SOURCE: “Seeing and Feeling: Representation in Two Poems of Theocritus,” in Classical Philology, Vol. 80, No. 1, January, 1985, pp. 1-19.

[In the following essay, Walsh studies “Idyll 1” and “Idyll 7” for what they reveal about Theocritus's attempts to portray certain aspects of character.]

As soon as poets begin to speak, at the end of the fifth century, about their skill at capturing the familiar look of things,¹ others begin to ask questions about the limits of this endeavor. First, they ask technical questions, like the one posed in Aristophanes' Frogs: can the naturalistic manner adequately represent every kind of object? (According to “Aeschylus” in this play, there is a moral kind of object that literal images of life do not capture.) Later, Plato suggests that some things cannot be represented directly by any manner of verbal or visual art. Theocritus has similar concerns, partly technical and partly philosophical, about the peculiar status of human beings as objects of representation. He sets human beings against a background of inhuman things, and he distinguishes consciously between the representation of one and the other.

Theocritus also distinguishes between different levels in the representation of human beings. There is a category of feeling (Aristotle would call it pathos) that can be made recognizable in lifelike representation because its causes are visible and because it produces visible, physical symptoms; its primary elements are pleasure and pain.² A man's pathos, the way he responds to circumstances with pleasure or pain, may serve in turn as a sign of something deeper, his moral disposition or his character (Aristotle would call this ēthos), which is not itself accessible to observation.³ The first step away from the visible is easily made. Pathos seems bound to its causes and symptoms by natural laws, and so the inferences required to detect it also seem natural; one recognizes another man's pathos instinctively, without conscious thought. The next step, inferring another man's character, is more difficult because character is not wholly natural. Social custom helps to form it, for example, in variable and unpredictable ways. Therefore, the signs of ēthos seem less natural and clear than the signs of pathos. When someone tries to put his ēthos into speech, his words may seem ambiguous, or empty and conventional; the unnatural part of ēthos expresses itself in an arbitrary language.

Human beings, in Theocritus' poetry, may stand out more or less sharply from the background of inhuman, natural things according to the level at which they are represented. When they display their pathos, they are represented in the same way as the landscape, as if equally simple and visible. One attends to them casually, as if they were part of the landscape, off-center, not worth thinking about. When Theocritus' people attempt to display their ēthos, on the other hand, they loom larger in the foreground, and the landscape recedes; it becomes difficult to connect the human figure with any sort of natural context. Between these two extreme kinds of representation, there are others, less easily defined. “Idyll 1” gives us the extremes; more complicated kinds are found in “Idyll 7.”

“IDYLL 1”

Since this poem is constructed entirely as a dialogue between two rustics, Theocritus never describes its physical setting directly. The landscape is a variable, and “nature” seems to change its meaning as a function of the speaker's rhetoric. The speaker's relationship to the observed, natural world is most problematic in the case of Thyrsis, not only when he speaks for himself but also when he impersonates Daphnis, the poet-hero of his song. Daphnis' rhetoric is an extension of his own.

According to Thyrsis, the music of the syrinx is like⁴ the “tune” a pinetree “whispers” (1-2); human art and inhuman nature, he suggests, need not significantly differ. The same idea expressed with greater intensity produces the pathetic fallacy,⁵ which figures prominently in the narrative part of Thyrsis' song (71-72, 75-76). …

The beasts mourn, apparently, because they have enjoyed Daphnis' art; his singing and syrinx-playing touch an aesthetic sensibility that is common to men and animals. What Thyrsis expresses in conversation as a metaphor (the pinetree's “music”) becomes literal truth in his song (the beasts actually like poetry).

The next step in this series changes the pattern, however. The voice of Thyrsis as speaker and singer is replaced by that of Daphnis, whom Thyrsis now quotes; the pathetic fallacy is followed by an adynaton; and the harmony of man and nature, first metaphorical, then literal, now turns counterfactual and absurd. Daphnis demands that nature violate itself to mark his death (132-36): thorns should bear violets, the deer should bite the dogs, and the pinetree, which began by making music, should now produce pears. Since these things are impossible, Daphnis' point must be that there are limits to the harmony of man and nature. He finds his death nonsensical, and he wants plants and animals to become nonsensical, too, as if to make good the promise of fellow-feeling implicit in the pathetic fallacy. It turns out that only men can suffer nonsense. Nature, then, finishes as something alien and exterior in the rhetoric of Thyrsis, and there is nothing in the visible world like Daphnis' private dismay.

This conclusion follows from the way Thyrsis began in equating human and natural beauty: nature seems unresponsive because it was expected to respond too much, and the end of Thyrsis' song exposes the inaccuracy of his initial metaphor.⁶ Thyrsis' style has an “affected,” ambitiously literary quality.⁷ It is not surprising, then, that Thyrsis belongs to a larger world of singing contests. Even his present song about Daphnis competes with an earlier version, which he performed in competition with someone named Chromis (23-24). The song begins with the announcement that marks its public origin: “I am Thyrsis, the one from Aetna …” (65). As his friend the goatherd understands, the beauty that Thyrsis' art produces can be distinguished from natural beauty—his song is “sweeter” than the waterfall's sound (7-8) and “better” than the cicada's (148)⁸—and he works according to a rhythm different from the landscape's. Thyrsis performs his song at noon, when everything natural rests, although Pan would punish any other sort of disturbance; apparently, his performance somehow bypasses the sleeping god. Instead, it places him in contact with remoter deities, the Muses (144-45) of classical poetry.

The “affected” literary language in which Thyrsis addresses the Muses works by saying something other than it means or else indicates its meaning with a silence. His language is “rhetorical” in the special sense of a rhetorical question. Daphnis, in Thyrsis' song, at first sits silently while others question him. He dramatizes his anger by way of a pretense that the questions asked him are all rhetorical, although some of them—those posed by sympathetic cowherds and shepherds—seem to be genuine requests for information. Then, Daphnis himself asks a series of rhetorical questions which receive no answer (100-102, 105). These are followed by an apostrophe to the beasts, the landscape, and the absent Pan (115-30), all of them silent and unresponsive; they are Daphnis' audience, never his interlocutors. Finally, there is the adynaton (132-36), which describes something unreal and impossible. Like Daphnis' silence and his questions, the adynaton expresses his indignation, and its way of signifying is rhetorical: although formally a prayer (“let everything change …”), it signifies the vanity of prayer, just as Daphnis' questions signify the vanity of answering.

This rhetorical way of speaking suggests that speech is incomplete, its meaning somewhere else, out of sight. The form of Thyrsis' song also locates meaning elsewhere, outside of itself; the song demands filling out, from the reader's literary knowledge or else from his imagination. It seems incomplete because it tells a fragment of a story and story-telling aims at a feeling of order and wholeness; one would never know or feel that something had been omitted from a descriptive speech like the goatherd's.⁹ Thyrsis' song submits to the regimen of story-telling: it has a clearly articulated structure, a beginning (marked by the first refrain, “Begin, dear Muses …,” 64), a middle (“Begin again …,” 95), and an end (“Cease, Muses …,” 127). As a story, according to Aristotelian notions, the song must complete itself by suggesting causes to explain pictured effects, but Thyrsis only hints at the facts and never displays them openly. One wants to know especially what lies behind Daphnis' argument with Aphrodite.

