BACK TO THE FUTURE

The avant-garde writers of the Hellenistic period demonstrate an acute sense of literary tradition. In the previous chapter we have already seen some of the ways in which Theocritus develops his distinctive fragmented and polyphonous voice in relation to the past. In the programmatic narrative of Idyll 7, the search for an exemplary voice recedes through a series of lost poets' songs towards an always already distanced model of excellence. So in Idyll 11, the much-discussed Hellenistic technique of reversing and restructuring the phraseology of earlier writing finds a parallel in the appropriation and manipulation of a Homeric figure: the Cyclops is taken back to a green and loving youth, back to a time before Homer's writing of him as a paradigm of monstrous brutality. Indeed, in Hellenistic poetry we see again and again a search for an original and originating moment in the past ‘before Homer wrote’. In part, this move can be seen as a response to an awareness of the modern poet's epigonal status – an awareness of what Walter Jackson Bate (1970) calls ‘The Burden of the Past’. Like Seferis, the Hellenistic poet can truly say ‘I awoke with this marble head in my hands.’ The awareness of the effects of the monuments of the past on the possibilities of the creative act are not limited in the ancient world to the Hellenistic writers, for sure, but writing from within the archive – the Hellenistic condition ἐν βύβλοις, ‘amid the books’ – provides a heightened perception and concern that ‘the word is not his own word only, but has whored with many before him’.