ABSTRACT
The dislocation of the early Hellenistic world, psychological and spiritual as well as geographical, must have been immense. This chapter considers what kind of different and awkward explanations modern scholars have for the way Hellenistic poetry deals with the juxtaposition of religious devotion and politics. The six hymns of Callimachus are indeed the most overtly religious literary texts from the early Hellenistic period. The child-gods are restricted almost entirely to Callimachus. Callimachus is not a nihilist rejecting religion out of hand. When he examines accepted religious values he finds that they do not work as a system in the way that they should, and that for any observer who is thoughtfully aware of complexities the orderliness assumed by traditional religion is illusory. The illusion, then, the religious illusion, has broken and does not seem to have much of a future.
