my best to keep the heart of the story intact.

When it comes to literature, this can mean two very different things, a combination of Greek forms and ideas with the values and traditions of other cultures, or a group of genres and ideas that, while Greek in itself, was not typical of the classical period.

Hellenistic poets like Callimachus and playwrights like Menander were much more concerned than classical writers had been with individuals, their desires, and their anxieties.

And instead of assuming that their readers were the members of small communities that gave them their identity and made clear what it expected of them, they saw them as people who were trying to find happiness In a suddenly much larger and confusing world, where change was the order of the day, this period also saw the birth of what we would call the romantic novel, in which a pair of star-crossed lovers had adventures and traveled to distant and exotic places.

The Hellenistic approach to the world also affected the philosophical schools of the period.

Greek architects organized their columns according to three orders: Doric, the simplest and heaviest; Ionic, with its scrolled capitals; and Corinthian, with capitals carved to look like acanthus leaves.

According to the Roman architect Vitruvius, the Corinthian order was invented when the sculptor Callimachus saw a basket that had been left on a grave with an acanthus plant growing up through it, and he was so struck by the shape that he carved it in stone.

The Colosseum in Rome, completed around 80 AD, uses all three Greek orders stacked vertically: Doric on the ground floor, Ionic on the second, and Corinthian on the third, with a flat, plastered attic on top.

The Colosseum could seat about fifty thousand spectators, and its eighty entrances were designed so that the entire audience could file out in about fifteen minutes, a crowd flow standard that modern stadium designers still study.

They dined together, studied together, and wrote in the margins of eternity.

Among them were names that echo still, Eratosthenes, who measured the circumference of the Earth by watching shadows in two cities; Callimachus, who cataloged a half million scrolls into the first known library index; Euclid, who wrote the elements, a geometry so perfect it would outlive kingdoms.

To walk its corridors was to walk inside the human mind at its most luminous.

Outside, Alexandria was a marvel.

Eratosthenes of Alexandria, circa two hundred and seventy-six to circa one hundred and ninety-four BC, Greek scientific writer, was born at Cyrene.

He studied grammar under Callimachus at Alexandria, and philosophy under the Stoic Ariston and the Academic Arcesilaus at Athens.

He returned to Alexandria at the summons of Ptolemy III Euergetes, by whom he was appointed chief librarian in place of Callimachus.

He is said to have died of voluntary starvation, being threatened with total blindness.

Eratosthenes was one of the most learned men of antiquity and wrote on a great number of subjects.