Seeing double : intercultural poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria

When, in the third century BCE, the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people.

Offering an expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule.

Her work positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically and imaginatively.