Apollonius of Rhodes' most reliable information is largely drawn from their own works. Once considered a mere imitator of Homer, his reputation has been enhanced by recent studies, with an emphasis on the special writing characteristics of Hellenistic poets as scholarly heirs of a long literary tradition at a unique time in history.
Apollonius was among the foremost Homeric scholars in the Alexandrian period. He wrote the period's 1st scholarly monograph on Homer, critical of the editions of the Illiad and Odyssey published by Zenodotus, his predecessor as head of the Library of Alexandria. Argonautica seems to have been written partly as an experimental means of communicating his own researches into Homer's poetry. He has been credited with scholarly prose works on Archilochus and on problems in Hesiod. He is also considered to be one of the period's most important authors on geography, though approaching the subject differently from Eratosthenes, his successor at the library and a radical critic of Homer's geography. It was a time when the accumulation of scientific knowledge was enabling advances in geographical studies, as represented by the activities of Timosthenes, a Ptolemaic admiral and a prolific author. Apollonius set out to integrate new understandings of the Physical World with the mythical geography of tradition and his Argonautica was, in that sense, a didactic epic on geography without detracting from its merits as poetry.
Apollonius was a student of the poet and scholar Callimachus. He instructed Apollonius in rhetoric.
Callimachus was a native of the Greek Colony of Cyrene, Libya, and was of Libyan Greek ancestry. He was born and raised in Cyrene, as a member of a distinguished family. His parents being Mesatme and Battus, descendants of the !st Greek King of Cyrene, Battus I. Calimachus claimed to be a descendant of the Battiad Dynasty, the Libyan Greek monarchs that ruled Cyrenaica for 8 generations and the 1st Greek Royal family to have reigned in Africa. He was named after his grandfather, an elder Callimachus, who was highly regarded by the Cyrenaean citizens and had served as a general.
Callimachus was a noted poet, critic, and scholar at the library of Alexandria and enjoyed the patronage of the Egyptian-Greek Pharaohs Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and Ptolemy III Euergetes. Elitist and erudite, claiming to "abhor all common things," he is best known for his short poems and epigrams. He was responsible for producing a bibliographic survey based upon the contents of the Library.
In the prologue Aetia ("Causes"), he claims that Apollo visited him and admonished him to "fatten his flocks, but to keep his muse slender," a clear indication of his choice of carefully crafted and allusive material. Another saying attributed to him is:"Big Book, Big Evil."He often attacked long, old-fashioned poetry. He urged poets to "drive their wagons on untrodden fields," rather than following in the well worn tracks of Homer, idealizing a brief form of poetry, yet carefully formed and worded, a style at which he excelled. Calimachus often wrote poems in praise of his royal patrons (Ptolemy II Philadelphus).
Callimachus married the daughter of a Greek man called Euphrates who came from Syracuse. It is unknown if they had children. He had a sister called Megatime. She married a Cyrenaean man called Stasenorus to whom she bore a son, Callimachus, the Younger as to distinguish him from his maternal uncle. This boy also became a poet, author of "The Island."
Due to Callimachus' strong stance against the epic, he and his younger student Apollonius of Rhodes, who favored epic and wrote the Argonautica, had a long and bitter feud, trading barbed comments, insults and attacks for over 30 years.
The epithet Rhodes indicates that Apollonius had some kind of association with the island of that name.
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