SOURCE: “Gender and Power,” in Theocritus's Urban Mimes: Mobility, Gender, and Patronage, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 41-92.

[In the following excerpt, Burton examines how Theocritus portrayed changing gender roles, the rise of feminine power, and gender ambiguity in his poems.]

The ascendancy of autocratic hegemonies, the rise in mobility, and the reliance on mercenary forces had strong effects on gendered social identities for Greeks in the Hellenistic age. Masculine power in the old Greek world was closely linked with the ideal of a citizen-soldier.¹ But in a mobile Hellenistic world, citizenship was losing its appeal as a measure of masculine power. Further, the rise in state wealth, resulting in part from Alexander's conquests in the East, enabled reliance on mercenaries in armed forces. Thus Hellenistic Greek males, for the most part, had to seek personal identities outside the role of citizen-soldiers and the realm of public political life.² As male political life faded, the scope of female public life expanded.³ Strong queens, such as Olympas and Arsinoe II, were setting new levels of visibility for Greek women, and the horizon of possible social roles was expanding for less elite Greek women as well. Evidence of women receiving civic honors for poetic achievements and public benefactions attests to the growing visibility (and economic power) of women.⁴ Further, marriage contracts developed which, by protecting a woman's interests in the absence of family, allowed her more independence and mobility.⁵

A basic premise of social and political order in the ancient Greek world was the subordination of female to male. Although the Hellenistic Greek world was still basically a patriarchy, and women's lives remained more circumscribed than men's, normative boundaries between public and private, male and female, domestic and political were becoming more fluid. Further, in Ptolemaic Egypt, as Ahmed has recently stressed, Egyptian laws and customs provided an important model of sexual egalitarianism for Greeks,⁶ and Pomeroy confirms that “in the economic sphere, as in the political and social realms, there was less distinction between the genders in Ptolemaic Egypt than there was, for example, in Athens, or in Greek society in general of an earlier period.”⁷ Since Ptolemaic Alexandria was a center for advanced poetic projects, it is not surprising that the subject of gender roles and relations became a central thematic concern among Hellenistic poets.

With the loss of the autonomous city-state as an arena for Greek males to establish self-identity, private spheres of self-realization, particularly the erotic, ascended in cultural importance. Much of Theocritus's poetry is engaged with issues of how passionate love detaches individuals from normative life and how in song or talk, through redescription of selves and others, men and women try to remake their gendered identities. Theocritus's urban mimes, with their attention to interactive relations of men and women within a civic frame, best reflect how changing social and political conditions can destabilize gendered identities.

The first section of this chapter shows how representations of male-female encounters in Theocritus's urban mimes reflect concerns about changing gender roles in the Hellenistic age. An examination of Theocritus's shaping of these male-female encounters also underscores his close attention to gender differences in both discourse and behavior. The second section looks more closely at issues of women and power in the urban mimes. A common source of power for women in the urban mimes is religion and religious rituals (including witchcraft). Theocritus's poetry also contains numerous examples of powerful women linked with subordinate males. In addition, this section compares Theocritus's approach to the issue of gendered power with approaches of other Hellenistic poets. The third section examines the issue of sexual ambiguity in Theocritus's poetry, with some comparative attention to other Hellenistic poetry as well. This includes a discussion of Theocritus's presentation of Adonis in “Idyll 15,” a crucial topic in a study of the theme of gender identity in Theocritus's poetry.

MALE-FEMALE RELATIONS

Male-female relations are central to all three urban mimes. “Idyll 2” is basically the story of Simaetha and Delphis's relationship. “Idyll 14” includes the story of the breakup of Aeschinas and Cynisca's relationship. “Idyll 15” presents a number of complex male-female interactions in the public space. A matching of Idylls “2” and “14” underscores Theocritus's interest in how gender can shape experience. Both poems feature the topic of a failed heterosexual love affair, but “Idyll 2” approaches it from the vantage of the rejected woman; “Idyll 14,” from the vantage of the rejected man.

Two other similarities link Idylls “2” and “14.” First, in both poems, a symposium serves as a focal point in the love affair's dissolution. In “Idyll 2,” Simaetha, excluded from the sympotic community, describes how she learned from a flute player's mother that Delphis had abandoned her and returned to his former erotic recreations in the sympotic world.⁸ In “Idyll 14,” Aeschinas, a sympotic insider, describes how Cynisca left him by fleeing his symposium. Second, in both poems, fictive persons adopt new gendered personae when their lovers abandon them. In “Idyll 2,” Simaetha responds to Delphis's desertion by moving outside the patriarchal state and assuming the countercultural role of a witch. In “Idyll 14,” Aeschinas responds to Cynisca's desertion first by adopting a classic lovelorn pose and then by resolving to go abroad and become a mercenary soldier.

In the first chapter, the discussion of “Idyll 2” focuses on how Theocritus's representation of Delphis as an elite but displaced Greek raises issues of mobility and assimilation and also heightens Delphis's distance from Simaetha's social world. This chapter looks more directly at the central topic of gendered power relations in “Idyll 2.”⁹ The metaphorical linkage between male domination and colonization¹⁰ may help illuminate “Idyll 2”'s power dynamics: Delphis, the privileged male colonizer, an elite Greek foreigner from Myndus, assumes erotic privilege in a patriarchal system, and Simaetha, the subordinated female, finds recourse in an alternative realm of magic, nature, earth.¹¹ Further, “Idyll 2,” Simaetha's monologue, has a special self-reflective edge insofar as Theocritus, a privileged Greek male, is presenting a subordinated Greek female, whose self-narrative in turn presents a privileged Greek male.

In “Idyll 2,” Theocritus situates Simaetha, without kin in evidence to uphold her, on the margins of Greek society where slaves and free persons mingle, and he shows her even so refusing to be silenced and disregarded. Instead she assumes the traditionally male initiative in courtship: she sees Delphis, an elite Greek male, experiences love symptoms, and sends her maid to summon him. Simaetha's description of falling in love underscores her appropriation of male privilege in making Delphis and his friend objects of her erotic gaze: …

And I was already midway on the road, at Lycon's place,
when I saw Delphis walking with Eudamippus.
And their beards were more golden than helichryse,
and their breasts were far more shining than you, Selene,
for they had freshly left the gymnasium's fair exercise.

(76-80)

By having Simaetha emphasize her role as spectator (rather than spectacle), the poet unsettles patriarchal assumptions about the relations of men and women in a public space. Simaetha's comparison of Delphis and Eudamippus to the moon goddess reinforces their feminized position. Polarities such as male and female, public and private, help uphold hierarchical positions of privilege. “Idyll 2” explores what happens when an unruly “other” challenges such gendered polarities by behaving inappropriately, breaking the rules. But the objectification of Delphis and Eudamippus, combined with the linkage of their glistening male beauty with the wrestling-school (a usual site of homosexual voyeurism)¹² also heightens the homoerotic pleasure made available through Simaetha's gaze.¹³

Delphis's response to Simaetha's unconventional summons shows ways a person unsettled by alien modes of behavior might try to reestablish a familiar pattern of power relations. By verbally enacting a courtship routine (komos) through which elitist Greek males traditionally asserted social dominance, Delphis maneuvers himself back into the conventional male position of subject not object in the seduction scene. But Delphis's seduction speech ends with a reversed-sex analogy that refeminizes his own position as love's victim, even while it suggests a repositioning of Simaetha too (as a female victim rather than initiator of love): …

And with bad madness he rouses a maid from her chamber
and a bride to leave her husband's bed, still warm.

(136-38)

The ambiguity in Delphis's use of analogy here exemplifies the fluidity of gendered positions of power in “Idyll 2” and underscores Theocritus's interest in how sexual self-perception can defy the rigidity of gendered polarities. Further, Delphis's use of this analogy, which shows Eros exercising power indiscriminately (without making distinctions between maiden and bride), encourages the suspicion that Delphis too did not see Simaetha as an individual but rather as a generic woman; he too would not consider the particularities of her social situation. Simaetha vividly recreates Delphis: his golden beard (78), his glow like the moon goddess's (79), his exact words of courtship. But Simaetha's redescription of Delphis's courtship never shows him particularizing her. Instead, Delphis's courtship speech focused on himself: how he would have looked and felt had he performed a komos. The poem itself, Simaetha's monologue, embodies the highly individualized, whole woman Delphis cannot see.

Simaetha's remembrance of the way Delphis bestowed adjectives underscores his male narcissism. He described Philinus as … “graceful” (115) and himself as … “agile and fair” (124-25). In both cases the epithets apply to the whole person. But the epithet he uses to describe Simaetha … “lovely,” (126) is applied to only one body part … “mouth” (126), treated solely as an object of his personal, sexual pleasure: … “I would have slept, if I only had kissed your lovely mouth” … (126).

In the culturally approved life of respectable Greek women, sex meant marriage and family. But Delphis comes from the sympotic/gymnastic world of easy extramarital love, with either sex (44, 150). The repetition of the adjective … light … underscores the distance between Delphis's and Simaetha's approaches to love. Delphis's reputation for being handsome and … “light in moving …” (124) made him confident that lovemaking with him would be pleasing. For Simaetha, on the other hand, to experience love, to seek its cure, is … “no light matter” (92). Delphis's abandonment of Simaetha reveals to her … that he is light-minded,¹⁴ or as Simaetha confirms at the poem's start, that Delphis has … “a fickle heart,” … (7). How could she expect to keep a Delphis who outran even charming Philinus? A repetition of the participle … fleeing … also highlights the distance between them in matters of love. Delphis acts in haste, hurrying from a symposium to wreathe a doorway: … “He ran off …” (152). But for Simaetha falling in love is a monumental life event, involving a rite of separation from her previous life. She suffered fever ten days, consulted old women skilled in charms: … “time was flying by …” (92), but Simaetha did not rush into love.¹⁵

Threshold and road motifs reinforce “Idyll 2”'s shaping of Simaetha's interaction with Delphis as a female rite of passage.¹⁶ Simaetha first saw Delphis at a midway point, on a walk to a festival of Artemis (a goddess of female initiation rituals).¹⁷ She saw Delphis for the second time as he stepped with a light foot over her threshold (104). Simaetha's self-description underscores the liminality of this moment: suspended between childhood and adulthood, she was less articulate than babes calling to their mother and her body was as stiff as the doll she was putting aside to become a woman (108-9).¹⁸ Simaetha infuses with epic grandeur another liminal moment, this morning's dawn, when a gossip came and told her that Delphis loved another (145-49). In an unstable environment, without visible family connections, Simaetha had created an idyllic world of love for herself. But Delphis's departure destroyed that world and Simaetha's self-identity as well.

A brief return to our comparison with “Idyll 14” helps clarify Theocritus's handling of gender issues in “Idyll 2.” In both Idylls “2” and “14,” the defection of a loved one destroyed the lover's sense of self-worth. In “Idyll 14,” Aeschinas describes himself as worthless: … “As for me, I'm not worth notice or account, / like the miserable Megarians, in last place” … (48-49).¹⁹ Similarly in “Idyll 2,” Simaetha describes how Delphis left her without an identity: … “He has made me, instead of a wife, a bad woman, and a maid no more” … (41).²⁰ From the abyss, both Simaetha and Aeschinas have to recreate themselves. For “Idyll 14”'s Aeschinas, a Greek male in a mobile, urban world, options are open: he resolves to go abroad and become a mercenary soldier. But for “Idyll 2”'s Simaetha, a Greek female without husband or virginity in a patriarchal world, options are limited. Before Delphis left her, Simaetha had already made herself a monster in society through her violation of sexual and social rules. But Delphis's betrayal moves Simaetha further outside normative, patriarchal society into an alternative realm of magic and witchcraft, where the terms of the struggle between male autonomy and female self-empowerment can shift. Later in the chapter I discuss how Theocritus's shaping of Simaetha's magic rites highlights the theme of gender and power. But now let us consider in more detail how “Idyll 14,” like “Idyll 2,” raises the issue of the fragility of gendered identities in a changing world.

In the age of autocratic Hellenistic kingdoms, Greek men as well as women were looking outside public political life for privatized realms in which to rediscover self-worth. The erotic realm, with its own practices of dominance and subordination, offered a forum for establishing personal identity. “Idyll 14” explores problems that can arise for a Greek man in a world of changing gendered identities if he lets heterosexual love become the focus of his identity. Also, in a time when Greek women were attaining increased levels of visibility and economic power, “Idyll 14” presents an example of what could happen if a spirit of female independence invaded the men's-club atmosphere of the symposium. Although in the ancient Greek world compliance was an expected part of a woman's role (especially at symposia), in “Idyll 14” Cynisca did not comply with Aeschinas, the symposium host, in his expectation that she would toast him as her lover. Her behavior revealed instead that she was in love with Lycus, his neighbor's son. Thus Cynisca defied Aeschinas's authority by exercising choice in whom she loved and by leaving the symposium.

Cynisca's actions upset Aeschinas's assumptions about the social order,²¹ and he is still suffering an identity crisis two months later (48-49): Cynisca has brought him near madness (9). Part of Aeschinas's anxiety is due to uncertainty about gender roles. By using the term hybris (characteristically linked with komos activities), Aeschinas redescribes Cynisca's behavior as a usurpation of male sympotic privilege (the maltreatment of others): … “But as for me, the lovely Cynisca / maltreats me” … (8-9).

The obsessive quality of Aeschinas's passion for Cynisca has moved him outside normative male life. By having Aeschinas repeat the name of Cynisca's new lover Lycus both times he mentions him (47's anaphora, cf. 24's anastrophe), Theocritus emphasizes Aeschinas's jealousy at being replaced: … “Now Lycus is everything; her door's open to Lycus even at night” … (47). The mention of Lycus moves Aeschinas to project himself into Cynisca's passion and even into her bedroom,²² and this vision propels Aeschinas into an abyss of self-pity: …

But as for me, I'm not worth notice or account,
like the miserable Megarians, in last place.
If only I'd stop loving her, everything would come out right.
But as it is, how can it? I'm like the mouse caught in pitch, as they say, Thyonichus.
And what is the cure for helpless love,
I don't know.

(48-53)

Aeschinas had centered his identity on his success as a lover, and when Cynisca leaves him, his self-image plummets. The poet underscores Aeschinas's compulsive linkage of Cynisca's passion with his own by having Aeschinas use the noun eros only twice in “Idyll 14,” both times placed last in the line: first Cynisca's eros (26), and second Aeschinas's eros (52). Cynisca's … “famous” (26) love for Lycus makes Aeschinas's love for her … “helpless” (52), but Aeschinas's passionate love for Cynisca empowers her, for she can reject him.

Aeschinas's redescriptions of Cynisca's behavior at the fateful symposium reflect male anxieties about female autonomy. Aeschinas's identity crisis began when Cynisca refused to participate in the toasting ritual: …

So while we were drinking and calling out names, as agreed,
she said nothing, though I was right there!

(20-21)

The phonetic parallelism and matching positions of the phrases … “while we …” (20) and … “she [said] nothing …” (21), by opposing male and female, group and individual, underscore Cynisca's defiance of male solidarity and control. Cynisca speaks only once and blushes. Her blush, like her silence earlier, is a powerful signifier of her separation from the male ideology which privileges talk in a sympotic context: …

“Won't you speak? Have you seen a wolf?” someone teased. “How clever,” she said,
and her cheeks blazed; you could have lit a lamp from her easily.

(22-23)

The phonetic similarities and matching placement of the descriptions of speaking and blushing … (22; … 23) and the echo of the noun … “wolf” (22) in … “lamp …” (23) highlight Aeschinas's sudden realization of Cynisca's sexual betrayal: the “wolf” emerges in her blush, which speaks as strongly as words of her passion for Lycus (Wolf).

