If lines 3-5 in the prologue to Callimachus ' « Aetia » are supposed to report the Telchines ' words, it is probable that Callimachus ' adversaries were concerned neither (or not only) with long hexameter poems, nor with erotic/ mythological elegies, but rather with historical/ encomiastic poems in elegiac couplets.
Identifiable remains of Hellenistic examples of this genre are meager.
The fragment Suppl. Hell. 958 (P.Hamb. 312 inv. 381) represents the only known example from the early Hellenistic period of an encomiastic composition in elegiacs, outside the epigrammatic genre, with a military subject.
