Seeing Double

Reviewed by: Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria Mary Depew Susan A. Stephens . Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Hellenistic Culture and Society, 37. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2003. Pp. xvi, 292. $65.00. ISBN 0-520-22973-8. With her expertise in Egyptian literature and culture, Susan Stephens is in a unique position to evaluate how the Ptolemaic monarchs' engagement with Egyptian matters influenced the poetry produced in Alexandria in the early to middle third century. Her book goes beyond the recent work of scholars such as Koenen, Bing, and Selden to examine how Egyptian references in this poetry locate it within a wider dialogue about kingship occurring in roughly the same period and place (11). The book's title distills its approach (9): . . . the cumulative effect of this poetry would have been to allow the reader to discern Egyptian cultural formations, but contained within or domesticated by its framework of Greekness. The effect is one of an optical illusion—looked at from one angle discrete elements in the narrative are [End Page 167] Greek, from another Egyptian; both are complete and distinct without the other, yet interdependent in their final patterning. Stephens examines how this poetic dynamic mirrors the monarchs' positioning of their authority and their dual rule as basileus to the Greek population and pharaoh to the Egyptian (16 and ch. 5). Unlike the occupying Persian presence that preceded their rule, the Ptolemies strove to position themselves in both their own and Egyptian culture, actively collaborating with both religious traditions, for example, to construct civic and political ideologies. Scholars have disagreed about whether Hellenistic poets also made use of Egyptian ideas about religion and kingship in order to honor their royal patrons, but the relatively common view that these were "ivory-towered intellectuals indulging in obscurantist aesthetics" (12), withdrawn from political life, will be a lot more difficult to maintain after this study. The body of the book consists of three chapters devoted respectively to Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius (chs. 2–4). Stephens lays the groundwork for her reading of their poetry in chapter 1, "Conceptualizing Egypt." The chapter presents a detailed and succinct account of the "various ways in which the Egyptian motifs of kingship might have been available to Greeks in Egypt and how Greeks assimilated what they saw or heard" (64). In addition to the discourse on the nature of states and cultures that Herodotus, Plato, and Isocrates engaged in, Stephens also examines the perhaps less well known works on this topic of Hecataeus, Euhemerus, Dionysius Scytobrachion, and the Alexander Romance. Hecataeus' Aegyptiaca, after all, was composed at Soter's court, and its Egyptocentric modeling of the origins of culture and idealized kingship may have been meant to construct the past as an exemplum, of equal status with Greek paradigms, for present-day kings. Dionysius composed an Argonautica and Libyan Stories, whose rationalized myths match on many points, not only themes taken up by Euhemerus and Hecataeus, but also the narratives found in the poetry of Apollonius and Callimachus. It is in chapter 4, in her examination of "Apollonian Cosmologies," that Stephens discusses the largest number of these parallels. In chapter 2 Stephens examines in detail Callimachus' first and fourth Hymns, addressed respectively to Zeus and Delos. Her strategy here is to note how Callimachus often exploits radical shifts between past, present, and future, or the geographically near and distant, to effect ruptures in his text's narrative fabric. It is at these moments of rupture, she argues, where we may find events that are "legible within two discrete discursive systems and [where] Egypt and Egyptian motifs behave as subtexts that coexist with and complement the Greek" (77). Stephens argues that in these two hymns, Callimachus creates a new theogony as a fitting tribute to the new king of the Nile (121). In chapter 3 Stephens examines two of Theocritus' Idylls, 24 (Heracliscus) and 17 (Encomium to Ptolemy), and argues, among other points, that in Idyll 17 Theocritus elaborates features of Ptolemaic kingship that map closely onto the model sketched by Hecataeus in his portrait of the ideal king. Stephens' discussion of these poets' work is richly rewarding, and

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