Cynisca's defiant behavior at the symposium frustrated Aeschinas's assumptions of sexual hegemony. Now, in retrospect, Aeschinas uses three images to describe her conduct. First he describes her tears as worse than a little girl's: … “She suddenly started crying, worse than a six-year-old / who longs for her mother's lap” … (32-33). Then he compares her speed in running away to a mother swallow's: … “A swallow gives morsels to her nestlings under the eaves / and flies swiftly off again to fetch more food …” (39-40). Finally he signifies her disappearance with a reference to a famous bull fable: … “A bull once went through the woods …” (43). The incongruity of these images has long disturbed readers.²³ Recent scholars have approached these images principally as devices through which the poet can characterize the fictive speaker as inept.²⁴

I would like to suggest that through Aeschinas's use of these incongruous images, Theocritus represents the psychological process of Aeschinas coming to terms with his recent past. The use of imagery here, as elsewhere in Theocritus, requires the poem's audience to be active, to project into the character's emotional state. Aeschinas's descriptions of Cynisca move from helpless to powerful, female to male, domestic to wild: a crying girl-child; a mother swallow; a bull. They start by domesticating Cynisca, but end by betraying Aeschinas's realization that she has broken free of him. By redescribing Cynisca first as a child with her mother and then as a mother with her offspring, Aeschinas tries to assert dominance by fixing her, containing her within the domestic sphere, subsuming her under subordinated categories, relegating her to biology. But his imagery breaks away from the female realm: instead, his description of her behavior at the party ends with the tale of a bull. Insofar as Cynisca behaved in an autonomous and disruptive manner, Aeschinas ultimately reads her actions as male.²⁵

Aeschinas's redescriptions of himself reflect how Cynisca's independent behavior causes him to perceive himself as worthless and hopeless: a starving Megarian (49), a mouse caught in pitch (51).²⁶ Insofar as a bull and a mouse represent opposite poles of power in the animal kingdom, Aeschinas's imagery reflects male anxieties about gender privilege. He sees Cynisca finally as a bull running free to the woods and himself as a mouse caught in pitch: her, dominant and autonomous; himself, subordinate and constrained. Aeschinas's use of imagery suggesting gender reversal reflects how Cynisca's unconventional behavior has destabilized his sense of self-identity.

The image of Cynisca running from the symposium as a bull runs into the woods can enrich the poem's gender dynamics in other ways as well. Just as in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, the chorus use the bull fable to emphasize the savage otherness of Laius's unknown murderer (477), so too in “Idyll 14,” through the bull imagery, Aeschinas underscores Cynisca's savage otherness.²⁷ Further, in Greek myth and literature, woods traditionally represent escape from normative society and sexuality;²⁸ and the metamorphosis of woman into wild beast can also represent release from conventionally gendered identities (e.g., Atalanta the virgin huntress, later a lion, and Callisto the virgin huntress, later a bear).²⁹ Also, by having Cynisca mate with a wolf (Lycus), Theocritus highlights the opposition of Cynisca's wildness and Aeschinas's cultivated sympotic life.³⁰ Finally, a wolf, like a boar, can represent a test of manhood. But rather than challenge the wolf (Lycus, his rival), Aeschinas beats the girl: he is a bully, and all he can do to mitigate his brutish violence is refer to her as a bull.

The Greek patriarchal world separated conceptually women who attended symposia from mothers and children. But Aeschinas does not distance himself from Cynisca by underscoring her social inferiority as a woman who attends symposia. Instead, “romantically” he tries to redescribe her into the world of the family, which he has rejected by devoting himself to her. Aeschinas's use of domestic imagery for Cynisca suggests the male fantasy of domesticating the prostitute (although she may not have been, strictly speaking, a prostitute—see the discussion of Cynisca's status in chapter 1). The related theme of prostituting the housewife is central to Herodas's Mime 1, and Greek drinking cups conflating the images of a prostitute with a housewife show an enduring interest in these male fantasies.³¹ Female social categories become even more fuzzy in the Roman world (both in life and in art) with the influx of Greek courtesans and the presence of respectable Roman women at symposia,³² and the representation of mistress as loving wife becomes a central thematic motif in Latin elegiac poetry (e.g., Cat. 68, Tib. 1.5.21-34).³³

Gow, in commenting on the word … “longing for [her mother's lap] …” (33) in Aeschinas's description of Cynisca's tears as like a six-year-old's, refers to Achilles' description of Patroclus's tears in the Iliad as “T's original”:³⁴ …

Why then are you crying like some poor little girl, Patroklos,
who runs after her mother and begs to be picked up and carried,
and clings to her dress, and holds her back when she tries to hurry,
and gazes tearfully into her face, until she is picked up?

(Hom. Il. 16.7-10 O.C.T.) (trans. Lattimore, Iliad, 330)

Most commentators on “Idyll 14” have disregarded Theocritus's echo of Homer here. Yet Theocritus uses textual echoes throughout his poetry, and it is worth exploring how such echoes can enrich the dynamics of the poems.³⁵ I would like to make a few suggestions concerning why the poet, in representing Aeschinas's response to Cynisca's tears, might recall Achilles' response to Patroclus's tears. First, an evocation of the valorized world of Homeric warriors heightens by contrast the comic modernity and instability of Aeschinas's mobile world of mercenaries and party girls. The heroic world has come to this: privatized, everyday triumphs and defeats in the agonistic arena of love and the symposium. The pathos of Achilles' heroic loss resonates in Aeschinas's redescription of Cynisca as a little girl and ironizes his self-representation of loss. Second, through this allusion Theocritus also highlights “Idyll 14”'s plot and theme development. Just as Patroclus's tears mark a turning point in the Iliad's plot and lead to Achilles losing Patroclus, so Cynisca's tears mark a turning point in “Idyll 14”'s plot and lead to Aeschinas losing Cynisca.³⁶ Further, just as Patroclus's loss causes Achilles to feel isolated and alienated from his fellow soldiers (his physical symptoms include tearfulness and inability to sleep or eat), so too Cynisca's loss causes Aeschinas to feel isolated and alienated from his fellow symposiasts (his physical symptoms include unkempt hair, thinness, and paleness). Thus, by evoking the most famous example of enclaved male bonding during wartime in the Homeric world, Theocritus can underscore the male-bonded community Aeschinas has abandoned for Cynisca. Further, the echo of a Homeric misreading of gender (Patroclus as a young girl) draws attention to Aeschinas's own trouble assigning gender to the roles of his girlfriend and himself.

Aeschinas initially limits himself to a closed identity as Cynisca's lover: when she abandons him, he puts on the “symptoms of love” mask (3-6). Aeschinas's tendency to categorize reductively both himself and others is also shown by his redescriptions of Cynisca as mother and child. But just as the roles of mother and child cannot define Cynisca (instead she becomes a bull, 43), so too the role of lover should not exhaust Aeschinas's potential. Aeschinas resolves to exchange his persona as rejected lover for the persona of soldier, a choice well-suited to his persistently violent character, as shown by his description of his mistreatment of Cynisca: … “Then I—you know me, Thyonichus—I struck her with my fist / on the temple, and then I struck her again” (34-35).

Through enlisting as a soldier, Aeschinas can regain the male comradery he has lost by abandoning the sympotic community and can also channel his violence. Aeschinas suggests a role model in the mercenary Simus, a man of equal age who also went abroad to forget (54). Aeschinas describes Simus's motivation with [an] ambiguous phrase … (53). … [The] scholia understand the phrase to mean “the man who fell in love with soldiery.” More recent readers understand the phrase to mean instead the man “who fell in love with the brazen girl.”³⁷ Yet both meanings can resonate in this phrase since for Aeschinas, as for Simus, the choice is between a brazen girl and a bronze shield. Aeschinas characteristically views such choices as exclusive. Thus by choosing soldiery, a masculinized profession, Aeschinas can underscore his separation from women: he can reject life-giving femaleness (exemplified in his use of child-rearing images for Cynisca) by exercising the male prerogative of becoming a death-dealing soldier.³⁸ In chapter 4 we return to “Idyll 14” and this topic when we consider the place of Ptolemy's encomium in Aeschinas's story … the name of Aeschinas's girlfriend: “little bitch”. …

In the previous chapter I discussed “Idyll 15”'s use of the motif of the road and its relation to the mobility theme. The motif of the road also pertains to this chapter's discussion of “Idyll 15,” for the movement of “Idyll 15”'s women from the private realm to the public, from the outskirts of Alexandria to the center, from a domestic space to Arsinoe's Adonia, raises the issue of gender relations and a woman's place in the world. For the Syracusan women, moving into the public domain involves encounters with men.

When the women first enter the streets, Praxinoa's appeal to a man not to trample her with horses … “Dear man, don't trample me” … (52) receives no reply, no male acknowledgment. Her seeming invisibility intensifies her feeling of alienation from the public streets … “I am very glad that I left my baby at home …” (55), and she feels childlike in her helplessness … ; “From childhood on I've been most fearful of horses and cold snakes” … (58-59). Thus this male-female interaction illustrates how males can not only control a female's public image, but also affect her private selfimage.

Praxinoa's fear of horses and snakes (58) also reinforces the poem's sexual symbolism insofar as horses can represent sexuality in both males and females (e.g., see Alkman), and snakes can in addition represent the crossing of sexual boundaries (e.g., the snake couplings involved in Teiresias's sex-changes).³⁹ In “Idyll 15,” Praxinoa must move beyond her sexual anxieties and the gender norms controlling access to the public streets before she can reach the Adonia. She must assert herself more successfully in interactions with men she encounters on the streets. Chance road encounters, by providing different kinds of public notice, can test and affect a person's self-identity: in “Idyll 15,” a man ignores Praxinoa's appeal, an old woman gives advice, a polite man clears the way, and a rude man insults Praxinoa and Gorgo's manner of speech. Chapter 1 discusses the encounter with the old woman. In this chapter, I examine “Idyll 15”'s presentation of male-female interactions in public space and show how through these interactions the poet addresses issues of gendered power and responsibility, alienation and assimilation.

In showing different male characters eliciting different reactions from Praxinoa, Theocritus explores ways the Syracusan women (as outsiders) try to gain control of their public image and find a place for themselves in the public arena. As the women approach the doors to the ceremonial grounds, the crowd jostles Praxinoa and she brusquely exhorts a man nearby to watch out for her cloak: …

                                        By Zeus, if you would hope
for good fortune, man, watch out for my wrap.

(70-71)

Earlier, Praxino urged a man not to trample her by using the address … “dear man …” (52), and he did not respond. This time, Praxinoa addresses a male stranger by using a vocative typically reserved for slaves: … “man …” (71). But her presuppositions about men's behavior in a crowd and how she would be treated (reinforced by her earlier encounter with a man who ignored her appeal) are false in this case, for this stranger treats her with unexpected kindness and concern: … “It is not in my power; all the same, I will take care” … (72). His polite response and admission of powerlessness shame Praxinoa. Disarmed by the male stranger's courteous behavior, she redirects her hostility impersonally against the crowd: … “It's really a crowd; / they're thrusting like pigs” … (72-73). Praxinoa's comment is her way to apologize, for although she calls the crowd “pigs,”⁴⁰ the crowd does not now include the polite man. Word repetitions further link the polite man with the women. At home Gorgo consoles Praxinoa's child with the phrase … “Take courage, Zopyrion” … (13), and on the street Gorgo encourages Praxinoa similarly: … “Take courage, Praxinoa” … (56). Now at the entrance to the festival grounds, the polite man heartens Praxinoa with the same exhortation: … “Take courage, lady” … (73).

The stranger's courteous manner changes Praxinoa's behavior and affects her use of language. When he brings Praxinoa and her companions into the clear with the assurance … “Take courage, lady; we are in a good position” … (73), Praxinoa's expression of gratitude exceeds his in politeness, as well as in elevation of language: …

And forever more then, may you be in a good position, dear man,
in return for protecting us. What a helpful and compassionate man.

(74-75)

Although Praxinoa initially treats him as if he were a slave … (71), she now addresses him as a friend and describes him as “helpful and compassionate.” Further, Praxinoa's reply revitalizes the aesthetic language underlying the stranger's colloquial reassurance by refashioning his use of the expression … “we are in a good position …” (73): … “And forever more then, may you be in a good [beautiful] position, dear man” … (74). Harmony now characterizes this encounter, not the eristics of power. Rather than shut the women out, this courtly stranger helps them gain public access.

The encounter with a solicitous man affects Praxinoa's future interactions with men by showing her the limitations of her preconceptions, and this demonstration of the civility to which men and women can rise in their relations with one another helps strengthen Praxinoa's indignation when she later encounters a man who behaves rudely. In exploring what is possible in the relations between men and women, “Idyll 15” approaches an important issue in the Hellenistic age, for the rules were changing and women who were mobile or had immigrated from home might have to seek male friends outside the family to serve as kurioi instead of the customary close relatives.

A change in the language Praxinoa uses to address her personal slaves underscores the change in Praxinoa that results from the encounter with the nice man. In her treatment of Eunoa at home, Praxinoa is presented as a virago: while washing and dressing Praxinoa, Eunoa can do nothing right. But that is Praxinoa's way of asserting power over the slave: through language. Before the polite man's intervention, Praxinoa addresses Eunoa abusively … (“scratchface,” 27; … “thief,” 30; … “wretched girl,” 31; … “fearless hound,” 53). Afterward however, Praxinoa becomes more solicitous and addresses Eunoa compassionately as … “you poor thing …” (76).⁴¹ This echo of Praxinoa's self-description when she discovers a tear in her shawl … “alas, poor me” … (69) underscores a lessening of distance between slave and mistress and reinforces a sense of temporary commonality among the women against outside threats, as evident in the handclasping between mistresses and slaves in an attempt to effect inseparable passage through the crowd (66-68). Through Praxinoa's and Gorgo's changing relations with slaves and men, the poet shows how social context can change dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, domination and subordination.

In naming fictive characters, Theocritus wryly highlights the typical significance of the social relationships “Idyll 15” explores.⁴² Significant names in fictions are by no means new (e.g., Aristophanes' Lysistrata, dissolver of armies), but the Hellenistic age's intensified interest in the representation of human types is shown by such recent works as Theophrastus's Characters, as well as the increasing attention to realistic visual portraiture.⁴³ “Idyll 15” begins in the house of Praxinoa, a woman with her mind on her work⁴⁴ and thus naturally resistant to taking the morning off to attend a festival: … “It's always holiday for those who don't work …” (26). It takes a friend called Gorgo, whose name can signify danger and also female power,⁴⁵ to entice her out of the house. Their husbands' names highlight Gorgo's and Praxinoa's domestic discontent: Praxinoa's husband is named Dinon, the terrible; and Gorgo's is Diokleidas, ordained key-master. Praxinoa has a child named Zopyrion, little spark of fire: fearing lest his fragile spark be extinguished in the public streets, she leaves him at home. Praxinoa also has a servant called Eunoa (good sense), who carelessly handles the soap and water Praxinoa uses when preparing to leave the house.⁴⁶ This servant accompanies Praxinoa to the festival. Gorgo's servant, named Eutychis (good luck), is only mentioned once in the poem: when the women reach the doors to the palace, Praxinoa advises Eunoa to take Eutychis's hand (67). The women need more than just good sense to enter through the crowded doorway: “good sense” must combine with “good luck” to succeed. Thus significant names highlight the typical significance of “Idyll 15”'s characters and plot. In addition, by wryly offering an allegory here, Theocritus can amuse a sophisticated audience familiar with the practice of allegorically interpreting myths⁴⁷ and also make a passing allusion to Tyche (luck), a personified deity rising in popularity in third-century Alexandria.⁴⁸

The third encounter with a man in “Idyll 15” takes place within the ceremonial space of the Adonia. A public festival, particularly one that includes works of art on display, constitutes a situation where persons not otherwise linked tend to interact with one another: exchange ideas, affirm values, and create a sense of community. When Praxinoa and Gorgo enter through a congested doorway to a ceremonial space where they pause to admire tapestries, their elevated remarks reinforce the ceremonial mood of the Adonia. The male bystander, on the other hand, instead of joining the women in admiring the tapestries, disrupts the ceremonial mood of the occasion by ridiculing the way Praxinoa and Gorgo speak.⁴⁹ Insofar as speech is immediately expressive of cultural identity and class, by introducing a fictive bystander critical of the women's speech, the poet can underscore the social boundaries that arise between men and women, and between Greeks of one ethnicity and another.

