A large proportion of the Hellenistic texts we have looked at engage with major features of the narratorial voices of Archaic poetry. Callimachus' Hymns and Apollonius' Argonautica, for example, both experiment with Archaic moralising. Hellenistic poets take up and transform these features to create effects and narratorial personas which are often very different from their Archaic models. The Argonautica portrays its narrator as concerned about the propriety of his narrative, as are the narrators of the Works and Days or Olympian 1, but this is part of a coordinated portrayal of a narrator undergoing a progressive decline in self-confidence and autonomy, eventually unable to exclude inappropriate material from his own narrative. This use of a prominent narrator reminiscent of the narrators of Archaic didactic, monody, iambos and Pindaric epinician underlines the importance of texts other than Homer and genres other than hexameter epic, at least as models to adapt and exploit, in the Hellenistic period.

Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius engage with such Archaic texts at a variety of levels. Certain Hellenistic poems are clearly related to particular Archaic texts which they vary and adapt. Theocritus' Idyll 24 transforms into a domesticated ‘epic’ the pacy, selective narrative of Nemean 1. Theocritus reduces the variation of narrative pace in the Pindaric poem, and also the prominence of the narrator, to create a poem with a much more ‘epic’ veneer than its Archaic model, but also one which juxtaposes internal and external audiences in a very ‘Hellenistic’ manner.