The sense of the story, however, depends upon something beyond factual circumstance: Daphnis' ēthos, his true character, has caused the present situation. Thyrsis describes a quiet time, evidently the aftermath of a crisis when reflection and habit dominate passion and impulse. This, as the example of Hellenistic painting suggests, is when ēthos can be most readily perceived.¹⁰Ethos is not a visible entity and so it cannot be pictured directly, but for some Hellenistic painters, communicating ēthos may have been the object of their art:¹¹ the most ambitious and the best representation of a human being would display not just actions or feelings of a given moment, but the abstraction that sums them up (ēthos in one of its senses, the pattern constituted by habitual, repeated actions),¹² and it would represent what explains them (ēthos in another sense, the moral faculty with which actions are chosen).¹³ An artist ambitious in this way might say that he was showing what men were (inside) rather than what they seemed (outside). Both aspects of the project—showing ēthos and showing a man's real nature—might be construed as a return to classical models.¹⁴ Aristotle saw little ēthos in the tragedy of his own time; and some painters in the fourth century were choosing, as a matter of principle, to represent “seeming” rather than “being.”¹⁵

Thyrsis is ambitious in this way, as in others. He has chosen to represent what cannot be directly represented, Daphnis' moral constitution, his sense of right and wrong. When Daphnis finally speaks, he speaks as if the words had been forced out of him from some private place which words could not adequately describe. Daphnis speaks rhetorically, in a language that does not mean what it says, as a way of circumventing this difficulty. He speaks rhetorically because he speaks morally, and most rhetorically with the adynaton, a figure that has no point except as a measure of his outraged moral feelings. (Justice, he seems to say, exists nowhere in the world outside, only within his own alienated consciousness.) Although Daphnis' rhetoric does not describe an object, it works as a measure of spiritual depth by way of its connotations: it brings a generalized memory of the great-souled heroes earlier poets used to celebrate, and it aims at evoking the feelings these poets taught their readers to feel.¹⁶ Daphnis speaks of himself, in the grand manner, as unlimited by death: his promise to be a “pain to Love” in Hades (103) sounds like an inversion of Achilles' promise to love the ghost of Patroclus; the adynaton sounds like any one of Achilles' deeply troubled, impatient prayers for justice and friendship.

“Idyll 1” also provides a model of another kind of speech, in which words seem more immediately attached to things than to verbal conventions; denotation takes precedence over connotation. This kind of speech tries to make pictures as if each word bore a visible copy of some particular object. The goatherd, who uses language in this way, scarcely counts as a speaker. He has no name. Thyrsis performs a song to display his art and to be honored for it, but the goatherd remains part of the “Idyll”'s frame, deflecting attention from himself to the center. His speech approaches the status of an art most closely when he describes the carved cup he has promised to Thyrsis in payment for a song, but the thing, he insists, is the marvel (56). The goatherd dissembles his skill by wrapping himself up in the role of admiring spectator. He wants his words to seem transparent, and he describes what he sees as if perception entailed no imaginative activity but was immediately and completely given by the thing itself. Thyrsis found “music” in nature, in the stirring leaves of the pinetree, but the goatherd finds none: falling water has only the neutral quality of “making sound.” …

The goatherd's denotative clarity is not diminished by the literary sources of his language.¹⁷ He is not a naive observer: when he sees what is supposed to be a real spring he may also think of other springs, some of them imaginary. The unmusical water in Theocritus recalls a scene described in the Odyssey, for example (17. 209-10). But even when it points toward absent or imaginary things along with present and real ones, the goatherd's speech is more definite than Thyrsis' poetry. Appreciating his allusion to Homer entails recalling Homer's words and then comparing Homer's words with the goatherd's.¹⁸ The allusive text's point consists in its likeness to and especially in its difference from a model;¹⁹ the point is lost, the author's conscious purpose mistaken, if a reader does not consciously distinguish one text from the other.²⁰ In Thyrsis' poem, on the other hand, the suffering of Daphnis evokes epic and tragic antecedents,²¹ but Thyrsis accomplishes this chiefly without alluding to particular sources like the goatherd. Daphnis' claim to heroic depth stands only as long as one refrains from comparing him consciously to Achilles or Hippolytus.²² Vagueness enhances the force of connotation in Thyrsis' poem; specificity is necessary to the goatherd's allusion.²³

The goatherd speaks in a relatively transparent way (if not naively) because he has chosen to represent something less esoteric than Daphnis' moral feeling. Three groups of figures have been carved in the cup he describes: two men “contending in speech” for a woman, an old man hauling in a net full of fish, and a young boy weaving a cricket-cage out of rushes, stalked by a pair of foxes who are “plundering” his vineyard and his lunchpail. All of these are easy to read, partly because all experience strong, simple feelings—the young men, love (37); the old man, eagerness and fatigue (40-41); the boy, delight (54).²⁴ Their feelings are mostly appetitive, so that human beings and foxes have the same degree of complexity. What one is told about their private experience (the old man's fatigue, for example) can also be publicly seen in physical symptoms (the bulging sinews in his neck, 43). Since the old man's symptoms are naturally caused by his effort, it seems safe to treat the phenomenon as an index of the experience, to infer the invisible from the visible. Thus, pathos emerges at the level of “likeness” (41 …).

Unlike ēthos, pathos can be represented without even hinting at a meaningful, well-shaped story.²⁵ One struggles to understand Daphnis' ēthos as one struggles to understand the connection between past, present, and future events in his life. Ethos might explain his actions, or provide the sense of wholeness that the bare narrative lacks. The figures described by the goatherd, on the other hand, are not engaged in the sort of action that makes a story, and one can see immediately as much as one will ever want to know about them. The old man will eat his fish. The woman will choose one man or the other, or she will wait for a third: there are no other possibilities worth considering. The boy in the vineyard will lose his meal to a fox, and the vineyard's owner might punish him for neglecting the vines, but there will be no lasting damage—the vines and the boy will continue to grow—and the next event in the boy's life will not follow from this one. (There might be repetition, another cricket-cage, more joy, another loss, but still no larger pattern of cause and consequence.) As the pictured effects can be isolated from earlier and later actions without loss of meaning, each of the pictures is independent of the rest. It is not possible to say, and it does not matter, how much space or time has been elided in representing them. The three scenes might all belong to the same moment in a single landscape, or they might not.²⁶

There are two reasons why the representation of pathos fits within the dimensions of a vignette. Pathos is normally brief and impulsive: since the young men themselves do not look beyond winning the woman, the picture of the young men suggests nothing beyond that point, and so it is bounded in time. The pictures are spatially bounded for another reason. There is no story to connect the three scenes juxtaposed within the cup, and none can be imagined, because even if they belonged unambiguously to the same moment the people pictured in these scenes would seem no less separate. The boy, the young men, and the old fisherman are all wholly absorbed in what they do and unconscious of their surroundings. (The foxes can fill their stomachs because the boy has lost himself in play.) Their absorption guarantees that the viewer need not look elsewhere for the meaning of what he sees. They act without reference to anything beyond themselves, and so their significance is contained by their present activity.

