Callimachus' famous epigram is a studious and poignant reflection on the possibility of a kind of personal immortality through the survival of one's literary work. The message at first seems familiar and consoling: Heraclitus is dead, but no matter, his works live on and assure him a kind of afterlife. Contrasts between literature and life structure the poem. The physical separation of friends in the real world, Callimachus in Alexandria, Heraclitus, his Halicarnassian friend, dead someplace far away, is overcome by the fiction of literary address as the poet seems to speak to his dead friend, just as his poems, his “nightingales,” will speak to all those addressees that Heraclitus will never know in the eternal present of poetic communication.