The bystander's hostile encounter with Praxinoa and Gorgo brings the issue of gender and power to a thematic level in the poem. A housewife can exercise dominance in the private world of the home: at the start of the poem, Praxinoa behaves authoritatively when she abuses her servant and scolds her child, and she speaks in front of her child as if he were not present and must be reminded that the child can understand. But in the public realm, Greek culture traditionally assigned dominance to men and subordination to women. Thus the male bystander is policing violations of the hierarchical social order when he orders the women to be silent and then tries to validate his attempt to exclude them from participation in the public experience by speaking in front of them as if they were not present: …

You wretched women, stop that endless twittering—
like turtle doves they'll grate on you, with all their broad vowels.

(87-88)

The bystander's objections to the women reflect basic cultural presuppositions about gender and decorum; his behavior coincides with the patriarchal tradition of associating women with children and slaves in terms of their diminished capacity for understanding and self-control.⁵⁰

The bystander's remarks can reflect male prejudice against what the women are doing and what the popular festival of Adonis is facilitating: the women have broken out of their place. They have cut loose from the ties of the domestic world, and their incursion into the public realm involves risk: for themselves, of reputation; for the men they encounter, of normative social dynamics. Even if one disregards the extremist view Thucydides presents in his version of Pericles' funeral oration (2.46), still, from the dominant culture's point of view, the semantic content of Praxinoa and Gorgo's speech transgresses normative expectations of women's speech in the public arena. They presume to pass evaluative judgments on a work of art, and although their speech corresponds to the pictorial imagery of the tapestries, their praise brings into the public realm speech that is private, domestic, and meant to be heard at home, or even restricted to the bedroom.⁵¹

Praxinoa dares in public to speak of eros. She describes Adonis at that liminal moment of boyhood when he still can look sexually ambiguous;⁵² the first down is spreading from his temples; he has not yet shaved: …

And Adonis himself, how marvelous he is, reclining on a silver
couch, with the first youthful down spreading from his temples,
thrice-loved Adonis, loved even in Acheron [Hades].

(84-86)

This is the threshold of gender definition, the moment of gender doubt. If he shaves now, Adonis will look androgynous again; but he is at the point of turning into a man.⁵³ This is a moment when men can find boys most alluring. But Theocritus's Praxinoa also finds this stage of gender doubt erotic, and her description of Adonis makes evident the eroticism of her gaze. The recurrent cycle of Adonis's death ensures the continued appeal of his unaging vulnerability and passivity.⁵⁴ By experiencing eros through viewing the tapestries, by desiring what is forbidden and alien (Adonis, a passive young boy), Praxinoa is transported into the world of the Adonia. But the bystander is oblivious to how Praxinoa's experience is appropriate to the festive occasion; instead he objects to her violation of patriarchal social norms for women's behavior in a public space.

The confrontation between the bystander and the Syracusan women highlights issues of heterosexual power. The bystander's aim is to silence the women and keep them from speaking. Through eavesdropping, the bystander puts the women's private life on display for public consumption. His mockery makes their private life public, as Theocritus's poem makes it public. The bystander's use of Doric here is sufficiently exaggerated to seem sarcastic rather than simply incongruous.⁵⁵

Praxinoa rises to the challenge: she refuses to let him silence her and thus legislate her public identity. She asserts her right to be heard and affirms her identity by making a judicial response. Her mocking response to the bystander shows her “reading” of his speech and the social and cultural stereotypes she understands to be informing his speech: …

Mother, where does this man come from? What's it to you if we twitter?
If you have slaves, order them around. You're giving orders to
                    Syracusans.
And let me assure you: we are Corinthians by descent,
like Bellerophon. We “babble” in the Peloponnesian manner;
Dorians are permitted, I think, to speak Doric.
Let there be no master over us, honey-goddess,
except one. I don't care: don't level off an empty jar on my account.

(89-95)

First, Praxinoa understands the bystander to be expressing linguistic chauvinism when he characterizes their speech as dovelike twittering, and her response defiantly exaggerates the female aspect of her speech by beginning and ending with exclamations characteristic of women: … “mother …” (89), … “honey-goddess …” (94), and … “don't level off an empty jar on my account …” (95).⁵⁶ The first word of her reply … also defiantly highlights the Doric accent that “grates” on the bystander's ears. Praxinoa's self-assertion underscores her right to speak differently from the bystander. Second, Praxinoa understands that the bystander is attempting to exclude Gorgo and herself from the social community by editorializing about them in the third person (88); and she reverses the insult by speaking of him in the third person … “where does this man come from?” (89). She also identifies herself and Gorgo with a regional group (Syracusans) that excludes him, … “You're giving orders to Syracusans …” (90). Third, Praxinoa understands the bystander to be calling Gorgo and herself slaves: he gives orders to them … “stop, you wretched women” … (87) in the same way Praxinoa gives orders to her slave … “wretched woman, stop” … (31-32), and she tells him to save that language for his slaves: … “If you have slaves, order them around” … (90). Fourth, Praxinoa understands the bystander to be denying the women freedom during a festival that grants them license, and her reply shows that she values autonomy: … “Let there be no master over us, honey-goddess, / except one” … (94-95).

Gow identifies the master here “as the king, rather than her husband for whom in any case she has scant respect.”⁵⁷ Dover agrees with this identification, but points out the incongruity in these circumstances of such a politically motivated clause: “We may doubt whether an indignant Syracusan housewife at Alexandria, reproving an impertinent stranger, would remember this humble compliment to Ptolemy.”⁵⁸ But the nonspecificity of the language leaves the question of identity open and invites speculation. I would like to suggest that the language could also imply Adonis as master. It would not be uncharacteristic for Praxinoa, in the context of the Adonia, after a bystander expresses disgust at her praise of Adonis, to insinuate slyly that she would not mind having Adonis as “master.” Such a desire would not jeopardize her claim to autonomy. Praxinoa will not be mastered: she has already shown that her husband is not a god to her. Further, Praxinoa's invocation of Melitodes, if this “honey-goddess” is Persephone (as the scholia suggest), would also support an interpretation of the “one master” as Adonis, since Praxinoa's underlying hypomnesis (precedent for the goddess's attention to her appeal) would be Persephone's own interest in Adonis (she is his mistress for a third of the year).

Praxinoa's final injunction … “don't level off an empty jar on my account …” (95) underscores the distance between Praxinoa and the male bystander. Basically, she is saying that the bystander's effort to silence her is a waste of time. Through this colloquial phrase, Praxinoa asserts her right to be there and to say anything she wants. Also, by having Praxinoa use rhetoric from the kitchen, the poet artfully illumines the social issues at stake here. The Adonia is traditionally a women's festival, women's discourse is appropriate for this environment, and the bystander has no right to complain. The movement of the festival from private to public brings women into the public realm and with them women's rhetoric.

Praxinoa's reply shows how common language, characterized by domestic proverbs and female oaths, can incorporate high culture's literary language as well, for she responds to the bystander's challenge, with its underlying presumption of a speech code that excludes women, by appropriating the male heroic strategies of a verbal duel. She validates her social history by tracing the lineage of the Doric dialect back to the hero Bellerophon. Her use of Homeric diction and a genealogical self-defense bridges the distanced world of myth and her own time.⁵⁹ …

Praxinoa appropriates diction and theme from the male-defined, militaristic world of Homeric duels to challenge a man who attempts to silence her. Her street tactics include cleverly recasting her opponent's insults. She defuses the bystander's insulting description of herself and Gorgo as … “twittering …” (87) by first appropriating the cognate noun … “What's it to you if we twitter?” (89), then neatly transforming this defiant assertion into a declaration of genealogy, matched in phoneme and phraseology: … “We are Corinthians by descent, / like Bellerophon” … (91-92). The bystander's remarks indicate that the women's speech is as foreign to him as the twittering of birds. Praxinoa's retort, on the other hand, shows that she not only understands, but can also appropriate the rhetoric of the dominant male world.⁶⁰ Praxinoa's choice of Bellerophon as heroic ancestor, who is characterized like Adonis by youthful vulnerability and a talent for attracting powerful, older women (e.g., Proetus's wife),⁶¹ also contributes toward her refashioning of normative gender behavior.

By linking Praxinoa's focus on Adonis's androgyny with Praxinoa's rebellious attitude toward the bystander's criticism of her speech, the poet also connects gender doubt (a sexuality that can evoke eros in both men and women) with gender freedom. Praxinoa demonstrates gender freedom by publicly engaging in a verbal duel with a male stranger, a behavior customarily restricted in Greek society to men. So too Adonis's ambivalent model of manhood opposes the agonistic ideal that shapes the behavior of the bellicose bystander.

The bystander claims that Praxinoa and Gorgo are broadening and flattening their sounds. But the sounds that they make are definitely not flattened. Praxinoa's speech in praise of Adonis is Hellenistic in its variegation of detail and shape; it is also the language of epiphany spoken by poets like Sappho. Praxinoa characterizes her language as an international Doric that unites realms opposite in value and historical perspective, e.g., the Peloponnese, in general unrefined, and cultivated Corinth. Further, Praxinoa and Gorgo have brought this speech from Syracuse, Sicily, to Alexandria, Egypt. The sounds of a speech that brings together such diverse worlds should not be tedious. Praxinoa acclaims her international status. In a time marked by historical change and syncretism of language, she will not let her speech be squashed or confined to a single style, genre, diction. Instead she revels in its motley architecture and defiantly exalts the emergence of her folk language into the public realm. Thus Praxinoa's reply becomes a resonant linguistic moment in which the poet expresses programmatic values (e.g., the value of mixing levels of diction such as Homeric and folk-Doric in a single poem).⁶² Praxinoa's language reflects her life: she rejects the bystander's attempt to homogenize and dismiss people. She asserts her right to be a Doric speaker, a Syracusan, and a woman.

How has Praxinoa, initially timid on the street, afraid of horses and men, come to this point of defiance against the bystander's attempt to control her? She treats the man who interrupts her praise of the tapestries differently from the way she treats the man who helps her with her cloak. During the encounter with the polite man (70-75), his considerate treatment changes her attitude and her language. Calling the crowd “pigs” is her way to apologize to the nice man who said, “I can't protect you but I will do my best” (my paraphrase of 72), for she associates him with herself and her companions in opposition to the “pigs.” Her experience affects her, and she now speaks gracious language in regard to the helpful man: … “May you be in beauty …” (74). In the next encounter with a man (87-95), an eavesdropping bystander insults the Syracusan women when they are responding to the dimension of eros in religion and art. But this time, when someone abuses Praxinoa on a crude level, she puts him down with Theocritean manners (niceness).⁶³ Instead of responding with Callimachean “iambics” (the vile Assyrian river),⁶⁴ she uses Theocritean irony, a universalizing rhetoric that adopts eristics to make harmony.

The parallels between Praxinoa and Gorgo's fictive biography and the poet's own also can affect the reader's perceptions of the interaction between the bystander and the Syracusan women. Like Praxinoa and Gorgo, Theocritus himself is an immigrant from Syracuse. The bystander is slandering Doric, but the poet's native dialect is Doric, and his poems, written primarily in Doric, are trying to find audience in the Alexandrian court. By double voicing this passage, by addressing the bystander's remarks as much to the poem's “real” audience as to the Adonia's fictive crowd, the poet can anticipate responses to the poem itself, as well as to the hybridization characteristic of his poetry as a whole:⁶⁵ his presentation in hexameter poetry of “low” speech (everyday, domestic, Doric) and marginal characters (herdsmen, women, mercenaries, monsters), which involves the piquant mixing of “low” and “high” levels of style, genre, language, and character. Thus, in “Idyll 15,” the immigrant poet exploits the voice of immigrants in a witty self-irony which could also deflect criticism of his poetic enterprise.

The question naturally arises: after hearing Praxinoa's remarks about Adonis and the bystander's rebuff, is the poem's “real” audience going to side with the bystander or Praxinoa? Many have sided with the bystander. He represents a culturally validated prejudice against marginal figures. But the choices are not limited to a simple dichotomy. The poem is polysemous. The bystander represents a break for the poet from imaginatively projecting into Praxinoa's and Gorgo's experiences. The women live their lives; the bystander observes, and his mockery is ironically and self-consciously interrogated.

WOMEN AND POWER

Traditionally in the ancient Greek world men attained power through physical force and public political activity. Women had fewer avenues to power: generally smaller and physically weaker than men, they were excluded from military power and also from public political life. In the Hellenistic world, however, men were losing their sense of public power due to the ascendancy of autocratic hegemonies and mercenary soldiery, and women were becoming more visible in the public arena, as shown by, e.g., terracotta representations of girls wearing cloaks and carrying tablets, presumably on their way to school.⁶⁶ The public presence of Hellenistic queens offered women a new model of feminine power and Greek males a gendered reminder of their relative powerlessness in the state. Greek men and women in Egypt especially, with its long tradition of relative equality for women, were witnessing different modes of gender behavior. The changing social conditions, both on the public and the private level, were destabilizing traditional Greek assumptions about relations of power between men and women.

Theocritus's three urban mimes, Idylls “2,” “14,” and “15,” all feature self-assertive women retaliating against traditional male acts that threaten their sense of self: in “Idyll 2,” when Delphis cavalierly deserts her, Simaetha takes active retaliatory steps through magic; in “Idyll 14,” when Aeschinas beats her, Cynisca protests by leaving his symposium (and his life); in “Idyll 15,” when a male bystander tries to shame Praxinoa into silence, Praxinoa vigorously asserts her right to public speech. The previous section focused on representations of direct male-female interactions in Theocritus's urban mimes. This section examines other ways in which the topic of women's power emerges in Theocritus's poems as a central thematic concern, with attention to the themes of magic, motherhood, and the relations of powerful females and subordinate males. Select works of other Hellenistic poets are also included for comparative purposes.

The resources available to a woman mistreated by a man in ancient Greek society varied depending on class, status, and ethnicity. If a Greek woman had a kurios (male guardian) available, she could rely on him to take appropriate measures on her behalf. But a mobile world intensified problems of female protection and retribution. The rise of marriage contracts in the Hellenistic age addressed some of these problems by specifically spelling out the obligations of both partners and by allowing the woman, in the case of a dispute, to appeal directly to outside parties approved by both husband and wife.⁶⁷ But contracts were not available to cover other tricky situations, such as the plight of a woman who, abandoned by a male lover, finds herself without kin to defend her publicly (e.g., Theocritus's Simaetha).

Witchraft offered one countercultural, private source of psychological power to women who were seemingly without recourse. The story of Medea, one of the three great witches in Greek literature and myth (the other two being Hecate and Circe), shows the kind of isolation that could provoke the use of magic. In Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica, Medea's appeal to Jason to take her with him to the Greek world underscores the vulnerable position of a woman immigrant separated from her family: …

          Do not expose me to insult and disgrace when I have left
my country far away and have no kinsmen to protect me.

