A report on Catullus and Callimachus

Modern bust of Catullus on the Piazza Carducci in Sirmione.
Papyrus fragment from the Aetia of Callimachus
Catullus at Lesbia's by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Papyrus fragment from the Aetia of Callimachus
Bithynia within the Roman Empire
Callimachus is thought to have worked under the patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. This bust of him is held at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.
Catullus et in eum commentarius (1554)
Callimachus wrote six hymns to gods of the Greek Pantheon, including one to Zeus. This statue of the god was found at Camirus and is housed at the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes.
Lesbia, 1878 painting by John Reinhard Weguelin inspired by the poems of Catullus
19th-century artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria, where Callimachus compiled the Pinakes
Vergil's Aeneid interacts frequently with the work of Callimachus. This late-18th-century painting by Jean-Baptiste Wicar shows Vergil reciting his poem to the emperor Augustus.

Catullus, Horace, Vergil, Propertius, and Ovid saw his poetry as one of their "principal model[s]" and engaged with it in a variety of ways.

- Callimachus

Catullus's poetry was influenced by the innovative poetry of the Hellenistic Age, and especially by Callimachus and the Alexandrian school, which had propagated a new style of poetry that deliberately turned away from the classical epic poetry in the tradition of Homer.

- Catullus
Modern bust of Catullus on the Piazza Carducci in Sirmione.

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Ovid

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Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus.

Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus.

Statue of Ovid by Ettore Ferrari in the Piazza XX Settembre, Sulmona, Italy.
Ovid Banished from Rome (1838) by J.M.W. Turner.
Medea in a fresco from Herculaneum.
Engraved frontispiece of George Sandys’s 1632 London edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished.
A 1484 figure from Ovide Moralisé, edition by Colard Mansion.
Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1859. National Gallery (London).
Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
Metamorphoses, 1618
Ovid by Anton von Werner.
Ovid by Luca Signorelli.
Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid (c.1640), by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld.
Bust of Ovid by anonymous sculptor, Uffizi gallery Florence

They also play with generic conventions; most of the letters seem to refer to works in which these characters were significant, such as the Aeneid in the case of Dido and Catullus 64 for Ariadne, and transfer characters from the genres of epic and tragedy to the elegiac genre of the Heroides.

The poem stands in the tradition of mythological and etiological catalogue poetry such as Hesiod's Catalogue of Women, Callimachus' Aetia, Nicander's Heteroeumena, and Parthenius' Metamorphoses.