Callimachus

“But where Ovid treats his characters with mild condescension and some irony, Mr. Calasso treats them with the kind of respect believing pagan writers like Homer and Callimachus might have given them. Also unlike Ovid, Mr. Calasso often provides several different versions of a story, so that his readers can see the various potential meanings a myth can have.”

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose.

Depending on how the text was copied, the twelve thousand verses of Homer’s Odyssey filled five to ten scrolls of normal length; truly monumental works, such as Callimachus’s Pinakes, were well over a hundred scrolls long.

According to Alberto Manguel’s book “A History of Reading,” Callimachus may have been the first to organize a catalog alphabetically.

It was overseen by the poet and scholar Callimachus, who understood that users would need to easily find things, and so he cataloged it.