When the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt in the third century B.C.E., they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and 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 successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. Seeing Double suggests that the Alexandrian poets were image makers for the Ptolemaic court, and that their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support no subvert the status quo but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively recreated, examined, and critiqued. Through her nuanced readings, Stephens shows how the Alexandrian poets experimented by adapting existing Greek mythological and historical models to articulate a novel kind of kingship-a kingship no longer of the upper and lower Nile but of an interconnected Greek and Egyptian culture.
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