σικχαίνω πάντα τὰ δημόσια, ‘I loathe everything to do with The People’, writes Callimachus, and this (public) turning away from the public poetry of the fifth century is a stance, a gesture, repeated in a multiformity of guises throughout the texts of the Hellenistic period. Although the practices of literary production, performance and circulation are known in even less detail for this period than for the fifth century (and many questions about, say, the constitution of the public of Hellenistic literature are simply not answerable with any security), none the less there are much discussed and highly significant shifts both in the conditions of literary production and in the presentation of the poet's voice which require some brief introductory remarks.

While in the fifth century ‘citizenship’ is the sign through which the boundaries of the racial, cultural, economic group are articulated, in the Hellenistic writers a sense of community, a sense of to whom poetry is addressed and from what position poetry is produced, is quite differently formulated and contested. The poet's gesture of withdrawal from the persona of the public sophos, who speaks out to the citizen body, finds an institutional analogue in the Mouseion and Library in Alexandria (from where much of the poetry I shall be discussing in this and the next chapter is written).