Callimachus (ca. 305–240 BCE) is the chief poet of the Hellenistic era. A native of Cyrene in Libya, he spent his career at Alexandria in the court of Ptolemy (both Soter and Euergetes), where he worked as a librarian and produced, among other works of scholarship, a 120-book bibliography of the entire Alexandrian library called the Pinakes. A prolific writer, he composed volumes of hymns, epigrams, iambus, lyric, and mini-epic (epyllion), but his most famous work was the Aetia, which describes the origins of local myths and rituals. Save for the Hymns and Epigrams, his poems survive only in tatters, but the sheer quantity of papyrus fragments attests to his popularity in Greece and Egypt from the third century BCE to the second century CE.