CICERO AS A HELLENISTIC POET

There is a general consensus that as a young man Cicero embraced the poetics that we associate with Catullus and his contemporaries, the poets whom it is convenient to style neoterics. The common flaw in these approaches to Ciceros poetic career is a failure to distinguish between the influence of Hellenistic poetry, which had been constant since the earliest attested stages of Latin literature, and the assertion of a poetics associated with Callimachus: the two are not identical.