Pathos produces a different sort of meaning from Thyrsis' shapely, organic account of ēthos. Although the scenes in the cup cannot be coordinated syntactically to make a story, they can be compared as members of the same class or paradigm, and although they do not uncover hidden depths they point to general truths about men seen in public.²⁷ Almost by definition, pathos is a generic rather than a specific quality of human beings, something they share in spite of their thoughts or choices. The figures in the cup are supposed to be particular human beings, but they are also types or examples which point to universal categories of feeling. Therefore, they have no names, like the goatherd who describes them. (As Daphnis struggles to express his ēthos, on the other hand, he names himself six times,²⁸ as if defending his identity against leveling comparison.) In this way, the figures in the cup invite quasi-allegorical interpretation: they are Childhood (the time before sexuality), Youth (the time of courtship), and Age (the time when sexuality has become less important than survival), and their activities—play, love, work—stand for everything that human beings can do.²⁹ The kind of sense these things make, unlike the ethical sense of Daphnis' story, does not have to be laboriously decoded. Childhood is universal, but it is also (for the goatherd) concrete, fully embodied in visible representation. The cup's maker is not supposed to have added anything to what was there, certainly not meaning: like the goatherd and the carved figures, the carver is anonymous, not worth thinking about as a special person with a special attitude. In any case, all the goatherd sees is the “wonderful sight” … of the object, the way it looks, which “would cause amazement” (56 …). The cup is “amazing” because it is uncannily accurate, a perfect mirror of the world.³⁰

Thyrsis is an ambitious, quasi-classical poet who performs for an audience of Muses (144-45); his language calls attention to itself because it connotes other uses of language and also because it does not refer to real, visible things. The goatherd is more modest and natural, and his language is only a way of pointing or picturing. Thyrsis' art and the goatherd's directness suit the objects of their attention: on the one hand, ēthos, the particular, abiding, and invisible aspect of human beings; on the other, pathos, the general, impulsive, and visible. Ethos is tied to the story, and the story's meaning is discovered (or not) through inference and imagination. Pathos can be displayed in the vignette. Here, one discovers meaning by observing and classifying what one observes, for the meaning of the vignette is only a matter of likeness, the picture's likeness to a class of ordinary, familiar things, and the likeness that unites members of the class—all children playing, all men working. (Of course, the three pictures taken together also make a class, all human activities, or the ages of man.)

Each of these two kinds of representation has its characteristic weakness, a liability to one sort of reduction or another. Thyrsis' poem dissolves in self-consciousness and theatricality. Since he has been required by the goatherd to reproduce or equal his earlier performance of the Daphnis-song, Thyrsis must now become, in memory and anticipation, his own audience, remembering what he sang before and matching every word he plans to sing against an authoritative original. (Thus, he finds himself in the predicament of all Hellenistic artists, who work in the shadow of classical authority.) As Thyrsis imitates himself, he impersonates Daphnis. He presents the hero from within by placing himself within the hero and speaking with Daphnis' voice. Daphnis, however, is also a poet and an actor. When he names himself (“I am that Daphnis who herded cows …,” 120) he claims recognition from an audience of future generations in the same way that Thyrsis claims credit from the goatherd (“I am Thyrsis from Aetna, and Thyrsis' voice is sweet …,” 65). What Thyrsis uncovers as he tries to reach the hidden parts of Daphnis' “tragic” consciousness is a public performance, a substitute for the inner man. It is made out of literary materials, the behavior of heroes in classical poetry, and it is directed chiefly toward consumers of poetry: when Daphnis pretends to address the landscape, which does not hear him, he really speaks to us. Even his silence seems theatrical, a way of miming significance, the trick for which Aeschylus was famous.³¹

The Hellenistic artists who chose to represent “seeming” rather than “being” may have felt what one feels in Thyrsis' song, the falseness attached to the old ambition to make a man's true character visible. In all forms of art, perhaps as a remedy for the unsettling suspicion that human realities are internal and concealed, vulgar Hellenistic taste requires convincing illusion, a picture that looks “actual” and “alive”.³² To defeat the self-consciousness that falsifies representation of human behavior, the artist, notoriously, might make the viewer feel like a voyeur.³³

The absorption of the figures carved in the goatherd's cup is their most important quality: it guarantees their unconsciousness of observation and protects them from Daphnis' theatricality. (They share this virtue with other subjects favored by Hellenistic artists—men and women drunk or sleeping, for example.) The goatherd's description, like Thyrsis' song, is twice removed from life, but the feeling of reality is not attenuated here as with the song's multiple impersonations. Instead, the viewer's objectivity is reinforced: the cup makes the scene it represents more solid and tangible than a scene observed firsthand; the cup is simply a thing, unresponsive to the viewer, and so it can be observed more accurately than living people.

The cup in which the figures are carved is also a thing in daily use. As soon as Thyrsis takes it from the goatherd, he means to fill it with goats-milk; then, the carved interior surface will disappear, and objective representation will become nothing more or less than an object (143-51). The cup's fragrance gives it value as an object, apart from its decorations, and the fragrance comes naturally from the newly carved wood (28), liberated by the craftsman but not created by him. Thyrsis' manner of representation seems empty and insubstantial, for it has no “objects” except other representations; solid things dissolve, and all that remains is the image of them. In the goatherd's sort of art, on the other hand, the image is obscured until there is nothing left but a thing.³⁴

When Daphnis “went to the stream and the current washed over him” (140-41), he was perhaps assimilated by the water and transformed, having lost his solid, visible matter as he “pined away/turned liquid” … with grief.³⁵ The stream he joined would be the literary tradition in which he has formed his notion of himself, and the water in the stream—conventionally, the source of inspiration for poets³⁶—would be the stuff of future songs like the song of Thyrsis. Daphnis, like his too-conscious art, thus becomes hard to grasp, insubstantial.³⁷ If the goatherd gets his wish (146-48), on the other hand, Thyrsis will be called back to the enjoyment of physical pleasures and in this way solidified; but then he must fall silent, his poetry set aside for a time, while his mouth is filled with honey and figs.³⁸ According to Daphnis' way of thinking, poets ought to go hungry, and they are most poetic when they die. The goatherd would prefer to see them live.

“IDYLL 7”

For Lycidas, one of the two poets whose poems are contained within this “Idyll,” the problem of interchanging material things with the products of human art has been solved.³⁹ In singing his own song, he imagines himself as the auditor of two others—first, an account of Daphnis' deliquescence (here, compared to the snow's melting), which suggests the artist's loss of solid form as he converts himself into pure representation; then, an account of the salvation of Comatas, a poet whose art miraculously brings him sustenance, almost out of thin air.⁴⁰ In the miracle of Comatas, representation acquires solidity, and the products of mind become food for the body.