(Argon. 4.90-91 O.C.T.) (trans. Rieu, Apollonius, 149)

Euripides' Medea illustrates what can happen when a man disregards such an injunction and deserts an inconvenient woman in order to marry into power.⁶⁸ Isolated in Corinth, an alien woman without official support, Medea turns to Hecate, the sinister goddess of witchcraft, to help her avenge her injuries: …

It shall not be—I swear it by her, my mistress,
Whom most I honor and have chosen as partner,
Hecate, who dwells in the recesses of my hearth—
That any man shall be glad to have injured me.

(395-98 O.C.T.) (trans. Warner, Medea, 72)

By having Medea locate Hecate, goddess of public crossroads, at the heart of her household,⁶⁹ Euripides suggests Medea has turned the house against its former master, Jason, and remade it into a nucleus of power from which she moves against Corinth's hegemony.

Theocritus's “Idyll 2” provides an elaborated and sustained representation of a woman empowering herself against an aristocratic Greek male's assumption of sexual privilege and social domination. Hecate, Circe, and Medea (Circe's niece) dominate the Greek literary and mythic tradition of witchcraft. In “Idyll 2,” by invoking her powerful predecessors in moving against Delphis, Simaetha shows that she understands herself to be participating in a strong female tradition of witchcraft: …

Hail, dread Hecate, and attend me to the end,
making my drugs as strong as Circe's
or Medea's or blond Perimede's.

(14-16)

Delphis is at the center of a male-dominated elitist Greek world, defined by gymnasia and symposia. To counter his position of power, Simaetha is relocating herself into an alternative world of magic that privileges women rather than men.

A consideration of how Theocritus shapes Simaetha's magic is central to a discussion of the theme of women and power in Theocritus's poetry, for Simaetha's magic aims at subverting Delphis's public self and male autonomy.⁷⁰ Repetitions of vocabulary and themes in Simaetha's magic rites and self-narration show Simaetha acting out the reversal of normative relations of dominance and subordination she wishes to effect between herself and Delphis.

First, Simaetha is seeking through magic to dominate Delphis by evoking in him the love symptoms he induced in her. Thus she evokes the symptoms of burning … (“may Delphis's flesh be destroyed in the flame” 26; … “I am all on fire for him …” 40); consumption … (“may he waste with love for me …” 29; … “my beauty wasted for him …” 83); and madness … (“like a man driven mad / may he come to this house,” 50-51; … “when I saw him I was driven mad …” 82).

Second, in her magic rites Simaetha appropriates symbols of Delphis's patriarchal world and uses them against him. In preparation for a binding-spell against Delphis, Simaetha orders her slave to wreathe a bowl with crimson wool (2), and she calls the bowl … a term applied to vessels used at symposia.⁷¹ Delphis described himself to Simaetha as a would-be sympotic komastes (reveller), wearing a wreath entwined with crimson bands (121), and Simaetha learned of his defection when a woman reported that he left a symposium to wreathe a house with garlands (153). The komastes typically performs ritual acts of seduction (a komos) at the beloved's house door: Simaetha's slave Thestylis is to perform ritual acts on Delphis's doorstep (60-62). Further, by casting a spell to make Delphis turn at her door like the bronze rhomb she whirls (30-31),⁷² Simaetha would trap Delphis in a dizzying command performance of a komos ritual.

Third, in reversing their gendered roles of power, Simaetha uses Delphis's most characteristic trait, his fickleness, against him: …

Whether a woman is lying by him or a man,
may he be as forgetful of them as Theseus, they say,
once forgot fair-haired Ariadne on Dia.

(44-46)

In using an analogy suited to herself (an Ariadne forgotten by a Theseus), Simaetha seeks to rewrite the mythic story. In her revisionist version, Ariadne will triumph over Theseus: Delphis will forget his current lover and return to her.

Delphis, a star member of the gymnastic and sympotic set, repeatedly left his oil flask with Simaetha: she interprets this act as a sign of her power over his world (155-58). Now that Delphis has abandoned her, Simaetha seeks, through magic, to separate Delphis from the sporting life: …

                                        And like a man driven mad
may he come to this house from the shiny palaestra.

(50-51)

The repetition in the poem of the verb … to be driven mad … in association with sites of athletic activity (50-51, 80, 82) underscores the theme of power reversal. Simaetha was driven mad by the sight of Delphis, glistening, fresh from the gymnasium (79-80, 82). Now she wants him driven mad and forced outside … the shiny palaestra, back into her domestic world.⁷³ By showing how Simaetha's ritual overturns conventions of Delphis's world, the poet evokes male fears that women might use magic to control and redefine them, that through witchcraft women might redefine terms of sexual discourse.

Repetitions of the word [kakós] in “Idyll 2” show how language can reinforce positions of power and also mirror the shifting of power relations. Delphis had plunged Simaetha into a crisis of self-identity: … “He has made me, instead of a wife, a bad woman, and a maid no more” … (41). But Simaetha moves away from a patriarchal world that ranks her as … bad … by her sexual relations with men into an alternative realm in which … bad things can work in her favor. Empowered by Hecate in a world of witchcraft, Simaetha is bringing [bad things] against Delphis: … “I'll mash a lizard and bring Delphis a bad drink tomorrow …” (58).⁷⁴ … Although Simaetha begins her self-narration by seeing herself as victim … “Who brought this badness upon me?” (65), by the poem's end Simaetha has established herself in the position of controlling subject rather than victim: …

Now with spells I will bind him; and if he hurts me still,
by the Fates, he shall knock on Hades' gate,
such bad drugs, I swear, I keep for him in my box.

(159-61)

Simaetha's redescription of Delphis's and her relationship ends by affirming the power reversal between Delphis and herself: when Delphis had been her suitor, he regularly knocked at her “door” (6); now, if he continues to play komastes elsewhere, she will use bad drugs (from her “box”) against him. She will reverse the terms of eroticism and send him to play komastes at Hades' door.

Through the emotional experience of magic rites, by acting out matching retributions for her maltreatment, Simaetha releases herself from her dependency on Delphis and from society's hierarchical constraints: the poem starts with her resolve to go to Delphis's wrestling school tomorrow and reproach him (8-9), but it ends with her vow to kill him if necessary (159-62). The crisis of identity and emotional turmoil caused by Delphis separates Simaetha from her environment: …

The sea is still, and the breezes are still;
yet the anguish in my breast will not be still.

(38-39)

In the course of the poem, through sympathetic magic and reciprocal self-narration, Simaetha changes the terms of sexual discourse and moves toward creating a more satisfactory world and self-identity for herself.

Allegory further enhances “Idyll 2”'s presentation of Simaetha's process of reclaiming herself. Midway to Lycon's place (place of the wolf, a wild predator), Simaetha saw Delphis, and the sight distracted her from Artemis's festival: … “No longer did I take notice of / that procession …” (83-84). She turned away from her path toward Artemis, mistress of fierce beasts (67-68), chaste goddess of the wild, to pursue Delphis (an Apollo figure, Artemis's seductive twin).⁷⁵ At the poem's end, Simaetha is finding a way to return to her former path, to regain a sense of power over herself and her world. Her willingness to kill her violator Delphis (159-60), her desire to rid herself of his intrusion into her life, also suggests a turning back toward Artemis, goddess of independence from men, the goddess who destroyed Actaeon for seeing her naked.⁷⁶

At the poem's end, Simaetha transfers the quality of shining from Delphis and his friend (… “[whose] breasts were far more shining than you, Selene [the Moon]”; 79)⁷⁷ to Selene, invoked as … “of the shining throne …” (165). Griffiths suggests that this reversal signifies Simaetha's move away from her own world: “Though Simaetha is venturing again into somewhat heightened poetic usages, she is no longer applying them to her own experiences. She is, rather, finding momentary release by projecting her sensuality into a removed aesthetic realm.”⁷⁸ Yet by having Simaetha strip Delphis of his adjective and give it to the Moon, her ally in magic, Theocritus also shows Simaetha deconstructing her image of Delphis and returning from her obsession with his world to reclaim her own life.⁷⁹ Thus Simaetha's farewell to the moon and the night … (“tranquil night …” 166) suggests movement away from the turmoil caused by Delphis: …

Farewell, Selene of the shining throne, and farewell you other
stars that attend upon the chariot of tranquil Night.

(165-66)

The night is over, and the moon has played her role as confidant in Simaetha's ritual therapy.

“Idyll 2” reflects male concerns about the increased visibility of women in the Hellenistic world by suggesting the possibility of fearful female vengeance in the everyday world. Egypt's long tradition of rituals of enchantment, now more visible to Greeks due to Egypt's prominence in the Hellenistic Greek world,⁸⁰ may have strengthened Greek male anxieties about aliens and others (e.g., females) using magic to limit Greek male autonomy.

Ritual activities that particularly encouraged the acting out of oppositional positions toward gender roles and institutions of power among the Greeks include Dionysiac rites, witchcraft, and the worship of foreign gods. Theocritus's poems featuring women's religious activities highlight their countercultural aspects. In “Idyll 26,” bacchantes perform mystic rituals and then ecstatically dismember Pentheus, Thebe's king (and Agave's son). In “Idyll 2,” Simaetha first saw Delphis, whom she unconventionally pursued, at a festival of Artemis, goddess of the hunt (68), female initiations, and the wild. Simaetha's ritual magic also involves invoking Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, and Selene, the Moon goddess, both outside the Olympian establishment. “Idyll 15” represents an Adonia, which celebrates Aphrodite's extramarital reunion with Adonis, a subordinated young male related to the Babylonian Tammuz, among others.⁸¹ The Adonia was traditionally a countercultural festival celebrated privately by women; in “Idyll 15,” Theocritus explores the social dynamics involved when this formerly subversive festival is sponsored by Queen Arsinoe and celebrated in the center of the Ptolemaic state.

The subject of the capacity of women's communities and religious rituals to subvert traditional male power was popular among other Hellenistic Greek poets as well. Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica features several oppositional or intrusive female communities: Medea and her sister Chalciope plot against their father, Colchis's ruler; the Lemnian women threaten to abort Jason's heroic quest; Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena plot to manipulate Jason and Medea. Callimachus's Hymn 6 includes the story of how Demeter punished a man for violating her grove by having him consume his family's estate; Callimachus's Hymn 5, how Athena punished a boy with blindness for gazing on her naked. Several of Herodas's mimes starring women also focus on ways female activities and friendships can overturn male assumptions of dominance and power (Mimes 3 and 6 are discussed later in this chapter).

Throughout Greek history, religious ceremonies, including funerals, provided standard occasions for women to enter the public domain, where they might encounter men,⁸² and Hellenistic poets follow an established poetic tradition in using religious rituals to facilitate fictive encounters between men and women (e.g., Men. Citharista 93-97, Sam. 38-49 O.C.T.). As mentioned above, in Theocritus's “Idyll 2,” Simaetha was accompanying a friend to a festival of Artemis when she saw Delphis and fell in love. So too in “Idyll 15,” Praxinoa and Gorgo, on their way to the festival of Adonis, encounter several men (and an old woman).⁸³ Also, in Herodas's Mime 1, Metriche's athletic suitor first saw her at a festival of the goddess Mise (56),⁸⁴ and in Callimachus's Aetia 3, frs. 67-75, Acontius fell in love with Cydippe at a Delian festival of Apollo (frs. 67.5-6, 70).

Other Hellenistic poems featuring more benign women's religious activities include Herodas's Mime 4, which represents women visiting a shrine of Asclepius (see chapter 3 for discussion). Further, Theocritus's “Idyll 24,” an epic narrative, highlights a mother's religious role: Teiresias directs Alcmene to burn at midnight the snakes that attacked her sons, to have them cast from the community at dawn, to fumigate the house, and then to sacrifice a boar.⁸⁵ Callimachus's poetry also features women's religious communities, e.g., Hymn 5's female celebrants of Athena, as well as Athena and her company of maidens, and Hymn 6's female celebrants of Demeter.⁸⁶

The motif of hostilities between male intruders and female celebrants is traditional in literary representations of women's ceremonies: in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, Euripides' relation Mnesilochus dresses in drag to infiltrate the Thesmophoria; in Euripides' Bacchae, Pentheus dresses in drag to spy on bacchantes. In Theocritus's “Idyll 26,” also featuring bacchantes, the poet heightens the sense of male violation of female space by having Pentheus spy on women engaged in the most secret ritual activities: removing holy things from a mystic chest and laying them on altars (7-8).⁸⁷ But by focusing on human agency in the destruction of Pentheus, not divine agency, the poet can underscore the fearsome power of women to destroy men.⁸⁸ Callimachus's Hymns 5 and 6 also underscore the exclusion of males from female religious celebrations through cautionary stories that reinforce the principle of female inviolability.⁸⁹ But in both these poems, unlike Theocritus's “Idyll 26,” the agent of the male's destruction is a goddess, not a mortal female: in Hymn 5, Teiresias sees Athena naked and she blinds him; in Hymn 6, Erysichthon violates Demeter's sacred grove to cut trees for a dining hall and she curses him with insatiable hunger.⁹⁰

Differences in the ways Theocritus and Callimachus handle the topic of childbirth exemplify differences in their approaches to the issue of women and power. Theocritus's “Idyll 17,” Ptolemy's encomium, features the theme of Ptolemy II's birth from Berenice. Childbirth is a conventional hymnic topic (e.g., Hymn. Hom. Ap.; Callim. Hymn 1, to Zeus, and Hymn 4, to Delos), and “Idyll 17”'s poet-narrator conventionally enhances the theme of Ptolemy's birth by associating it with legendary warrior births: the Argive woman's bearing Diomedes to Tydeus and Thetis's bearing Achilles to Peleus (53-56). But in commemorating the marriage union of Ptolemy's parents, the poet also emphasizes sources of male matrimonial anxiety: …

But if a woman know not conjugal love, her mind is ever set on others; easily she gives birth, but the children resemble not their sire.

(43-44) (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:133)

Further, assurances of legitimacy precede the narrative of Ptolemy's birth too: … “And in his father's likeness / was he born, a child beloved”; trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:135 … (63-64). The focus here is the woman's power over her husband in determining the legitimacy of offspring and the danger a wife's infidelity would create in a household (and in the Ptolemies' case, the state). Thus Ptolemy's encomium, “Idyll 17,” includes the theme of a woman's power to determine the legitimacy and claim of a child to patrimony and also raises the issue of a woman's role in a patriarchal system. Matrilineal identifications emphasize the themes of motherhood and female transmission of power in “Idyll 17:” Berenice, Ptolemy's mother, is identified as Antigone's daughter (61); Aphrodite, as Dione's daughter (36).⁹¹ Further, “Idyll 18”'s wedding song exalts Helen's importance (and undermines Menelaus's) by wishing they might have a child resembling its mother, not its father (21).⁹²

Lysias's Euphiletus, in defending his killing of his wife's seducer Eratosthenes, shows the depth of male, patriarchal anxiety about the possibility of a woman having an extramarital affair: …

Those who have got their way by persuasion corrupt women's minds, in such a way as to make other men's wives more attached to themselves than to their husbands, so that the whole house is in their power, and it is uncertain who is the children's father, the husband or the lover.

