ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the study of Hellenistic Poetry and its appreciation in the past, and picks out a few characteristic examples. The figure of the scholar poet, the fact of the coincidence of poetry and scholarship is the feature of the Hellenistic age. A characteristic example of appreciation of Hellenistic poetry after Politian belongs to the beginning of the seventeenth century. The climax of the scholarly work devoted to Hellenistic poetry was Bendey's collection of the Fragments of Callimachus at the end of the seventeenth century. Hellenistic poetry, rejected by classicism, seemed to be justified by late romanticism. It has repeatedly teen stated that the theories of eloquence, the schools of rhetoric, must have exercised their influence on the style of Hellenistic poetry. The Hellenistic poets did everything to preserve classical and pre-classical poetry, and ‘learning’ was a constitutive element of their own novel art.