Comatas has been shut up in a box by an intemperate king, and the form of his punishment, although his offense is not named, apparently reflects the king's jealous suspicion that poets think themselves too fine to acknowledge worldly authority.⁴¹ Thus, the king might say, let Comatas live locked away in a world of his own, and so discover whether he does or does not need what the king's world offers. The story shows, however, that Comatas does not need the king: because “the Muse poured sweet nectar on his lips” (82), bees bring him honey in the chest, and so he lives through the season, “suffering pleasantly” (83). Although the Muse's nectar must be metaphorical, a figure for his singer's gift, metaphor here conjures up actuality, and one kind of sweetness, immaterial and artistic, is transformed easily into another, material and natural. The song of Comatas (89 …) becomes palpable in the honey brought by bees (84 …).⁴²

This transformation reverses the process of Daphnis' melting with which it is paired. Poetry, then, may be converted into, just as it is produced from, the physical substance of men. If the latter process works, so does the former; neither is more miraculous than the other.

The story of Comatas sums up Lycidas' whole song, and the song as a whole, like the story of Comatas, is concerned with the problematic of “Idyll 1.” Lycidas aligns himself with Thyrsis. He loves the Daphnis-song, and his brief reference to it is composed in an elegant, deliberately elaborate style, like the version Thyrsis performs. There is the same sort of pathetic fallacy, and the same tendency toward rhetorical expansion, so that the picture of Daphnis' fate is made by way of simile to extend from Sicily as far as the Caucasus (73-77). There is also artificial word-order of a kind that Thyrsis does not attempt (a noun phrase divided across the length of an entire verse, 75).⁴³ Lycidas admits that he has “toiled” over his song (51);⁴⁴ he has given up the pretense of bucolic naivety.

Lycidas' poetry seems less natural than the poetry of Thyrsis because it makes more visible the common justification of both. The stories of transformation narrated in Lycidas' favorite songs dramatize the principles according to which he practices his own art, an art wholly governed by the poet's sympathetic imagination, insulated and self-sufficient like Comatas in his box. Lycidas frames his poem in such a way that he himself becomes its chief auditor, and he finishes by consuming nothing but what he produces on his own. The poem is a cure for the poet's desire, like the song Polyphemus sings in “Idyll 11,” and it works as a cure becuase (unlike Polyphemus' song)⁴⁵ it takes the absent lover's place in the poet's heart. Lycidas is sustained in isolation, like Comatas, by the power of art.

Lycidas describes a time following the enjoyment of love, a time when he can accept his lover's absence because he will have acquired a memory of pleasure to savor and celebrate. Since the lover has so far rejected him, his memory of pleasure is presently only an imagined memory, of course. But if memory consoles, as in Sappho's propemptikon,⁴⁶ why not an imagined memory, in the propemptikon Lycidas composes? If one mental phenomenon can substitute for the lover's presence, why not the other? Lycidas extends by one step the principle contained in Sappho's poem. Apparently, pleasure does not diminish as its focal point in the physical world recedes more distantly from view.

Thus, Lycidas happily contemplates a series of good things which lead him farther and farther from the immediate present until he forgets the boy with whom his poem began.⁴⁷ First, at an imagined celebration of the pleasures he hopes he will someday have had in love, he will enjoy warm food and wine. The wine-cup he presses to his lips will be his lover, his drinking a kiss (69-70): (The double quality of this action, half mental [remembering], half … physical [drinking], is matched by the ambiguity of the syntax: it is unclear whether drinking or memory is “tender” and “gentle.”) Then, instead of love (a physical blessing), or food, drink, and the memory of love (the physical united with the mental), Lycidas will enjoy wholly mental pleasures, a song about Daphnis and another about Comatas. Following this last substitution, the boy Lycidas loves need not be mentioned again, because Lycidas' poetry now sustains him.⁴⁸ His own little song (51) has turned into the song he imagines hearing about Comatas, and then it turns into a song Comatas himself might have sung for him if only their lives had overlapped. Lycidas wishes he could enjoy remembering this song, just as he wished to remember having enjoyed the pleasures of love. Having departed in an instant from present reality, Lycidas now moves even more easily from one fantasy to another.

The distinctions between things are overshadowed for Lycidas by aesthetic likeness: wine and memory are essentially similar because they are both pleasant. It does not matter to him that wine is a product of nature physically present to the one who drinks and memory a feeling derived from the past, constituted only by the thought of a man remembering. Like Thyrsis, who finds the same “sweet” quality in music and in a wind passing through the trees (“Idyll 1.” 1-2), Lycidas looks for sweetness everywhere, not only in Comatas' music (89) but even in the fragrant cedar chest (81), his prison.⁴⁹ Lycidas would probably agree with the Epicurean notion that all pleasures are the same, differing only with respect to intensity and the organs of sense affected.⁵⁰ Of course, the likeness of memory and wine as sources of pleasure emerges only at the moment of enjoyment, in the experience of Lycidas himself. The likeness will not necessarily be seen by others, because for others the category of pleasant things may be differently constituted. Other people cannot, in any case, share Lycidas' memories, and so they have no clue to his experience of wine if wine for him is a way of remembering his lover. Thus, like Thyrsis in “Idyll 1,” Lycidas sets himself the task of demonstrating something private, an experience with which his audience must sympathize to understand.

It should be easier to understand Lycidas, however. When Thyrsis tries to speak for Daphnis in “Idyll 1,” his words are made to seem inadequate, even an obstacle to understanding, because there is a hidden presence, something mysterious and abstract within the hero that constitutes the meaning of his story. Language becomes opaque—it is noticeable as a thing apart from its referent—because it points at something it cannot make visible. What Lycidas aims at in “Idyll 7” lies somewhere short of Daphnis' ēthos, his ineffable alienated consciousness. Lycidas' object is closer to pathos, the strong, visibly marked sensations of the figures carved in the goatherd's cup.⁵¹ Even the enforced privacy of Comatas in the darkness of his box can be penetrated more readily than Daphnis' ēthos, if one is asked simply to imagine the sweet fragrance of cedar (81) or the pleasures of a diet composed of nothing but honey (83-85). Lycidas has another advantage over Thyrsis in representing human beings. Daphnis' ēthos presumably has some sort of reality outside of the rhetoric with which Thyrsis attempts to evoke it; the object, however immaterial or inscrutable, provides the occasion for its representation. Lycidas' imagined experience, on the other hand, is created by his rhetoric:⁵² he has no memory of love, not even an imagined memory, except to the extent that his description of it makes it real for him. To that extent, it is also real for his audience, and it can be fully represented because it has no other, extra sort of reality. Having made himself an auditor of his own song so that the song can cure his desire, Lycidas has found a way to place his audience in the same position as himself. The audience forms a picture of the imaginary feast, and even, perhaps, the pictures of remembered love, as easily as Lycidas himself, for it shares the primary data which produce these pictures, the words of Lycidas' song.⁵³ What he describes is not hidden behind or beyond his words. Since he creates his memories in the act of describing them, they seem to lie no deeper within the speaker than his own speaking voice.

