The Hellenistic Era

Chapter 6 transports us to the Alexandrian Library. The first part focuses on the question of when and how book-rolls reached the Library, and the analysis foregrounds possible connections with the Peripatos and its library. Although we have cases of single travelling poems ( Olympian 5), lyric texts arrived to the Library largely as corpora, and scholarly work on lyric begun with Zenodotus, continued with Aristophanes of Byzantium, and was intensified with Aristarchus, while Callimachus presumably had lyric texts in his disposal when he was preparing his Pinakes . The second part addresses the question of whether the Lyric Canon was based on poetic quality and evaluation or simply on availability of texts. The analysis demonstrates that the Hellenistic era did not create the Lyric Canon; the Alexandrians rather inherited an already set agenda which determined the authors who were worthy of scholarly attention and subsequently worthy to be canonized.

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