This poetry of Alexandria, or rather this poetry of the Greek race in its latter days, was, to a much greater extent, the artificial product of culture and knowledge than the manifestation of original feeling or intellectual power. The very language in which it was written was artificial, far removed, not only in phraseology but in dialectical forms, from the language of common life. Poetry was pursued as the recreation of scholars and men of science; its chief aim was to satisfy a dilettante curiosity:--
Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, etc.(68)
The writers of this school whose names are most familiarly known are Callimachus, one of the Battiadae of Cyrene, Euphorion of Chalcis, Philetas of Cos, Aratus of Soli, Hermesianax and Nicander of Colophon, Apollonius of Rhodes(69), Lycophron of Chalcis, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, from whom Virgil takes a passage about geographical science, Zenodotus of Ephesus, a grammarian,--names suggestive of the widely-diffused culture of the Hellenic race, and at the same time indicative of the absence of any great centre of national life such as Athens had been in former times. To these are sometimes added the more interesting names of Theocritus of Syracuse, and of the idyllic poets Moschus of Syracuse and Bion of Smyrna, although they are more associated with the fresh woods and pastures of Sicily and Southern Italy. The chief materials used by the Alexandrine writers in their poetry were the tales and fancies of the old mythology and the results of natural science; the modes of human feeling to which they mainly gave expression were the passion of love and the sensibility to the beauty of Nature.
Nothing attests more forcibly the original power and richness of faculty which shaped the primitive fancies of the Greek mythology into legend, poetry, and art, than the perennial vitality with which this mythology has reappeared under many forms, satisfying many different wants of the human mind, at various epochs, from the time of its birth even down to the present day. In the contrasts often drawn between the classical and the romantic imagination, it is sometimes forgotten that this Greek mythology was richer in romantic personages, situations, and incidents, than the mythology or early legends of any other race. In the nobler eras of Greek literature, after the creative impulse ceased out of which the mythology and its natural accompaniment epic poetry had arisen, the legends and personages of gods and heroes supplied to the lyrical poets an ideal background by connexion with which they glorified the passions and interests of their own time: to the tragic poets of Athens they supplied beings of heroic stature, situations of transcendent import, by means of which they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not seek to impart any recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest them of any sacred or ethical associations, and to present them to their readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of passion and adventure. They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more appropriate form of 'epyllia' or epic idyls, to enable their readers to escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry,--the childlike curiosity ({ ~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON WITH DASIA AND OXIA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} { ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH VARIA~} { ~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}) which delights in hearing a story told, and the artistic passion to make present to the eye or the fancy distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.