(Lys. I.33 O.C.T.) (trans. Freeman, “Killing of Eratosthenes,” 49)

Herodas too pays special attention to the issue of female sexual fidelity in a mobile world. In Mime 1, an old bawd urges a young married woman to have an extramarital affair while her husband is away in Egypt. Mime 6 evokes male anxieties about sexual roles and the problem of infidelity: two women discuss dildoes, which Koritto claims, if well made, can be more than adequate substitutes for men (69-71). The importance of wifely loyalty for legitimate offspring is an ongoing motif in marriage songs (e.g., Cat. 61.217-26) and also in descriptions of ideal or alternative worlds (e.g., Hes. Op. 235; Hor. Od. 4.5.23; Mart. 6.27.3-4).

When Callimachus's poetry features the theme of childbirth, the focus is on the birthing process itself, with emphasis on female vulnerability and suffering. The emphasis on suffering in childbirth is not new with Callimachus, of course: the high risks of childbirth in the ancient world were notable.⁹³ But the point here is that suffering in childbirth is the focus of Callimachus's representations of childbirth and that this focus contrasts dramatically with Theocritus's focus on women's power in relation to children's legitimacy. Callimachus's Hymn 1 includes the story of how Rhea gave birth to Zeus and searched in distress for water afterwards (10-41). Hymn 3 identifies the unjust city as a place where women suffer and die in childbirth and bear lame children (126-28). Hymn 4 features the story of the unhappy wanderings of pregnant Leto (55-263), persecuted by Hera and dominated by her unborn son, who issues orders from the womb (162-95; cf. 86-99). Also in Hymn 4, Hera curses Zeus's mistresses with unhappy, difficult childbirth: …

And [may you] bring forth in darkness, not even where the poor mill-women bring forth in difficult labour, but where the seals of the sea bring forth, amid the desolate rocks.

(241-43) (trans. Mair, “Callimachus,” 105)

Further, Epigram 53, in giving thanks to Eileithuia for the easy birth of a daughter and praying for the easy birth of a son, reflects the theme of difficult childbirth and the long tradition of Greek women's prayers and offerings to Eileithuia and other birth goddesses.⁹⁴

Writing in a Hellenistic world defined by autocratic hegemonies, which denied Greek men political self-determination and placed them in positions of dependency instead, Theocritus repeatedly introduces into his poems the motif of strong mothers and dependent sons. “Idyll 11” exemplifies the Theocritean theme of the complicated interdependency between mothers and sons. An adolescent cyclops blames his mother for not assisting him in his courtship of Galatea, but he also expresses confidence that she will empathize with his suffering if he tells her of it: …

My mother alone it is who wrongs me, and her I blame;
for never once has she spoken a kindly word for me to thee,
though she sees me growing thinner day by day.
I will tell her my head throbs, and both my feet,
that she may suffer since I too suffer.

(67-71) (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:91)

“Idyll 11” emphasizes a mother's striking independence from family concerns: she consorts with a female friend (Galatea) and ignores her son's needs and demands. Further, the role that Polyphemus assigns his mother of arranging courtship/marriage was traditionally assigned to the father in the Greek world.⁹⁵ But in Theocritus's “Idyll 11,” no mention of a father interferes with the strained relations between Polyphemus and his mother.⁹⁶

“Idyll 24,” on Heracles' infancy and early childhood, also focuses on a mother's relations with her sons. Although the poem includes a father, his less-than-attentive presence contrasts with Alcmene's dominating role in her sons' upbringing: she roused her husband, still sleeping, when baby Iphicles cried in fright; she summoned Teiresias to learn the meaning of the snake incident after her husband had gone back to bed; she directed Heracles' education, even choosing his tutors. More incidental mentions of close relationships between mothers and sons appear in Idylls “10” and “12:” “Idyll 10”'s Milon mockingly urges the lovelorn Bucaeus to complain to his mother when she rises in the morning (57-58); “Idyll 12”'s poet-narrator notes that the winner of a boys' kissing contest returns, laden with garlands, to his mother (32-33). “Idyll 26” represents the most dysfunctional of Theocritus's mother-son relationships: the sparagmos (dismemberment) of Pentheus at the hands of his mother and aunts.⁹⁷ Further, “Idyll 26”'s narrator's suggestion that a similar fate might yet befall some nine- or ten-year-old male child (28-29) brings the threat of the terrible, destroying mother figure into the contemporary world.⁹⁸

In “Idyll 15,” Theocritus offers a paradigm of the process of power reversal between mothers and sons, as sons grow up. Within the context of the household, women can exercise power over males: Praxinoa and Gorgo complain about their husbands and Praxinoa invokes the female bogey Mormo, a surrogate dread mother, to scare her male child. Praxinoa's repetition of the verb … to lock up, … used first when she leaves the house (43) and again when she and her companions enter the palace grounds (77), signifies how relations change, however, between mothers and male children. While a son is still young, a mother can lock him at home, invoke the biting horse and bogeywoman, protect him from the outside world: …

                    I will not take you, child. Mormo, the horse bites.
Cry however much you like, but I won't have you maimed.
Let's go. Phrygia, take the little one and play with him.
Call the female dog inside; lock up the front door.

(40-43)

But when a child becomes a man, the power shifts and he now does the locking up: … “‘All women inside,’ said the man, locking the door on the bride” … (77). Through Praxinoa's use of this proverb as the women reach the festival grounds of the Adonia, a celebration of the extramarital union of a goddess and her young consort, the poet underscores how the Adonia subverts normative, gendered relations: a bridegroom may dominate a bride, but not when the principals are Adonis and Aphrodite. Further, the Adonia offers women respite from their husbands' locks.⁹⁹ Also, by having Praxinoa use this phrase as she herself appropriates the bridegroom's power in ushering her companions inside the palace grounds,¹⁰⁰ Theocritus wryly highlights the distance between normative, traditional expectations about gender relations (and women's submissive behavior) and Alexandria's changing social world (as represented in the poem by, e.g., Praxinoa's assertion of liberty on public streets).

Matrilineal identifications underscore the thematic importance of women in “Idyll 15:” the hymnist is identified as the Argive woman's daughter (97), Arsinoe as Berenice's daughter (110), and Aphrodite as Dione's daughter (106). A further matrilineal description occurs in the catalogue of heroes, for the hymnist identifies Hector as Hecuba's eldest son (139).¹⁰¹ Further, no identifications by father are made for women throughout the poem. By focusing on matrilineal identifications in the context of representing a festival sponsored by Queen Arsinoe and honoring her mother, Theocritus also emphasizes the transmission of power and identity from mother to daughter.

Herodas's poetry too includes the theme of the terrible, domineering mother. In Mime 3, Metrotime (honored mother) urges her son's schoolteacher Lampriskos¹⁰² to beat her son: …

As you wish for any pleasure from the dear Muses,
Lampriskos, and to enjoy your life,
so do you beat this fellow a-shoulder, till his life—
curse it—remain hanging on his lips.

(1-4) (trans. Knox, in Headlam and Knox, Herodas, 111)

Like Theocritus's “Idyll 24,” Mime 3 puts emphasis on the mother's role in her son's education: …

                                                                                                    [I called]
myself a fool for not teaching him
to feed asses, rather than to learn letters
in the hope that I might have a support in my old age.

(26-29) (trans. Knox, in Headlam and Knox, Herodas, 111-13)

The parents share in the son's training: the son was expected to recite tragic speeches to either Metrotime or his father by command (30-31)¹⁰³ Through Metrotime's description of her husband as elderly and hard of hearing and sight (32), the poet emphasizes how the natural age discrepancy between men and women in a Greek household might result in an inversion of gender authority in the household over time: the mother would be better able to hear the son's recitations. The mother here takes charge of disciplining the son, even to the point of going to his school and giving orders to his teacher.

In Mime 3, the socioeconomic status of the family is low: they live in joint housing; the son's education and his damage to the tenement's roof tiling take up most of the household budget; the family grandma is illiterate and destitute. Metrotime's use of analogy emphasizes her frustrated ambitions for her son: …

See now in what a state of grime all his back has become,
in his wanderings on the hills, as with some Delian
lobster-catcher wasting his dull life on the sea.

(50-52) (trans. Knox, in Headlam and Knox, Herodas, 113)

Metrotime's bitter severity against her son reflects an understanding that she must rely on him for security in old age (29).¹⁰⁴ The emphasis in Herodas's Mime 3, as well as Theocritus's “Idyll 24,” on a mother's concern about her son's education may also reflect the increased urgency in a mobile Hellenistic world for women to secure their futures for themselves. So too the rise in educational opportunities for girls during the Hellenistic period would have familiarized more women with teaching techniques: in Herodas's Mime 3, the mother helps her son with his homework and advises the schoolmaster; in Theocritus's “Idyll 24,” the mother chooses her son's tutors.

Mime 3's Metrotime resents the thanklessness of her sacrifices for her son. Instead of writing on the wax tablets she so carefully prepares, he throws them down or scrapes off their wax (14-18); he knows the way to the gambling den but not to school (8-13); rather than attend class or study, he gambles (5-21), sits on the rooftop (40-41), eats grandma's food (38-39), and roams about (50-52). Metrotime's resolve at the poem's close underscores her controlling, aggressive urges toward her son (and her dominance over her husband). When the schoolmaster stops flogging her son, despite her insistence that he continue (87-92), Metrotime announces she will fetch footstraps from home so that her son might be publicly fettered for humiliation (94-97). She does not propose to discuss the course of action with her husband, but simply to inform him (94): her disrespect is shown by the term she uses for him, … old man.

The diminishment of the husband's authority in the household is also a theme in Herodas's Mime 5, in which the mistress of the household, Bitinna, has taken a young male slave, Gastron, as sexual consort.¹⁰⁵ In a world restricting extramarital sex to men,¹⁰⁶ Bitinna, a married woman, claims extramarital privilege and challenges the tradition that only free males could consider slaves as sexual opportunities.¹⁰⁷ The poem opens with Bitinna's suspicion that Gastron (Glutton) has become so … overfull … with sexual privilege that he now consorts with another married woman as well (1-3). Gastron's infidelity diminishes Bitinna's self-image and authority in the household: she tries to reassert her position as mistress of the house by having him bound and publicly flogged. Bitinna's oath by a female tyrant (… “no, by the female tyrant”; 77) underscores her assumption of a tyrant's role over Gastron (and the household). In Herodas's poems, as well as in some of Theocritus's poems featuring women (e.g., Idylls “2” and “15”), the notable absence of male kurioi (guardians)—e.g., husbands, fathers, and other male relatives¹⁰⁸—which may reflect a growing reality related to mobility,¹⁰⁹ puts an emphasis on women's attempts to make a way for themselves in the world.

In Callimachus's poetry, unlike Theocritus's and Herodas's, fathers (not mothers) typically take aggressive action in the case of household disruptions. In the Aetia's story of Acontius and Cydippe, when Cydippe became ill, her father responds by consulting the oracle about her marriage and then questioning her about her condition (Aet. 3, fr. 75.20-39). So too in Hymn 6, when Erysichthon becomes insatiably hungry, his father seeks outside help (96-106), while his mother just turns down embarrassing social invitations (75-86) and weeps (94-95). By contrast, in Theocritus's “Idyll 24,” as discussed above, the mother Alcmene (not the father) consults a seer about her son's strange powers over snakes. Another of Callimachus's poems that highlights the father's power is Callimachus's Hymn 3, which features Artemis's appeal to her father Zeus for perpetual virginity.

Callimachus's poetry, like Theocritus's, includes representations of relations between mothers and sons. But while Theocritus's fictive mothers take strong, aggressive roles (e.g., “Idyll 24”'s Alcmene), Callimachus's fictive mothers are generally put in weak or subordinated positions. In Callimachus's Hymns 5 and 6, mortal mothers cannot save their sons from the terrible punishments goddesses give them: Chariclo cannot save Teiresias from Athena's blinding him (Hymn 5); Erysichthon's parents cannot save him from Demeter's curse of insatiable hunger (Hymn 6).¹¹⁰ Instead of Theocritus's strong and controlling mothers, sorrowing mothers are an important theme in Callimachus's poetry.¹¹¹ In Hymn 5's cautionary tale, Chariclo grieves for her blinded son Teiresias (93-95). In Hymn 6's cautionary tale, Erysichthon's mother (with other women of the household) bemoans her son's insatiable hunger (94-95). Also, the start of Hymn 6 features Demeter's sad search for her daughter Persephone (10-17), Greek mythology's most paradigmatic example of the sorrowing mother theme. In Hymn 2, the hymnist-narrator quiets celebrants by noting that Apollo's paean can silence even the laments of Thetis and Niobe, also mythic paradigms of sorrowing mothers (20-24).

A related theme in Callimachus's poems is nurturant reciprocity between younger males and older, maternal females, mourned after their death.¹¹²Epigram 40 commemorates an old priestess who died in the arms of her two sons; Epigram 50, a Phrygian nurse, whom Miccus, a former nurseling, cared for in her old age and honored with a statue after her death. Callimachus's epic poem Hecale, which features an old woman who offers a young hero hospitality on his journey, elaborates the theme of the nurturing older woman, lamented after death by the young male she helped. When Theseus returns from his heroic exploit and seeks Hecale, he discovers she has died, and the poem includes Hecale's posthumous honors (Hecale frs. 79-83, Hollis, pp. 263-69).

In contrast to the sorrowing, maternal figures who nurture young males in Callimachus's poetry, older women in Theocritus's idylls are typically strong, and their relationships with young males are often nonnurturant,¹¹³ erotic,¹¹⁴ and even magic (old women are valued for their magic charms and powers).¹¹⁵ Theocritus's extant poetry does not feature sorrowing mothers, even when such a plot motif might seem natural: thus in “Idyll 26,” Agave does not lament after dismembering her son.¹¹⁶Idylls “1” and “15” feature the related theme of how a young male's premature death affects females (other than his mother). But here too the theme of lamentation is displaced and diminished. In “Idyll 1,” Daphnis's story deflects the theme of female lamention for Daphnis to the animal kingdom. The Muses, nymphs, and Aphrodite do not sorrow for Daphnis (despite the Muses' love and nymphs' fondness for him [141], and Aphrodite's regret when he dies [138-39]). Instead jackals, wolves, a lion, and cattle bewail Daphnis (71-75). Further, Thyrsis begins his song by reproaching the nymphs for their absence while Daphnis suffered (66-69). In “Idyll 15,” although the hymnist elaborates how women will lament the death of Adonis the next day (132-35), still Aphrodite's personal sorrow or lamentation is not mentioned,¹¹⁷ and women celebrants participating in a ritual, communal lament are far from Callimachus's “sorrowing mother” theme. In both Idylls “1” and “15,” moreover, the relationships are oriented around eros (and Aphrodite) rather than “motherlove.”

The subject of passionate love, the kind of love that disrupts everyday life and overturns normative values, pervades Theocritus's poetry, and Aphrodite, goddess of love, plays a major role, especially in Idylls “1” and “15.” In “Idyll 1,” the subject of Thyrsis's song is Daphnis and his unhappy interactions with Aphrodite. Further, Aphrodite has one of the rare speaking roles for a god in Theocritus's poetry: in Thyrsis's song she admonishes Daphnis and he responds (“Id. 1.”97-113).¹¹⁸ “Idyll 15”'s Adonia celebrates the passionate reunion of Adonis and Aphrodite: the hymnist invokes Aphrodite (100-11), and the tableau's centerpiece is a couch on which Aphrodite and Adonis figures embrace (128, 131). References to Aphrodite are also frequent elsewhere in Theocritus, especially in contexts of passionate, sexual love: heterosexual, extramarital love (“Id. 2.”130-31, “Id. 10.”33, “Id. 11.”16); mutual, married love (“Id. 18.”51, “Id. 17.”36); homosexual love (“Id. 7.”55); either-sexed love (“Id. 2.”7). Other references to Aphrodite involve a variety of subjects. In “Idyll 2,” Simaetha links Aphrodite's powers with the rhombus, which she uses in an effort to bewitch Delphis (30). In Idylls “15” and “17,” more courtly poems, Aphrodite is credited with immortalizing Alexandria's old Queen Berenice (“Id. 15.”106-8, “Id. 17.”45) and also explicitly linked with the current queen, Arsinoe (“Id. 15.”109-11).¹¹⁹ “Idyll 28” highlights an Aphrodite-precinct in describing Miletus, home of Nicias and Theugenis (4). Epigram 13 represents an inscription on a statue of Aphrodite Urania in honor of a chaste matron.¹²⁰

In Theocritus's poetry, “Idyll 13”'s descriptions of the interactions between Hylas, a young boy, and insomniac water nymphs, … “dread goddesses for country folk”; trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:99 … (44), perhaps best exemplify the dangerous entanglement of erotic and maternal impulses in the relations of powerful women and youths.¹²¹ For example: …

There in their laps the Nymphs sought to comfort
the weeping lad with gentle words.