In Lycidas' “tender” vision of imagined pleasure (69-70), there seems to be nothing like perspective, no sense of depth or distance: there is no difference between one viewer's way of seeing and another's, or at least none that matters (the poem's success depends upon the auditor's imaginative sympathy), and no difference between various objects of perception, or none that matters (so that one pleasure can take the place of another, and distant pleasure remembered or anticipated can obscure the sense of present need). Simichidas, the second poet of “Idyll 7,” defines things according to qualities other than their ability to please,⁵⁴ qualities that he would probably claim inhere in things rather than in people who perceive them. Because his way of defining things is different from Lycidas', so are his results. He would probably deny, for example, that what counts in defining a thing can be simulated by human imagination, and he would deny that a correct perception of things can be shared through private sympathies.⁵⁵ There are no miraculous transformations in Simichidas' poem; he aims at marking distinctions rather than likenesses, and hierarchy rather than equality.⁵⁶ This process requires a clash of visions, the perspective obtained by dividing the outside view from the inside. Describing a friend's passion, he observes chiefly that it looks wrong: the beloved boy is losing his beauty (121 …). This is a truth derived from hostile outsiders, women who compete with pretty boys. Lycidas, on the other hand, cares only about his own perceptions, and these are governed by feeling, not by the look of things, so that he never needs to describe the boy he loves or characterize his appearance.

Examined a little more closely, Simichidas' posture betrays some complexity. He presents himself first as a materialist, marking his difference from Lycidas with an echo of Lycidas' poem. Lycidas was satisfied with “pressing” (70 …) a cup to his lips, “softly” (or “tenderly,” …) enjoying the memory of love. Simichidas' friend Aratus suffers from a visceral passion (99 …) for some boy, and so he prays that Pan will give Aratus what he wants, pressing (104 …) the boy's body into his arms; the boy is identified tentatively as Philinus, “the soft one” (105 …). Memory, apparently, would not qualify as a satisfaction according to Simichidas, perhaps because his own feelings of desire are goatlike, at least in magnitude: he loves Myrto “as much as goats love the spring” (97). But when Simichidas looks for “nobility” in people and poetry (4, 12, 39-40, 99-101; 92), a quality ambiguously related to material reality, his desire seems to exceed the thing itself. (Lycidas' taste for “sweetness,” a quality of things like honey and freshly cut wood, could be more easily justified according to materialist views.) Even the sensible qualities of physical things are problematic: beauty may be visible but it cannot be measured by visceral feelings. Although Philinus has lost his youthful beauty (121), Aratus still desires him; ugly things (127) must be kept at bay because passion lacks aesthetic judgment.

This is the thought with which Simichidas concludes his poem, abandoning the posture he adopted at the beginning. Just as Lycidas frames his poem as a prayer for the satisfaction of desire and then distracts himself by singing until he forgets his desire in the enjoyment of other things, Simichidas also prays and then turns away from his prayer (120 …) to something quite different. Instead of giving Aratus the boy he longs for down under his bones (102), Simichidas wants to give him spiritual comfort—restraint, modesty, calm (126 …).⁵⁷ Simichidas approaches Aratus' passion as an observer,⁵⁸ half sympathetic, half mocking, but in the pursuit of calm he and Aratus are united (126 …) for the first time.⁵⁹ (He began by referring to himself in the third person at 96-97.) What he reveals of himself might be called ēthos: his prayer for calm is set against tumultuous, instinctive feelings experienced in physical organs; he suggests that calm will come from some sort of spiritual effort or attention (126 …); he speaks in abstract and general terms (126-27 …). Lycidas also wants calm, but he approaches it by a different route: by blurring the distinction between pleasures of body and pleasures of mind; with bemused passivity rather than effort or care; and by conjuring up a pathos out of poetry rather than by formulating a moral ideal.

The boundaries of Simichidas' poem consist of passion (his goatlike love, 96-97) and reflection (… 126-27). He does not bring one topic directly into contact with the other, however, for they are divided by the poem's lengthy central section, the prayers to Pan (103-14) and the Erotes (115-19). During this interval, as Simichidas threatens Pan with hyperbolic, purely imaginary sorts of punishment (the god's exile to the cold northern edge of the world in winter, and to its hot southern edge in summer), passion is dispersed by irony,⁶⁰ removed to make way for the reflection that follows. At the end of “Idyll 7,” when Simichidas describes the harvest festival he attends after parting from Lycidas, his description of it is articulated in a similar way: sensation stands apart from thought, each serving as the object of its proper sort of representation.

At first, in describing nature, Simichidas insists upon its otherness, and especially upon the difference between natural beauty and the beauty of art. Leaves rustle in the breeze overhead (135-36), but the trees make no music such as Thyrsis hears in “Idyll 1” (1-2); the cicadas perched on the branches “chatter” (139) prosaically, unlike the musical cicadas with which Thyrsis is compared (l. 148); songbirds sing but others “moan” (141); the frog (which Simichidas has chosen as his emblem, 41) sits inaccessible among the thorns making rude noises (140 …).⁶¹ The natural scene is described here in greater detail and at greater length than anywhere else in the extant poems of Theocritus.⁶² As pure description unmixed with personal commentary, the passage emphatically marks Simichidas' character as a neutral observer of surfaces.⁶³ There is no greater depth in his account of his own pleasure (134) than in the goatherd's description of the cup's carved figures in “Idyll 1:” pleasure is fully explained by visible causes; it is not something produced by imagination, nor does one require imagination to detect its presence in Simichidas.⁶⁴

When Simichidas has finished describing the scene of the feast, his manner changes. He has been addressing his audience simply as narrator, picturing things as they could be observed in the past; his speech seems transparent and his memory merely a receptacle for things. Now, like Lycidas, he begins to report the activity of his imagination, speaking as much to himself as to any other auditor. His speech becomes “rhetorical,” no longer meaning what it says, calling attention to itself apart from its meaning. His memory takes shape as an experienced feeling, a thing pleasant and perceptible in itself. As he tries to reveal what he sees within himself remembering the feast, Simichidas asks questions without answers, like Daphnis at “Idyll 1,” 148-55. …

Even if he really wanted answers to these questions, none could be given. It might be possible to imagine enjoying the taste of Simichidas' wine, and even to imagine tasting the mythical wine of Heracles and Polyphemus, but imagination can go no further than this. It cannot measure, discriminate, or compare, and so it would be nonsensical to say “yes, the wine you tasted was the same as mythical wine” or “no, it was different.” Simichidas asks such questions playfully, as Daphnis asks them tragically, because there is something in his pleasure at the feast with which words do not directly connect; to share Simichidas' feeling, the auditor discounts the formal sense of his speech, and so forgives its nonsense.

