Note 2 — THE TRANSLATOR’S EPILOGUE

He completed his task, and gave a public reading of his epic, probably in the lecture-hall of the Museum. Its reception was a bitter disappointment for him. The audience took its cue from the all-powerful President; and before the storm of impatient interruptions, angry disapproval and contemptuous laughter the poor lad—he was not twenty—broke down, ‘flushing crimson with mortification,’ as the old Greek biographer graphically records. He recognised only too clearly who had taken the lead in crushing him, and tried to retaliate in satirical verse and stinging epigram. But it is given to few to be as effective with this weapon as Dryden or Byron, and Apollonius found that his enemy’s artillery, discharged as it was from the vantage-ground of social influence and official authority, overmatched his own. Callimachus was not ashamed to put forth all his strength against his young and friendless opponent; and his bitter satire, The Ibis,[2] seems to have displayed no little ability and power of invective. It long survived the occasion for which it was written, and must have been, in its kind, of some merit, since, personal and local though it was, its celebrity lasted till the Augustan age of Rome. Ovid took it as his model in his satirical poem of the same name.