(53-54) (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:99)

The most prominent (and domineering) goddess in Theocritus's poetry is Aphrodite, goddess of passionate, womanly love, a threatening figure for young Daphnis in “Idyll 1” and a dominating figure for youthful Adonis in “Idyll 15.”¹²² But this major erotic power in Theocritus's poetry receives mostly incidental mention in Callimachus's poetry, and typically not in the context of passionate, sexual love.¹²³ Callimachus's poems do not focus on female erotic subjectivity and do not link mothers with powerful, frustrated erotic impulses that can emerge in ambivalent feelings and hostilities directed toward the male child.¹²⁴ Instead, as shown by Callimachus's hymns, the focus is on chaste and/or matronly goddesses: Artemis (Hymn 3), Athena (Hymn 5), Demeter (Hymn 6), and Hera (whose jealousy in Hymn 4 [to Delos] focuses on her female rivals, not their progeny).

Another central theme in Theocritus's poetry is the destruction of young males' lives through powerful females.¹²⁵ This theme is developed on both mundane and elevated levels, and eros typically plays a role. On the divine and heroic level, “Idyll 1”'s Daphnis commits suicide to escape Aphrodite's threatening, erotic power; “Idyll 13”'s Hylas is pulled into a pool by loving water nymphs who drown him; “Idyll 15”'s Adonis each year passionately reunites with Aphrodite and then dies. More incidental references to the theme of young, doomed consorts of powerful female deities include Endymion, Selene's lover, who sleeps forever (“Id. 3.”49-50), and Iasion, Demeter's lover, killed by a thunderbolt (“Id. 3.”49-50; see Hom. Od. 5.125-28). Two further poems develop the theme of the threatened youth on a more earthly plane: in “Idyll 2,” a young urban woman, Simaetha, assaults her youthful, male ex-lover through magic and poisonous drugs; in “Idyll 3,” a goatherd responds to his female beloved's indifference by threatening suicide.¹²⁶ Eros is not a factor in “Idyll 26,” in which Pentheus is killed by his mother Agave and her sisters, but the poem provides another example of the underlying theme of youth destroyed by powerful women.

Instead of Theocritus's young men intimidated and destroyed by powerful, erotic females (e.g., Daphnis, Hylas, Adonis), Callimachus's poetry includes vignettes of chaste girls who flee powerful, erotic males. Hymn 3's Britomartis leaped from a cliff into the sea to escape Minos (190-97); Hymn 4's Asteria leaped from heaven into an abyss to flee Zeus (36-38).¹²⁷Hymn 3's attention to young Artemis's request for perpetual virginity underscores the theme of female flight from men and marriage.¹²⁸ The sexes of Callimachus's and Theocritus's bogeymonsters exemplify the reversals in Callimachus's and Theocritus's approaches to male-female power relations. Theocritus has a mother invoke a female bogey (Mormo) to frighten a male child (Theoc. “Id. 15.”40). Callimachus describes how mothers invoke male bogeys (cyclopes and Hermes) to frighten female children (Hymn 3.66-71; … “[Hermes] plays the bogey to the girl,” 70).¹²⁹ Further, in Callimachus's Hymn 4, the marriage hymn itself frightens maidens in a bogeylike manner (… 296-97). In Theocritus's wedding song, on the other hand, a maidens' chorus mock the bridegroom's sexual inadequacies and extol the bride's accomplishments (“Id. 18.”54-55).

The topic of motherhood and sons also emerges elsewhere in Theocritus's poetry, most naturally in “Idyll 18,” Helen's wedding song.¹³⁰ Even in “Idyll 22,” Theocritus's most martial epic narrative, the poet-narrator introduces Castor and Polydeuces as the sons of Leda and Zeus (1) and again as the sons of Thestius's daughter (Leda, 5), and later highlights their adversary Idas's death through the poignant detail that his mother Laocoosa would not see him married (205-6). Also, “Idyll 26,” a narrative hymnic poem on Pentheus's death, underscores the importance of Dionysus's mother, Semele: the poem begins by describing how the bacchantes set up three altars for Semele and nine for Dionysus (6), and the poem ends by saluting Dionysus, then Semele and her sisters (33-37). Further, the poem's final greeting to Dionysus recalls, in a relative clause, his babyhood and birth from Zeus's thigh (33-34), which leads back to Semele, his mother (35).¹³¹ The relative importance of the theme of motherhood in Theocritus's poetry, in contrast with fatherhood, is reflected in the prevalence of imagery featuring relations between mothers and children and the rarity of imagery of fathers and their young.¹³²

The recurring theme in Theocritus's poetry of men (and women) seeking help from old crones and sorceresses also draws attention to the issue of gender and power.¹³³ In “Idyll 2,” Simaetha goes to the houses of old women to seek charms to cure her of love (90-91). In “Idyll 3,” the goatherd reports that Agroeo, a sieve diviner, told him his love was not reciprocated (31-33). In “Idyll 6,” Damoetas ends his song by reporting that he spit into his bosom to avert the evil eye, as the old woman Cotyttaris showed him. In “Idyll 7,” Simichidas ends his song with the wish for a crone … “to spit on us and keep unlovely things away”; trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:65 … (126-27). In “Idyll 15,” a mysterious old woman appears and gives directions to the palace grounds (60-64).¹³⁴

In summary, much of Theocritus's poetry features strong women—e.g., mothers who dominate and even destroy their sons; young women who threaten their lovers; Aphrodite, a powerful goddess, who subordinates young mortal males. Theocritus's urban mimes pay special attention to the issue of women's roles and access to power in a mobile world: particularly Idylls “2” and “15,” which star women characters, but also “Idyll 14,” which includes a self-willed woman who disrupts a male-defined symposium. Several of Theocritus's poems also show how women isolated from their families or typically disregarded in patriarchal societies (such as old women) can find power in alternative realms of magic and cult; for example, “Idyll 2”'s Simaetha attacks Delphis through witchcraft, and several poems feature old women giving advice to the superstitious.

These themes are not unique to Theocritus among Hellenistic poets. Herodas's poetry too includes the themes of the powerful, domineering mother and of self-willed females out in the world. Callimachus's poetry seems to approach women differently, however. When his poems feature mortal women, the focus is generally on women's vulnerability and suffering: sorrowing, nurturing mothers (and mother figures) and vulnerable, chaste maidens (mostly victimized by Zeus). The topic of female erotic subjectivity—prominent in Theocritus's “Idyll 2” and also featured in such poems as Idylls “14” and “15,” central to several of Herodas's mimes and Apollonius Rhodius's epic—is largely absent from Callimachus's poetry. Aphrodite, a central and dangerous erotic deity in Theocritus's poetry, invoked repeatedly in contexts of passionate love, seems sanitized in Callimachus's poetry, which mentions her only incidentally. Instead, Callimachus's hymns feature chaste Olympian goddesses such as Artemis, Demeter, and Athena. While in Theocritus's poetry, young males suffer intimidation and death at the hands of powerful erotic female deities (e.g., “Idyll 1”'s Aphrodite and “Idyll 13”'s water nymphs), in Callimachus's poetry, young mortals threatened by powerful, erotic immortals are typically chaste young females fleeing adulterous Zeus (a tricky theme in a state run by Ptolemy, notorious for his amorous adventures and likened by Callimachus himself to Zeus).¹³⁵

ADONIS AND SEXUAL AMBIGUITY

A fashion in Hellenistic literature was to highlight feminine attributes in young males. This seems to correspond to a trend in statuary and painting, starting in the late fifth century and intensifying in the fourth century and Hellenistic age, to soften such male gods as Dionysus and Hermes by making them more youthful, beardless, and even effeminate (especially Dionysus),¹³⁶ and to further soften the perennially youthful Apollo.¹³⁷ Although during the democratized fifth century homosexual behavior, closely associated with the archaic age's privileged leisure class and privatized sympotic occasions, declined in visibility,¹³⁸ the rise of homoerotic epigrams during the Hellenistic period drew attention again to homoerotic culture. Dover suggests that the growing fashion in visual art and literature to feminize males, especially young males, may reflect a rising taste for effeminate eromenoi (male objects of homoerotic desire: generally boys).¹³⁹ But, as shown earlier, the Hellenistic age was also characterized by a trend toward heterosexuality, evident in the rising taste for the female nude in visual art and in the attention paid in literature to female erotic subjectivity. In representing female desire, the Alexandrian male poets seem to have borrowed from current trends in representing male homoerotic desire and thus to stress points of correspondence rather than difference between male and female eros, a continuum of sexual desires rather than a gendered dichotomy. Sculptural representations of hermaphrodites, which began to appear with more frequency during the Hellenistic period,¹⁴⁰ provide a visual example of fluidity of boundaries between male and female.

Several of Theocritus's poems, and particularly his urban mimes, underscore the gender ambiguity of young males by drawing attention to their erotic impact on both men and women. “Idyll 2”'s Delphis provides a key example. Simaetha admires Delphis in terms that highlight his potential appeal to men, for her desire is aroused by how Delphis glistens after exercising in the wrestling school (80), a sight which could also provide erotic stimulus for Greek men who loiter around wrestling schools and gymnasia to gaze at boys.¹⁴¹ Simaetha highlights Delphis's androgynous qualities by comparing his gleam to that of the goddess Selene (79). Further, Simaetha's informant is unsure whether Delphis's new love is male or female (150, 44).

Delphis's self-praise also highlights the fuzziness of his erotic placement between men and women: he reports that he is considered handsome and nimble among the young men (124-25). In a seductive speech addressed to Simaetha, Delphis describes his eagerness to comply with Simaetha's summons by using an analogy that evokes the homoerotic ethos of the gymnasium: …

Truly, Simaetha, you barely beat me—by no more than I
the other day outran the graceful Philinos—
in summoning me to your house before I came unasked.

(114-16)

By having Delphis use the adjective … graceful of Philinus when other adjectives might seem more suitable to running, the poet suggests that Delphis's interest in Philinus extends beyond the running field. Further, as noted in the previous discussion of “Idyll 2”'s male-female interactions, the analogy Delphis uses to end his seduction speech also highlights his sexual ambiguity, for in describing the passion that might have consumed him (had Simaetha not preempted it), he puts himself in the positions of a maiden and a bride victimized by Eros (136-38).

Before moving to a detailed consideration of “Idyll 15”'s Adonis, another key example in a discussion of the representation of sexually ambiguous males in Theocritus's poetry, I would like to point out two other places in Theocritus's poetry where homosexual and heterosexual desire overlap. In “Idyll 13,” the narration of Heracles and Hylas's story shows that water nymphs too find Heracles' boyfriend Hylas attractive (48-49). Segal aptly stresses Hylas's sexual ambiguities: “Love in his case veers ambiguously between male and female roles and between eroticism and maternal dependence.”¹⁴² In “Idyll 7,” Simichidas tries to diminish Philinus in his lover Aratus's eyes, by reporting how women are teasing him as he reaches maturity: …

And truly riper than a pear is he, and the women cry,
“Alas, Philinus, thy fair bloom is falling from thee.”

(120-21) (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:65)

Although “Idyll 14” does not explore sexual ambiguity per se, the poem represents a male's confusion concerning gendered self-identity. When abandoned by Cynisca, his former lover, Aeschinas likens her behavior in leaving him to a bull's, and he likens himself to a mouse and a starving Megarian. These analogies underscore how Cynisca's act of self-assertion at a male-defined symposium has convoluted normative gender identities for Aeschinas: he now views Cynisca as powerful and dominant and himself, a man who formerly felt entitled to beat his girlfriend, as subordinated and powerless. A related example of role reversal occurs in “Idyll 6:” Damoetas's Polyphemus fantasizes that Galatea will appropriate the male's role of komastically courting him and he will take the subordinated role of barring his door to her (32).

“Idyll 15”'s Adonis is central to a consideration of the theme of feminized males in Theocritus's poetry. Adonis is unusual among Greek heroes and gods in that he was already a figure of gender ambiguity in Greek poetry of the archaic age. In his first extant appearance in Greek literature, he is described as … “delicate” … (Sappho fr. 244.1 Page).¹⁴³ In Hellenistic poetry, the adjective [delicate] … continues to spotlight feminized male beauty, for example, in a homoerotic epigram by Philostratus: …

Why did you gaze upon sweet, delicate
Stasicrates, a sapling of violet-crowned Aphrodite?

(Ep. 1.5-6 Gow and Page [= A.P. 12.91])

In “Idyll 15,” Theocritus's shaping of Praxinoa's gaze upon the Adonis figure represented in the woven tapestry underscores characteristics in Adonis that can make him sexually attractive to both men and women … “with the first youthful down spreading from his temples …” (85). Youth was traditionally a valued quality in eromenoi (beloved boys) and “youthful down” imagery appears regularly in homoerotic poems.¹⁴⁴ The homoerotic appeal of “down” imagery in the Hellenistic age can also be seen in a wry Hellenistic epigram attributed to Asclepiades:¹⁴⁵ …

Now you offer yourself, when the delicate down is spreading
                    under your temples and there is a prickly bloom on your thighs.

(Ep. 46.1-2 Gow and Page [= A.P. 12.36.1-2]) (trans. based on Paton, Greek Anthology 4:299).

Callimachus, whose work includes many homoerotic epigrams, also uses down imagery to describe a youth's appearance: …

A delicate down, like the helichryse's blossom,
was just starting to spread on him too.

(Hecale, fr. 274)

The sex of the speaker is unspecified and could be female, but from the imagery, the speaker's sex could just as well be male.¹⁴⁶ Further, the element of down is also traditional in descriptions of males who die young, for example, Homer's description of young giants killed before reaching manhood: …

                              before the down blossomed beneath their temples
and covered their chins with freshly blooming beard.

(Od. 11.319-20 O.C.T.) (trans. A. T. Murray, Odyssey 1:409, rev.)

Thus when “Idyll 15's” Praxinoa gazes on a tapestry representing the dead or dying Adonis and comments on the youthful down on his face, she focuses on qualities (his youthfulness, the incipience of a beard) that make his sexuality available to both men and women (and that also emphasize the poignancy of his premature death).¹⁴⁷

In Theocritus's “Idyll 15,” the poet intensifies Adonis's ambiguity as a sexual figure by having the hymnist highlight Adonis's association with Ganymede, an object of Zeus's homoerotic desire,¹⁴⁸ as well as with the Erotes, young male figures often represented hermaphroditically.¹⁴⁹ On Aphrodite and Adonis's couch, the centerpiece of “Idyll 15's” Adonis celebration, carved ivory eagles transport Ganymede to Zeus (123-24), and Erotes fly overhead in the arbors. Both Ganymede and Erotes, like Adonis, traditionally represented youthful homoerotic beauty, and Theocritus uses Ganymede elsewhere in explicitly homoerotic contexts. Thus in “Idyll 12,” the erastes-narrator uses Ganymede in the closure of a homoerotic courtship speech addressed to his eromenos: …

Happy he who judges those kisses for the boys,
and surely long he prays to radiant Ganymede
that his lips may be as the Lydian touchstone whereby
the money-changers try true gold to see it be not false.