Simichidas has carefully fashioned his excursus into myth to mark its distance from the clearly pictured scene of the feast.⁶⁵ There are eleven adjectives in the passage describing the feast,⁶⁶ two, other than place-names and titles, in the allusions to myth (“strong” and “stone”); there are three names in the first passage,⁶⁷ and seven in the second.⁶⁸ Apparently, mythical and divine things need only be named, not qualified: every auditor will see them the same conventional way, or it does not matter if different auditors see them differently. As Simichidas moves deeper into myth, his language departs further from literal description: first, wine becomes a “bowl” by metonymy (150); then, it turns into “nectar” with a metaphor (154).⁶⁹ As he migrates back to the present scene, the metaphor is canceled, and wine becomes simply a “drink” (154). In the descriptive passage, each object is presented independently, as if to deny any suggestion of an underlying structure of thought or feeling: clauses are juxtaposed in asyndeton (141-42) or else joined simply with “and” (135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 145, 147). The allusions to myth, on the other hand, are coordinated by repetitions (149, 151) and combined in a single, lengthy period.⁷⁰ The period concludes with a series of images leading gradually back to the present in articulated stages, each stage contained within a clause subordinated to the one preceding it (nectar made Polyphemus dance, nectar “such as the drink” Simichidas once enjoyed at the festival of Demeter, “upon whose heap” he now wishes to plant his winnowing-fan again).

Simichidas can only perceive the object and its meaning seriatim, with two distinct kinds of mental activity. First, he reports what he sees at the surface, taking things one at a time, like the goatherd in “Idyll 1,” and insisting upon the difference of each from the others. Then, he reports likeness rather than difference, especially the likeness of a literary, mythical past to the recent past of personal memory; he seems to be speaking about his feeling, rather than what he sees, although he does not have a way to describe his feelings directly; and his way of experiencing things becomes larger and deeper, as if it encompassed something other than tangible objects. Simichidas' movement from one kind of experience to the other is marked. When he sees the hidden syntax that joins things beneath the surface, he sees with his imagination, like Lycidas, and his speech appeals to the imagination of auditors. This requires a language different from the language of description, an elegant, periodic style composed of figures, which belong to the imagination⁷¹ and never say precisely what they mean.

The differences between Lycidas and Simichidas, sharply defined when they perform as singers, are partly dissolved at the end of the “Idyll.”⁷² It becomes clear, in retrospect, that Simichidas must have exaggerated his rudeness a little: his rudeness was a posture, and his literary fancy, which slips out like a secret confessed by writer to reader, is surely a posture, too. It has often been suspected, perhaps rightly, that the characters of “Idyll 7” represent real people in some kind of disguise.⁷³ It is certain that personal identity in the “Idyll” is not something fixed. Simichidas becomes one sort of person or another, and he speaks in different voices (or speaks to Lycidas in one voice and writes for us in another), as a way of representing the various aspects of people and things. As Lycidas says, Simichidas is a “made-up” character created with an eye to the truth (44 …).

Notes

1. The character Euripides in Aristophanes' Frogs prides himself upon representing something real (1052 …) and familiar (959 …); cf. Sophocles' view of Euripidean realism as reported by Aristotle (Poetics 1460b33). The notion that poetry makes a “speaking picture” seems to be earlier: Plutarch ascribes it to Simonides (De glor. Ath. 346F).

2. For pathos and pleasure/pain, see Arist. Rh. 1378a20, EE 1221b37.

3. For the sensations associated with pathos serving to indicate ēthos at a deeper level, see Arist. EN 1104b4-9, Pol. 1340a32-35; pathos is something that happens to the ēthos, 1340a12-13. On the detection of pathos and its natural status, cf. [Arist.] Pr. 70b7-17 and Phgn. 805a8-11. Aristotle identifies shame as a kind of pathos because it produces a physical symptom, blushing (EN 1128b10-14).

4. Their equivalence is emphasized by anaphora … (1-2).

5. There is no reason to suppose that the pathetic fallacy was associated traditionally with the story of Daphnis, although it is used by Theocritus only here and at “Idyll 7.” 74-75. Cf. W. Elliger, Die Darstellung der Landschaft in der griechischen Dichtung (Berlin and New York, 1975), p. 321.

6. The stepwise, almost analytical way Theocritus treats the conceit of the pathetic fallacy suggests that he does not “accept a stage that is already set” in depicting nature or discourage us from seeing “the individual pieces that went into the construction”: cf. B. F. Dick, “Ancient Pastoral and the Pathetic Fallacy,” CompLit 20 (1968): 33.

7. … On this category of style, see H. D. Jocelyn, “Vergilius Cacozelus (Donatus Vita Vergilii 44),” in F. Cairns, ed., Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, Second Volume (Liverpool, 1979), pp. 67-142.

8. On the cicada, see n. 39 below.

9. C. P. Segal, Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral (Princeton, 1981), p. 26, suggests that Daphnis' death is made “deliberately mysterious” to produce a “remote mythical atmosphere.” According to E. A. Schmidt, “Der Leiden des verliebten Daphnis,” Hermes 76 (1968): 550-51, Thyrsis' song does not mean to tell a story and so it should not be regarded as incomplete. Since descriptions, unlike stories, can be shortened without attracting notice, they can also be lengthened indefinitely: see P. Hamon, “Rhetorical Status of the Descriptive,” YFS 61 (1981): 10.

10. See J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art (New Haven and London, 1974), pp. 188-89.

11. Pollitt, Ancient View of Greek Art, pp. 30-31.

12. It is coordinated with nomos at Hes. Theog. 66. Cf. Arist. EE 1220b1-5 and Plut. De liberis educandis 3A (τ … … θοs … θοs … sτ … πολ … χρόνιον).

13. See Arist. EE 1220b5-7, Poet. 1450b8-9.

14. See Sophocles' description of his own language as …, quoted in Plut. De prof. virt. 7, 79B.

15. Arist. Poet. 1450a25-26; on “seeming” see Pliny HN 34. 65, discussed by Pollitt, Ancient View of Greek Art, pp. 28-29, 265.

16. Cf. Eur. Med. 410-20 and Supp. 520 for the adynaton in tragedy. For other kinds of adynaton, see H. V. Canter, “The Figure AΔYNATON in Greek and Latin Poetry,” AJP 51 (1930): 32-41, and E. Dutoit, La thème de l'adynaton dans la poésie antique (Paris, 1936). Cf. T. G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), p. 267, on the adynaton as a “foreign element” in pastoral. For the tragic aspect of Daphnis, see A. Parry, “Landscape in Greek Poetry,” YCS 15 (1957): 11-12; Snell discovers a tragic element in the range of geographical reference (The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer [Cambridge, Mass., 1953], p. 286). For the epic quality of Daphnis' style, see Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 41. …

17. See U. Ott, Die Kunst des Gegensatzes in Theokrits Hirtengedichten (Hildesheim and New York, 1969), pp. 99-105. On the goatherd's epic affinity in particular, cf. R. Stark, “Theocritea,” Maia 15 (1963): 378.

18. See C. Perri, “On Alluding,” Poetics 7 (1978): 296. For an elaborate schema describing the decipherment of allusions, cf. Z. Ben-Porat, “The Poetics of Literary Allusion,” PTL 1 (1976): 579-87.

