Apollonius of Rhodes

Apollonius flourished in the first half of the 3rd century BC, serving as scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria under the Ptolemies. His shorter poems traced the foundations of cities like Alexandria and Cnidus, subjects that flattered his royal patrons. The Argonautica was both innovative and rooted in tradition, offering a new kind of epic for a new kind of Greece - Hellenistic, literate, self-conscious. Modern scholars have debated a supposed literary feud with fellow librarian-poet Callimachus, though almost no evidence supports it and almost nothing is known about Apollonius himself, including whether he had any real tie to Rhodes. Once dismissed as a Homer imitator, he's now read as a poet writing at a singular hinge in literary history, heir to centuries of verse and architect of what came after.