(34-37) (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:95)

Callimachus's Epigram 52 also underscores Ganymede's value in homoerotic contexts, for the erastes-narrator, in courting an eromenos named Theocritus,¹⁵⁰ uses Ganymede to invoke Zeus:¹⁵¹ …

Yea, by Ganymede of the fair locks, O Zeus in heaven,
                              thou too hast loved.

(3-4) (trans. Mair, “Callimachus,” 175 [his Ep. 53])

Thus in Theocritus's “Idyll 15,” the association with the Erotes and Ganymede (like Adonis, a beautiful boy who never grows up and a subordinated lover) emphasizes Adonis's sexual ambiguity as a passive, sexual object on display for both men's and women's gazes.¹⁵² The elements of youth and passivity in Praxinoa's description of Adonis's appearance take him beyond sexual dichotomy to suggest more androgynous appeal.¹⁵³

Ovid too emphasizes the element of gender doubt in Adonis's erotic appeal (Met. 10.519-739). Venus, in telling the story of Atalanta to Adonis, highlights Adonis's androgyny by comparing Atalanta's face and naked body¹⁵⁴ to Adonis's (as well as her own):

Ut faciem et posito corpus velamine vidit,
Quale meum, vel quale tuum, si femina fias,
Obstipuit.

(Met. 10.578-80; Anderson, Ovid's Metamorphoses)

But when Hippomenes saw Atalanta's face and unclothed body—a body like my own, or like yours, Adonis, if you were a woman—he was struck with wonder.

Venus's flattery of Adonis here emphasizes the sexual ambiguity of his appearance. In Ovid's version,¹⁵⁵ Venus, in Diana's dress, participates in Adonis's liminal world of hunting (535-39) by feminizing it, transforming it into an erotic playground. In restricting the hunt to small animals, especially deer and rabbits (traditional love-gifts),¹⁵⁶ Venus reorients the hunt around the goal of embracing on the grass afterwards (554-59). But for a Greek youth, the hunt represented a passage to manhood:¹⁵⁷ Adonis ignores Venus's cautionary tale, rejects her hunting proscriptions, and chases a boar. But he fails to pass to manhood, for the boar kills him (708-16). Venus commemorates his youthful death by instituting an annual reenactment of her grief, and she transforms his blood into the anemone (717-39), a reminder of ephemerality and sexual ambiguity.¹⁵⁸

The link between eros and death is a central theme in Adonis's representations in Greek literature. Thus Sappho emphasizes through the adjective … delicate the poignancy of Adonis's tender death: … “Delicate Adonis is dying, Kythereia [Aphrodite]” (fr. 244.1 Page).¹⁵⁹ “Idyll 15's” representation of the Adonis festival exploits the linkage between eros and death. Praxinoa admires a representation of Adonis by describing him as one who evokes love even in death (86). The hymnist's description of the grieving female celebrants' appearance also highlights this linkage: …

At dawn we will gather with the dew and carry him outside
to the waves crashing on the shore,
and with hair unbound, robes in folds at our ankles,
breasts bare, we shall begin the funereal song.

(132-35)

The Adonia traditionally offered a poetic forum for heteroerotic voyeurism. For example, in Menander's Samia, a youth's spying activities at a private Adonia result in his impregnating his neighbor's daughter (38-50). A Hellenistic epigram by Dioscorides also highlights the heteroeroticism of the ritualized Adonis lament: …

Tender Cleo took me captive, Adonis, as she beat her breasts
          white as milk at thy night funeral feast.
Will she but do me the same honour, if I die,
          I hesitate not; take me with thee on thy voyage.

(Ep. 4 Gow and Page [= A.P. 5.193] (trans. Paton, Greek Anthology 1:223-25)

By personalizing the eros inherent to the Adonia, Dioscorides' speaker transforms the Adonis lament into a site of personal, heteroerotic seduction.¹⁶⁰ Later Ovid too recommends the Adonia as an opportunity to find women: “nec te praetereat Veneri ploratus Adonis” (“Do not let Adonis, bewailed by Venus, escape your notice”; Ars Am. 1.75).

Theocritus's poetry romanticizes deaths of other young males besides Adonis, in both heterosexual and homosexual contexts. “Idyll 13” combines the two: amorous water nymphs steal Hylas from Heracles by pulling him into a pond: …

For love of the Argive lad had fluttered
all their tender hearts.

(48-49) (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:99)

“Idyll 1's” Daphnis, a rebel, seeks to escape the tyranny of love through death: Daphnis vows to continue to give love (Eros) grief even in Hades (103), and Thyrsis's description of Daphnis's death stresses the muses' and the nymphs' tenderness for him (140-41). Throughout Theocritus's poetry, fictive characters connect love and death. In heterosexual contexts, “Idyll 2's” Simaetha threatens to kill her beloved (159-62, 58) and “Idyll 3's” goatherd threatens to commit suicide for love (25-27, 53). In homoerotic contexts, lovers also highlight their love through death references, but less violently. “Idyll 12's” erastes desires that even two hundred generations later, in Acheron (Hades), he might learn of his love affair's lasting fame (18-21). “Idyll 29's” erastes claims he would fetch Cerberus, keeper of the dead, for his beloved (38). “Idyll 12” offers an amusing variation of the use of the eroticism of death motif in a seduction strategy: an erastes ends his courtship speech to his eromenos by describing an annual boys' kissing contest held at Diocles' tomb in Megara to commemorate his homoerotic passion (27-37).¹⁶¹

Callimachus's poems that feature young males also typically represent their attractiveness in ways that heighten their homoerotic appeal, even when the context for their appearance is heterosexual (as in the case of a male-female marriage). For example, in Callimachus's Aetia 3, frs. 67-75 (the marriage of Acontius and Cydippe), the poet-narrator underscores Acontius's attractiveness by describing the attention he is given in settings that typically attract the homoerotic gaze: Acontius receives notice on his way to school or to the bath (fr. 68), and symposia male admirers play the game kottabos in his honor (fr. 69). Further, Callimachus describes only Acontius's response on the wedding night, not Cydippe's, and he uses imagery that reflects a homoerotic world oriented around the gymnasium:¹⁶² …

Then, I deem, Acontius, that for that night,
                    wherein you touched her maiden girdle,
you would [not] have accepted … the ankle of Iphicles …
who ran upon the corn-ears.

(Aet. 3, fr. 75.44-48) (trans. Trypanis, “Callimachus,” 59)

Callimachus also underscores the effeminancy of the god Apollo:¹⁶³ …

And ever beautiful is he and ever young: never on the girl
cheeks of Apollo hath come so much as the down of manhood.

(Hymn 2.36-37) (trans. Mair, “Callimachus,” 51-53)

This feminized Apollo may correspond to (or anticipate) a trend in Hellenistic statuary representing Apollo: as Smith suggests, “Apollo had always been represented as young and beautiful, but Hellenistic Apollo often takes on a soft, languorous, effeminate style.”¹⁶⁴ Callimachus also highlights the homoerotic aspect of Apollo's relationship with Admetus: … “He tended the yokemares, / fired with love of young Admetus” (trans. Mair, “Callimachus,” 53; Hymn 2.48-49).¹⁶⁵

In Callimachus's Iambus 3, the erastes-narrator's wish to overturn his sexual identity highlights Callimachus's preoccupation with gender roles: he claims that he would rather be a celebrant of Cybebe (Cybele) or participate in the ritual lament for Adonis (that is, he would rather be a eunuch or a woman) than be a poet in a materialistic age when poets are not honored (or a lover of boys when boys have turned mercenary).¹⁶⁶ This poem stresses the degraded aspect of the erastes-narrator's wish by describing Adonis, the proposed object of worship, as Aphrodite's … “slave [or mortal] …” (Iambus 3, fr. 193.37).

In addition to feminized males, boyish females appear in many of Theocritus's and Callimachus's poems.¹⁶⁷ In Theocritus's “Idyll 18,” for example, a maiden chorus underscore their own athleticism: …

And we, the full tale of her coevals, together anoint ourselves in manly fashion
by the bathing places in Eurotas and run there together.

(22-23) (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:143)

Similarly, Callimachus's Hymn 5 praises Athena by highlighting her boyish charms (13-32). The festival director instructs the celebrants not to bring Athena perfume, alabasters, or mirror, for her red blush comes from running and from simple unguents:¹⁶⁸ …

So now too bring something manly, just olive oil,
          the anointing oil of Castor, of Heracles.

(29-30 Bulloch, Callimachus) (trans. Bulloch, Callimachus, 95)

Theocritus's urban mimes also include examples of women engaging in conventionally male behavior. “Idyll 2”'s Simaetha takes an active (male) role in courtship behavior: she falls in love when she sees Delphis on the street, and she summons him to her. “Idyll 15”'s Syracusan women take the active roles of subjects as they gaze upon male objects of desire (the Adonis figures), and Praxinoa defies a male stranger and asserts her right to public speech. “Idyll 14”'s Cynisca claims the traditional male right of a self-willed love, and when Aeschinas beats her for her disloyalty, she asserts her power by leaving him.

A key simile can illustrate the theme of gender ambiguity in Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica, for Jason's joy when he has attained the golden fleece, the object of his heroic quest, is compared to a girl's delight in catching the moonlight on her robe: …

And as a maiden catches on her finely wrought robe
the gleam of the moon at the full, as it rises above
her high-roofed chamber; and her heart rejoices
as she beholds the fair ray; so at that time did Jason
uplift the great fleece in his hands;
and from the shimmering of the flocks of wool
there settled on his fair cheeks and brow a red flush like a flame.

(Argon. 4.167-73 O.C.T.) (trans. Seaton, Argonautica, 305, rev.)

Medea has performed the crucial feat of putting the serpent to sleep, while Jason has simply taken the fleece afterward. This simile not only feminizes Jason's response to the fleece, but also seems to eroticize it by evoking imagery appropriate to marriage readiness and by emphasizing Jason's sexual attractiveness (the flush on his cheeks and brow).¹⁶⁹

The gender ambiguity characteristic of much of Hellenistic poetry may reflect uncertainty about gender roles in a world in which Greek men's public roles were being curtailed and women's were opening up. Just as boundaries between males and females were fluctuating in Hellenistic society, so too in poetry and art. The trend toward feminizing males in Hellenistic visual art and literature may reflect the political subordination of males in a new Greek world defined by autocratic hegemonies. Hellenistic poets were living in a period of change: gendered roles in society—such as the equation of public and political with male, and private and immobile with female—were in flux due to the rise of mobility and the domination of autocratic hegemonies. Through representations of sexual desire and interrelations, poets were able to explore the changing gendered conditions of their world.

Notes

1. On the linkage of soldiery with citizenship, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), esp. 126-27.

2. For a judicious discussion of ways Greek males could continue to live political lives in Hellenistic Greek cities, see Albrecht Dihle, “Response,” in Bulloch et al., Images and Ideologies, part 4, “Self-identity in Politics and Religion,” esp. 287-90.

3. “Idyll 7” takes men out of the city into the country to participate in a private ceremony; “Idyll 15” takes women out of the suburbs into the city center to view a public festival. By showing women becoming more publicly visible and men retreating into the private sphere, these poems can suggest the social changes gender roles are undergoing in the Hellenistic age.

4. On the granting of honorary citizenship to the itinerant poet Aristodama of Smyrna, see IG 9.2.62 (for discussion, see Pomeroy, Goddesses, esp. 126-31). On the rise in female euergetism, esp. from the second century b.c. on, see Riet Van Bremen, “Woman and Wealth,” in Cameron and Kuhrt, Images of Women, 223-42. See also Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, “Ancient Greek Women and Art: The Material Evidence,” American Journal of Archaeology, 2d ser., 91 (1987), esp. 405-9.

5. See esp. P. Elephantine 1 (311/310 b.c.), which ends with the statement: “This contract shall be valid in every respect, wherever Heraclides may produce it against Demetria, or Demetria and those helping Demetria to exact payment may produce it against Heraclides, as though the contract had been made in that place” (trans. Pomeroy, Goddesses, 128). The full text (English translation) and a discussion of this contract can be found in Pomeroy, Goddesses, 127-29; idem, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, 86-98.

6. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 29-33. On the traditional Egyptian belief in equality of the sexes, see Jean Vercoutter, “La femme en Egypte ancienne,” in Préhistoire et antiquité, vol. 1 of Historie mondiale de la femme, ed. Pierre Grimal (Paris: Nouvelle librairie de France, 1965), 119; Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, La femme au temps des pharaons (Paris: Stock/Laurence Pernoud, 1986), 170-71.

7. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, 173; see also David M. Schaps, Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece (1979; reprint, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 96-97.

8. The sympotic toasting ritual is pivotal in revealing differences between “Idyll 2”'s and “Idyll 14”'s male symposiasts. “Idyll 2”'s toasting ritual, as reported to Simaetha, revealed Delphis's autonomy of her, his complete involvement in a promiscuous sympotic community (from which she is excluded). “Idyll 14”'s sympotic toasting ritual separated Aeschinas from the sympotic community and revealed his obsession with Cynisca.

9. “Idyll 2,” more than the other two urban mimes, has a tradition of readers sensitive to important gender issues—e.g., Steven F. Walker, Theocritus (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 95-98; Griffiths, “Home before Lunch,” esp. 260-68; Charles Segal, “Space, Time, and Imagination in Theocritus' Second Idyll,” Classical Antiquity 4 (1985), 103-19.

10. For a useful introduction to this interpretative strategy, see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 174-77. See also, for example, Spivak, In Other Worlds, 241-68 (ch. 14: “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World”).

11. On earth-centered religion as a source of power for native peoples against colonizers, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 234.

12. See Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. 54-55.

13. The name Delphis may itself suggest androgyny: Delphis occurs as a girl's name at Diog. Laert. 8.88. On sexual ambiguity in Theocritus's representations of Simaetha and Delphis, see also Walker, Theocritus, 97-98; Griffiths, “Home before Lunch,” 266; Segal, “Space, Time, and Imagination,” 110.

14. Included among the meanings … in Liddell and Scott's lexicon are “light, easy to understand,” “light in moving, nimble,” and “light-minded, fickle” (Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., with supplement [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968]).

15. Simaetha was quick to respond to Delphis after she committed herself, but she regrets this in retrospect (138-40).

16. See Segal, “Space, Time, and Imagination,” 105-6.

17. See, e.g., Burkert, Greek Religion, 151-52.

18. Theocritus emphasizes the crucial moment of Delphis's crossing the threshold, and the crossing of sexual boundaries implied in that act, by having the sentence cross stanzas as well (the sentence breaks at 104 and continues in 106 after the refrain).

19. Cf. Callim. Ep. 25.6.

20. The distinction between maiden and wife which Delphis disregards at the end of his seduction speech (the critical element for Delphis is that Eros causes both to leave their bed-chambers) is crucial in a Greek female's life-sequence, but Delphis's actions have denied Simaetha both these identities.

21. At the time of the symposium, Aeschinas's blame was directed principally against Cynisca, whom he accosted as … (“bane of my life,” 36), but Aeschinas's retrospective description of the Thessalian singing “My Wolf” as … “a wicked wit …” (31) shows that Aeschinas now views himself as a victim of his guests' games too.