19. The goatherd marks this difference, for example, with the epithet α … πολικόν (56) in alluding to [Hes.] Sc. 318 and Homer Il. 18. 549.

20. This formulation seems correct for Hellenistic poetry, at least. For Hellenistic modes of allusion, cf. G. Giangrande, “Théocrite, Simichidas, et les ‘Thalysies’,” AC 37 (1968): 515, and (on “opposition”) “‘Arte Allusiva’ and Alexandrian Epic Poetry,” CQ 17 (1967): 85. For the possibility that there may be other modes, see J. Chandler, “Romantic Allusiveness,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 3 (1982): 461-87, esp. p. 485.

21. For the sense of “evocation” as opposed to “allusion,” see N. Goodman, “Routes of Reference,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (1981): 132. I use the term “allusion” in Goodman's narrowest sense.

22. When Daphnis, using epic diction ( … ; cf. Il. 22. 92, 6. 143), compares himself explicitly to Diomedes, his point is the obvious, physical difference between them (112-13).

23. Thyrsis' studied vagueness perhaps accounts for the range of heroic affinities modern readers have discovered in Daphnis. For a brief summary of these, see D. M. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Poetry (New Haven, 1983), pp. 220-21 and n. 73. Theocritus should not be identified with his fictional character Thyrsis, of course: Theocritus wants us to feel the disproportion between the pastoral singer's theme and his manner.

24. Ott, Kunst des Gegensatzes, pp. 104-5 and n. 294, discovers no more than this, although he sees the carved figures as “Ausdrucksformen der menschlichen Seele.”

25. The use of pathos and ēthos as terms of moral philosophy and literary criticism has a complicated history in the ancient world, and I have alluded here only to the part that seems to reflect best the underlying rationale of Theocritus's first “Idyll.” It would be possible, imitating Aristotle's characterization of the Homeric epics (Poet. 1459b14; cf. ps.-Longinus Subl. 9. 15), to call Thyrsis a poet of pathos (like the author of the Iliad) because his tone is emotional and the hero of his poem suffers profoundly; the goatherd, according to this scheme, represents ēthos (like the author of the Odyssey) because he shows how men behave normally, at quiet times, when they are simply “themselves.” Pathos and ēthos can be interchanged in an analysis of this sort because the distinction between them depends upon a third term of unstable meaning, “nature.” One expresses ēthos by speaking “naturally” (Quint. 6. 2. 8-20; cf. Demetr. Eloc. 216), while pathos is conveyed in an elevated style, with newly invented words (Demetr. 94), unnaturally. One also expresses pathos by speaking “naturally” (Dion. Hal. Comp. 22, p. 212 Roberts), in an austere style, with nobility but without pretentiousness; pathos, apparently, forces its way through the false surface of manners. For an account of Theocritean poetry based upon Aristotle's view of pathos and ēthos in Homer, see Halperin, Before Pastoral, pp. 239-43.

26. On the timelessness of ecphrasis and the structured time of the story, cf. Ott, Kunst des Gegensatzes, p. 133. Timelessness should not be regarded as a shortcoming of the visual medium, as by Lessing in Laocoön; the timeless picture and its description adequately represent pathos.

27. The same might be said about the goatherd's model, Homer's description of Achilles' shield in Iliad 18.

28. 103, 113, 116, 120, 121, 134.

29. The scenes' universality makes it easy for modern readers to discover particular schemes within them: see, e.g., Halperin, Before Pastoral, pp. 242-44, 161-89. For the ages of man in the cup's pictures, cf. Ott, Kunst des Gegensatzes, pp. 108-9.

30. Cf. Hom. Il. 18. 548-49, where the “wonder” also seems to arise from accuracy in representation.

31. See Ar. Frogs 832-34, 912-20. Cf. Ott, Kunst des Gegensatzes, pp. 123 (with n. 356) and 134.

32. … “Idyll 15.” 80-83; cf. Herod. Mim. 4. 27-38 and Aristophanes of Byzantium in Menander Test. 32 Körte.

33. Thus, according to a collection of nearly identical epigrams, when Aphrodite first sees Praxiteles' statue, she wants to know, “where did he see me naked?” (Anth. Pal. 16. 160; cf. 168, 162).

34. The goatherd believes that the artist, even the poet, cannot take his art with him to Hades (62-63), perhaps because he thinks of art as material and Hades as a place without substance. Aristophanes plays with this notion in the Frogs, especially at 868-69. Cf. F. T. Griffiths, Theocritus at Court (Leyden, 1979), p. 127. The goatherd's cup would count as no less real and substantial within the fictional world of Theocritus' poem if there were no cup like it in the world of his audience, but for the relation of “Idyll 1” to contemporary artifacts, see Gow, Theocritus², 2: 14, and S. Nicosia, Teocrito e l'arte figurata (Palermo, 1968), pp. 15-47.

35. In “Idyll 7” (72-77), Daphnis “melts” like snow. Cf. E. Schwartz, “Theokrits Daphnis,” NGG (1904): 291; F. J. Williams, “Theocritus, Idyll i 81-91,” JHS 89 (1969): 122, n. 6.

36. See A. Kambylis, Die Dichterweihe und ihre Symbolik (Heidelberg, 1965), pp. 113-16; D. E. Gerber, Pindar's “Olympian One”: A Commentary, Phoenix Supp. vol. 15 (Toronto, 1982), p. 8; G. Lawall, Theocritus' Coan Pastorals: A Poetry Book (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 103; Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 163, n. 132, and p. 156, n. 119.

37. If Lawall's argument is correct (Theocritus' Coan Pastorals, pp. 19-25) and Daphnis has denied his sexuality in the manner of Hippolytus, his loss of physical substance would make an appropriate end to the story. On the physical dimension of poetry, see Griffiths, Theocritus at Court, pp. 24-25.

38. The goatherd's compliment to Thyrsis (his singing is “better than a cicada's”) probably refers to a myth told by Plato (Phaedrus 259B5-D7) which Callimachus treats as the charter for post-classical sensibility (Aitia frag. l. 29-34). The cicadas were once human, hypercivilized aesthetes, so eager for art that they neglected to eat, and yet they now survive, transformed, among the creatures of the field, subsisting on dewdrops. In the goatherd's view, apparently, the better sort of art is less spiritual than the cicada's (it is rewarded with honey and figs rather than dew), and the better sort of artist is less modest and restrained than Callimachus. The goatherd likes the quasi-tragic pretensions of Thyrsis' poetry, perhaps because he is close enough to nature to appreciate the difference between insect culture and the culture of men. On the relationship between Theocritus and Callimachus, cf. Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 116 and n. 20. Also, see G. Schlatter, Theokrit und Kallimachos (Ph.D. diss., Zürich, 1941), pp. 66-73.

39. This problem was left unresolved in “Idyll 1.” For a different view, see Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 150.

