Callimachus (fl. 4th century BC), admired by Catullus, Ovid and Propertius, was the author of some 800 books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the Greek writers whose works were to be found in the famous library of Alexandria. Of his own work, only six hymns, 64 epigrams, the fragment of an epic, and a description of the method he employed to compile his catalogue, survive today. Harvey’s Oxford Companion to Classical Literature also tells us that ‘his is the proverbial saying, “mega biblion, mega kakon” ’, which means, if my rusty Greek has not seized up completely, ‘big book, big bad’, a sentiment to which reviewers, confronted by an 800-page biography, may often give wholehearted assent.
The fate of his works reminds us that oblivion is the lot of most books, and that authors who hope for literary immortality are usually disappointed. Publishers often used to employ the back pages of books to advertise their other publications, and few authors can read without a sinking heart the praise accorded to novels which are now quite forgotten and writers of whom they have never heard.
Samuel Johnson took a characteristically robust view:
No Place affords a more striking Conviction of the Vanity of human Hopes, than a publick Library … Of the innumerable Authors whose Performances are thus treasured up in magnificent Obscurity, most are undoubtedly forgotten, because they have never deserved to be remembered, and owed the Honours which they once obtained, not to Judgement or to Genius, to Labour or to Art, but to the Prejudice of Faction, the Stratagems of Intrigue, or the Servility of Adulation.
‘Ouch!’ may be the response to this statement of a melancholy truth, followed by the malicious listing of colleagues and rivals (for all colleagues are also rivals) who owe their success today to just such prejudice, stratagems and servility.
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