Kallimachos’ ›Ektheosis Arsinoes‹ in der Tradition griechischer Herrscherenkomiastik

This book is an in-depth philological study of the Ektheosis Arsinoes by Callimachos, a courtly occasional poem about the death of the Ptolemaic queen Arsinoe II, which has survived in fragments on a Berlin papyrus. It offers a new critical edition based on the autopsy of the original as well as a detailed line-by-line commentary, in which a holistic reconstruction of the mourning poem is endeavoured beyond linguistic details. The extensive introduction determines the genre and position of the poem in the Callimachean oeuvre and, in connection with this, illuminates the broad field of allusion in the background. This leads to a synoptic treatment of the tradition of Greek rulers' eulogies. The Ektheosis plays a key role in this: by surveying the entirety of the lines of tradition from his Alexandrian perspective and providing decisive impulses for future times, Callimachos offers an overview of the history of the genre. This makes the book not least a study of the (contemporary) political poetry of the Greeks in relation to rulers.