40. For the antithetical relation of the two songs, cf. Ott, Kunst des Gegensatzes, p. 18.

41. Lycus of Rhegium (frag. 7 = FGrH III B 666) tells a related story that specifies Comatas' offense, but it would be wrong to supply the details missing in Theocritus from Lycus' account, as Giangrande wishes (rev. of Theocritus' Coan Pastorals by G. Lawall, JHS 88 (1968): 170, citing Fritzsche ad loc). Theocritus adapts Lycus to suit himself, making the story more remote and mysterious … ; the master was “annoyed,” but the king suffers from Homeric “recklessness”; the master in Lycus conceives in advance the possibility that Comatas may be saved by the Muses, but his salvation in Theocritus is an unexpected miracle.

42. On the equation of melos/song with meli/honey, see Kambylis, Dichterweihe, pp. 98-99 (with n. 90) and p. 115.

43. … On Theocritean word-order in general, see Ph.-E. Legrand, Étude sur Théocrite (Paris [?], 1898), pp. 369-75.

44. … Schlatter, Theokrit und Kallimachos, pp. 71-72. On the conflict of “toil” and unforced gracefulness, see Pollitt, Ancient View of Greek Art, pp. 298-300 and the passages cited there. Cf. Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 136 and n. 77.

45. These poems seem more nearly alike in S. F. Walker's discussion of “sublimation” (Theocritus [Boston, 1980], pp. 67-68, 71, 82-84), and in Y. Furusawa's of the pharmakon (Eros und Seelenruhe in den Thalysien Theokrits [Würzburg, 1980], pp. 46, 64-65; cf. 166). The utility of Simichidas' song for Aratus has yet another basis, although Furusawa equates this one, too, with the song of Lycidas (p. 49, n. 81).

46. Sappho frag. 94 L.-P. On the category, see F. Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. 27-28, 163-64.

47. See Furusawa, Eros und Seelenruhe, p. 42, n. 64. …

48. Cf. Furusawa, Eros und Seelenruhe, pp. 49-50. But Lycidas' “salvation” does not depend upon Comatas' presence, only the image of it, which he himself evokes.

49. About his own poetry, Lycidas is most concerned that it should please his auditor Simichidas (50): see Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 172. Lycidas' response to everything he hears from Simichidas, even when he should be provoked, is unruffled, unchanging “pleasant” laughter (42, 128).

50. Kuriai Doxai 9. See J. M. Rist, Epicurus: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1972), p. 114, for a discussion of this notion. For a different point of contact between “Idyll 7” and Epicurus, cf. Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 141 and n. 95.

51. On Lycidas' pathos, cf. J.-H. Kühn, “Die Thalysien Theokrits (id. 7),” Hermes 86 (1958): 51.

52. It is occasioned first by rhetoric in a trivial sense, since Lycidas presents himself as attempting a seduction: he describes the happy feast among other happy results that will follow if the boy he loves indulges him (“frees him from Aphrodite,” 55-56). Since the boy has nothing to gain in the feast, however, Lycidas' rhetoric has evidently abandoned its task of persuasion.

53. For the participation of an audience in the artist's activity, cf. [Arist.] Pr. 921a32-39.

54. The quality that matters most to Simichidas is “nobility” or “goodness.” To Comatas' “sweet” music (89) he counterposes his own “noble songs” (92-93 …). He seems proud that his hosts in the country are “noble” (4). He calls Lycidas “noble” (12); he declines out of modesty to compete with the “noble” poet Sicelidas (39-40); and he derives authority for the story he tells from a “noble” singer, Aristis, a competitor at the Pythian contests (99-101). …

55. Unlike Lycidas' song, which aims at pleasing (50), a benefit that the auditor enjoys privately within himself, Simichidas' noble piece is intended to elevate, to confer honor (94), an external, public quality; see Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 174. On Simichidas' “objectivity,” cf. Ott, Kunst des Gegensatzes, p. 159 and n. 436; Kühn, “Die Thalysien Theokrits,” p. 57; and Lawall, Theocritus' Coan Pastorals, pp. 95-101.

56. Unlike pleasure, “nobility” stratifies—it is a quality of which men seldom have equal shares—and so it is essentially competitive. (Having enough nobility, one competes on the grandest scale, like Aristis; if one is less noble, like Simichidas, one chooses antagonists more carefully.) …

57. On the sense of this term, see K. J. Dover, Theocritus: Select Poems (Basingstoke and London, 1971), ad loc., and Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, pp. 67-69, 80-85.

58. See Kühn, “Die Thalysien Theokrits,” p. 57; Ott, Kunst des Gegensatzes, p. 154.

59. Simichidas uses singular pronouns in 103 and 119 while he remains relatively detached from Aratus' condition.

60. See A. E.-A. Horstmann, Ironie und Humor bei Theokrit (Meisenheim am Glan, 1976), pp. 80-110, on other sorts of irony in “Idyll 11”'s representation of passion.

61. This word denotes the murmuring speech of the ambassadors to Achilles (Il. 9. 311) but also the sound made by intestinal gas (Hippoc. Prog. 11. 6). Giangrande (rev. Lawall, p. 171) compares Anth. Pal. 9. 406, Callim. Aitia frag. 1. 1 Pf.

62. For Theocritus' customary “refusal to describe,” see Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, pp. 190-92.

63. Elliger, Darstellung, p. 334, defines Simichidas' way of seeing in different terms as “Erlebnisperspektive”; cf. Furusawa, Eros und Seelenruhe, pp. 127-31.

64. For the difference between this passage and Lycidas' song, see Segal, Poetry and Myth, pp. 152-53. For a different account, cf. Lawall, Theocritus' Coan Pastorals, p. 102, who sees no “objective description” anywhere after v. 131, only a “private world of sensation and imagination.” Sensation and imagination are not equally private, however, and Simichidas' sensations are evoked in the description of exterior phenomena. Cf. Giangrande, “Théocrite, Simichidas, et les ‘Thalysies’,” pp. 513-14, who accepts Lawall's view of the personal, interior dimension here but explains it differently.

65. If there was a “blending” in other parts of the Idyll, as Segal, Poetry and Myth, p. 163, suggests, there is unblending here.

66. 131-47. … For a discussion of the kinds of adjectives used here, see Elliger, Darstellung, pp. 334-35.

67. Eucritus, Phrasidamus, Amyntichus (all in the first two verses of the passage).

68. 148-53: Castalian, Parnasian, Pholus, Heracles, Chiron, Anapus, Polyphemus.

69. The conceit wine = nectar can be found in the episode of the Odyssey to which Simichidas alludes (9. 359).

70. According to Fabiano, “Fluctuation in Theocritus' Style,” p. 553, this and 16. 3 ff. are the two most extended periods in all of Theocritus' poems.

71. Arist. Rh. 1404a11 …

72. See Lawall, Theocritus' Coan Pastorals, p. 101; Furusawa, Eros und Seelenruhe, p. 91, apparently believes that Lycidas and Simichidas never differed.

73. See, e.g., Ph. Legrand, “… (Théocrite, Id. VII, v. 13),” REA 47 (1945): 214-18. …