Adrian Hollis's second edition of Callimachus' Hecale includes an English translation of the original Greek text. Twenty years after the first edition appeared in 1990, close study of the Byzantine poets, scholars, and clerics who knew Callimachus' poem intimately has allowed significant progress in our understanding of the poem. Equally valuable are two Byzantine lexicons which clearly had access to an ancient commentary on the Hecale; an Attic vase, which provides our first artistic representation of the myth; and an inscribed Greek elegy from Kandahar, which suggests that Callimachus' `miniature epic' was known to a Greek poet working in that remote bastion of Hellenism - additional proof of the poet's importance within Hellenistic culture.
