Unitarian poetic program and episodic narratives in the works of Callimachus.

While in the History of Classical Scholarship (1968) Rudolph Pfeiffer unambiguously defined Callimachus and his followers “ostentatiously anti-Aristotelian”, recent scholarship has reassessed the connection between Alexandrian scholarship and Aristotelian approach to reality. In the last decades the presumed “quarrel between Callimachus and Apollonius” over poetic genres, especially epic, has also been reconsidered. The paper aims to explore, with particular focus on the works of Callimachus (especially the Aitia, οὐχ ἓν ἄεισμα διηνεκές F 1,3 Pfeiffer), if and how the Alexandrian poetry of the Hellenistic age could relate with Aristotle’s reflection on unity and continuity of poetry in Poetics 9, and how the poetic genres examined by the philosopher developed in 3rd century Ptolemaic Alexandria.