Emerging from a tradition of writing going back to the poems of Homer, the Aetia provides the earliest source for almost every myth it relates.

In a variation on a famous scene from Hesiod's Theogony, the young poet interrogates the goddesses about the origins of unusual present day customs.

[10] The only aetiology commonly assumed to have been placed in the book are the stories Busiris, king of Egypt, and Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, who were known for their excessive cruelty.

Composed in the style of a Pindaric Ode, the self-contained poem celebrates queen Berenice's victory in the Nemean Games.

Books 3 and 4, by contrast, mention queen Berenice II of Egypt, which means that at least part of the work must have been composed around the time of her accession in the 246 BC.

Attempting to reconcile these disparate dates, scholars have suggested that the poem's first half was written at an earlier stage of the poet's life and that the last two books were added during the reign of Berenice II.

[6] Hellenist Annette Harder, on the other hand, writes that Callimachus began working on the Aetia in his youth and kept developing its content throughout his life.

[17] Having been read widely during the Roman Empire, the Aetia was still in circulation during the transition to the Early Middle Ages: the epistolographer Aristaenetus, the poet Nonnus and the monk Marianus of Auxerre show their familiarity with the text around the year 500 AD.

The poem is thought to have been available during the Byzantine Empire, with 12th-century scholar Eustathius of Thessalonica being the last person to display first hand knowledge of its content.

Announcing his attention to be a "Roman Callimachus" in the prologue to his fourth book, the elegist Propertius introduced aetiological material evoking the story of Acontius and Cydippe into his love poems.

[23] The Fasti, a didactic poem about the Roman calendar by Ovid, has, in the words of classicist Alessandro Barchiesi, "the strongest claim to be a full-scale imitation of the Aetia".

Catullus's composition, in turn, provided inspiration for the narrative poem The Rape of the Lock, published by the English poet Alexander Pope in 1712.

[26] Latinist Richard F. Thomas, in an article surveying its influence on Roman poetry, describes the Aetia as the "most important poem of the most influential Alexandrian poet".