22. Line 47's anaphora, phonetic repetitions …, and syllabic balance (especially in the second clause) reflect Aeschinas's compulsive linkage of Lycus, nighttime, and an accessible Cynisca.

23. E.g., Ph.-E. Legrand, Étude sur Théocrite, Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, no. 79 (Paris, 1898), 138.

24. E.g., Stern, “Theocritus' Idyll 14,” 56-57; Griffiths, Theocritus at Court, 114-15. For a seminal discussion of Theocritus's use of incongruous images, see Garson, “An Aspect of Theocritean Humor.”

25. Cf. Euripides' Medea, where the nurse mixes the image of a bull with that of a lioness with cubs to describe Medea (187-88). In Theocritus's “Idyll 26,” the narrator uses the fierce, feminine image of a lioness with cubs to describe Agave as she roars over her son's head (21): Agave is the lioness who destroys her own cub.

26. On instances of this proverb elsewhere in Greek literature, see Knox's note on Herodas's Mime 2.62 (in Headlam and Knox, Herodas).

27. On the bull fable, see Gow, Theocritus 2:256 n. 43.

28. See Marcel Detienne, Dionysos Slain, trans. Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), esp. 25-26. Examples of persons who escape to the woods include Atalanta, Artemis and her nymphs, Hippolytus, and Melanion (Ar. Lys. 781-96).

29. See P. M. C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), esp. 63-68, 72-76.

30. On the wolf as savage outsider, see Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths, 77 and 92-94 (Lycaon).

31. See, e.g., the 500 b.c. red-figure alabastron from Athens, Kerameikos 2713, depicting a man offering a courtship gift of a hare to a woman sitting in a chair and spinning (pictured in Alain Schnapp, “Eros the Hunter,” in A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece, by Claude Bérard et al., trans. Deborah Lyons [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 82-83 [figs. 112-13, with discussion, 82: “The woman spinning in this modest pose is a hetaira who, by identifying herself with the wife, adds greater worth and distinction to her seduction”]). See also the Adolphseck 41 pelike (= ARV 566,6), depicting on one side, a man offering a purse to a standing woman with a workbasket, and on the other, a man with a walking stick offering a purse to a seated woman (pictured in Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens [New York: Harper and Row, 1985], 228 [plates 205-6], with discussion, 224: “If my reading is correct, the pelike juxtaposes a man with his wife and the same man with a hetaera”; but cf. Martin F. Kilmer, Greek Erotica [London: Duck-worth, 1993], 166-67: “It may also be that, for the purposes of such scenes as this, things were deliberately left ambiguous: the viewer could think of these as courting scenes taking place between free Athenians, or business transactions between prostitute and client; or there may have been other interpretations”). See also Makron's cup (Toledo, Ohio, 72.55), depicting on the outside band, men soliciting women, and on the tondo, a woman making offerings at an altar (pictured in Keuls, Reign of the Phallus, 167 [the outside band: plates 141-42], with discussion, 167-68; 227 [the tondo: plate 204], with discussion of the juxtaposition of tondo and outside band, 223-24). On difficulties distinguishing the status of women depicted on erotic Greek vases, see Kilmer, Greek Erotica, 159-67. For a discussion of Greek epigrams linking weavers and hetairai (as well as weaving and love), see Tarán, Art of Variation, 115-31.

32. On the blurring of female social categories, see Jasper Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life (1985; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 27-28. On Roman wives acting as courtesans, see R. O. A. M. Lyne, The Latin Love Poets: From Catullus to Horace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 13-16. On the inclusion of respectable women at Roman symposia, see O. Murray, “Symposium and Genre,” 48-49.

33. For discussion of Cat. 68's use of the marriage motif and the Laodamia story in redescribing his relationship with the unfaithful Lesbia, see, e.g., Lyne, Latin Love Poets, 56-60. On Tib. 1.5.21-34, see Lyne, Latin Love Poets, 160-63.

34. Gow, Theocritus 2:253 n. 33.

35. For an evocative discussion of how attention to the literary echoes of Sappho and Homer can enhance the reader's experience of Theocritus's “Idyll 2,” see Charles Segal, “Underreading and Intertextuality: Sappho, Simaetha, and Odysseus in Theocritus' Second Idyll,” Arethusa 17 (1984), 201-9.

36. In both cases, the tears initiate a process of physical violence leading to the loss of the subordinated partner: Cynisca's tears prompt Aeschinas to assail her with his fists, and she leaves the symposium (and his life); Patroclus's tears prompt Achilles to send him into battle, where Patroclus is killed.

37. Gow, Theocritus 1:107. I use the translation “brazen” here for euphony's sake, with the understanding that, as Dover, Theocritus 195 n. 53, points out, … and … its derivatives are not used metaphorically in the sense of English ‘brazen.’” He suggests as possible meanings here “sunburnt” or “whom you could get for a bronze coin.” (“Brazen,” of course, can also mean “brass-colored.”)

38. Thwarted lovers elsewhere in Theocritus's poems try other crues for disappointed love—for example, song (e.g., Ids. 10, 11) and suicide (e.g., Ids. 2, 3). …

39. On the sexual symbolism of the snake, see, e.g., Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 106.

40. Praxinoa is expressing a Callimachean sentiment, insofar as pigs can represent mud and filth; cf. the literary values expressed at the close of Callim. Hymn 2 (when Apollo rejects what he describes as the filthy Assyrian river, full of refuse, in favor of the pure stream, 108-12). Callimachus also scorns the crowded road, Ep. 28.1-2.

41. The adjective … wretched often connotes compassion. See, e.g., Odysseus's self-description at Od. 5.299. …

42. By using significant names that are not uncommon, Theocritus can reinforce characterizations without unduly interrupting the narrative. On the use of significant names in Homer's Odyssey, see, e.g., Norman Austin, “Name Magic in the Odyssey,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 5 (1972), 1-19.

43. On Herodas's use of appropriate names, see J. C. Austin, “The Significant Name in Herondas,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 53 (1922), 16-17. On realistic portraiture, see, e.g., John Onians, Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age: The Greek World View, 350-50 BC (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), esp. 38-50; Christine M. Havelock, Hellenistic Art, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), esp. 141-47; Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age, esp. 19-23.

44. Praxinoa's name links … business … and … mind. …

45. The name … is also used to denote the Gorgon, a legendary female monster (e.g., Medusa), whose gaze turns men to stone. For discussion of the Gorgon, see, e.g., Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other,” ch. 6 in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 111-38.

46. If Theocritus were a fan of puns, one could imagine Praxinoa's abuse of Eunoa underscoring the household's lack of well-being, for a synergy of the names Praxinoa and Eunoa produces happiness … (a definition endorsed by Aristotle in Eth. Nic. 1095a19-20).

47. This practice, popular among philosophers seeking hidden meanings in Homer's epics, was criticized in Plato's Republic, but gained momentum during the Hellenistic period, especially among Stoics and philosophers interpreting scripture (see David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992]).

48. See P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:241-43.

49. The surprise of “Idyll 15”'s hostile encounter between the bystander and the women might be intensified by the expectable literary motif that women who go to festivals are often seduced (e.g., in Eur. Ion, new comedy in general, and Theocritus's “Idyll 2”). The Adonia in particular is a favorite literary occasion for seductions (e.g., Men. Sam. 41; cf. Theoc. “Idyll 24.”50, Theophr. Char. 2.4, Ar. Lys.). Before meeting the hostile bystander, Praxinoa thinks of erotic proverbs (the first concerning Hera and Zeus; the second, an anonymous bridegroom) after each encounter on the road to the Adonia. Some audience members might even expect that a seductive encounter would be the main concern of the poem. In “Idyll 2,” for example, the festival is not described, but simply provides an occasion for Simaetha to fall in love with Delphis. A hostile encounter between men and women at a festival, however, is not necessarily incongruous. An exchange of abusive insults is a traditional feature of such festivals as Demeter's at Pellene (Paus. 7.27.10) and Apollo's at Anaphe (Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4.1726). Apollodorus (1.5.1) attributes the traditional jesting at the festival of the Thesmophoria to the incident of Demeter's arrival at the house of Celeus, when Iambe jests to make her smile (Hom. H. Dem. 202-4). …

50. E.g., Arist. Pol. 1259a-1260b. Cf. Arist. Poet. 1454a22-24 on gender and decorum. The patriarchal tradition's exclusivity, represented by Aristotle, was already being challenged in the fourth century b.c. when Epicureans and Cynics began to allow women and slaves to participate in the philosophical experience.

51. White argues that Praxinoa is describing the Adonis statue rather than an Adonis figure on the tapestries (Heather White, “Theocritus' ‘Adonis Song,’” Museum Philologum Londiniense 4 (1981), 199-203; so too Schwinge, Künstlichkeit von Kunst, 57 n. 27). In this discussion, I follow Gow and Dover, who consider that Praxinoa is here describing an Adonis figure represented on the tapestries (A. S. F. Gow, “The Adoniazusae of Theocritus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 58 [1938], 198-99; idem, Theocritus 2:265, 288 n. 84f.; Dover, Theocritus, 206).

52. Cf. Young Theseus who, dressed in a long tunic and with hair plaited, on his arrival in Athens was mocked by builders, who called him a girl ripe for marriage (Paus. 1.19.1).

53. Praxinoa is emphasizing a central aspect of Adonis's myth. See Ov. Met. 10.519-739 for a detailed version of the story of Adonis's disappointed manhood.

54. Later in this chapter, I discuss the issue of the homoerotic gaze implicit in Theocritus's representation of Praxinoa's response to Adonis. The main issue under consideration here is what a male bystander might find transgressive in Praxinoa's speech.

55. On the problematic issue of the bystander's use of Doric, see, e.g.: Hermann Fritzsche, Theokrits Gedichte, 3d ed., rev. by Eduard Hiller (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1881), 187; W. C. Helmbold, “Theocritus 15.87-88,” Classical Philology 46 (1951), 116; Gow, Theocritus 2:290 n. 88; Monteil, Théocrite, 160; Dover, Theocritus, 207; Gianfranco Fabiano, “Fluctuation in Theocritus' Style,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 12 (1971), 521-22; Horstmann, Ironie und Humor, 37; C. J. Ruijgh, “Le dorien de Théocrite: Dialecte cyrénien d'Alexandrie et d'Egypte,” Mnemosyne, 4th ser., 37 (1984), 79; Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry, 164-65.

56. The exclamation … is used primarily by women: cf. Herodas 1.85 and 4.20. Melitodes may well be Persephone, a goddess associated with Syracusan women, according to the scholia to line 14 (Wendel, Scholia, 307). …

57. Gow, Theocritus 2:291 n. 95.

58. Dover, Theocritus, 208 n. 95.

59. Praxinoa's use of Bellerophon in this context seems to recall a memorable incident in Homer's Iliad, book 6 (144-211), when Glaucus, challenged by Diomedes for his identity on the battlefield, defiantly claims Bellerophon as heroic ancestor (for this suggestion, see also Horstmann, Ironie und Humor, 38 n. 94).

60. As Winkler explains, “To participate even passively in the public arena the minority must be bilingual; the majority feels no such need to learn the minority's language” (John J. Winkler, “Double Consciousness in Sappho's Lyrics,” in The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece [New York: Routledge, 1990], 174-76 [quote taken from 174-75]). See also Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), esp. 10: “Subordinates … know much more about the dominants than vice versa.”

61. For the tale of Proetus's wife and young Bellerophon, see, e.g., Hom. Il. 6.160-70.

62. On variation as a stylistic trait of Theocritus's poetry, see, e.g., Fabiano, “Fluctuation in Theocritus' Style,” 517-37: “As for Theocritus, I am inclined to think that variation of the level of style, which appears not only in the pastoral but in almost every idyll, is one of the main agents of poetic unification” (537).

63. Cf. how Catullus puts down Egnatius in Poem 39.

64. Callim. Hymn 2.108-9.

65. On genre and style fluctuation, see, e.g., Fabiano, “Fluctuation in Theocritus' Style”; Legrand, Étude sur Théocrite, 413-20; Ludwig Deubner, “Ein Stilprinzip hellenistischer Dichtkunst,” Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur und für Pädagogik 47 (1921), 361-78.

66. See Pomeroy, “Technikai kai Mousikai,” 52-53 and 64 n. 9; idem, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, esp. 60, 62 (plate 7), 71-72.

67. See, e.g., P. Elephantine 1 (an early Hellenistic marriage contract, dated to 311/310 b.c., available in translation in Pomeroy, Goddesses, 127-28; idem, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, 86-87).

68. This theme might have seemed uncomfortably familiar to audience members at the Medea's first performance (431) who had witnessed the passing of Pericles' citizenship law of 451/450, which required that a mother of Athenian citizens be an Athenian herself and thus encouraged Athenian men to discard alien wives (Arist. Ath. Pol. 26.4; for discussion of Pericles' law, see, e.g., A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens, vol. 1, The Family and Property [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], 25-29; Pomeroy, Goddesses, 66-70).

69. On the unusual placement of Hecate at Medea's hearth, see Denys L. Page, ed., Euripides: Medea (1938; reprint with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 102 n. 397.

70. For a discussion of Simaetha's spell as “therapeutic self-expression,” see Hugh Parry, “Magic and the Songstress: Theocritus Idyll 2,” Illinois Classical Studies 13 (1988), 43-55.

71. So, e.g., Anacreon fr. 356, 383, 409 P.M.G.; Ath. 11.475c-f. For other citations, in addition to Ath., see Gow, Theocritus 2:36 n. 2. …

72. On the identification of this bronze rhomb with the magic wheel of the refrain, see Heather White, “Spells and Enchantment in Theocritus' Idyll II,” ch. 2 in Studies in Theocritus and Other Hellenistic Poets (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1979), 30-34.

73. “Idyll 14” also highlights the theme of the clash between heterosexual love and the masculinized world of the gymnasium and the symposium: Aeschinas's obsession with Cynisca caused him to abandon the sympotic life.

74. Probably a love-potion (Gow, Theocritus 2:46 n. 58).

75. The association of the name Delphis with Delphi and hence Apollo also heightens the impression of class difference from Simaetha (whose name means snub-nosed; on Simaetha's name, see Dover, Theocritus, 95). Also, Simaetha saw Delphis on her way to Artemis's festival, and she compares his shine to that of the moon, with whom Artemis was often identified.

76. For this version of the Actaeon story, see Callim. Hymn 5.107-16; see also, e.g., Ov. Met. 3.138-252.

77. Simaetha was attracted by Delphis's gleaming athleticism, as shown by the full spectrum of “shiny, oily” words she uses in association with his athletic activities: … “the palaestra shiny with oil” (51), … (“his shining breast” 79), … “shiny-skinned Delphis” (102), … “his Doric oil-flask” (156). Delphis's invocation of Hephaestus Liparaios (“of [shiny] Lipara,” 133) may also reinforce this association.

78. Frederick T. Griffiths, “Poetry as Pharmakon in Theocritus' Idyll 2,” in Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to Bernard M. W. Knox, ed. Glen W. Bowersock, Walter Burkert, and Michael C. J. Putnam (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), 87-88. On Simaetha's subjective use of the adjective …, see also Fabiano, “Fluctuations in Theocritus' Style,” 523; Segal, “Space, Time, and Imagination,” 110.

79. Artemis's identification with Selene, the Moon goddess (Dover, Theocritus, 101) may add another dimension to this reading, insofar as Simaetha invokes Selene and Hecate (also identified with Artemis, “Id. 2.”33) to help her resolve the crisis of identity she is experiencing because of Delphis. As shown above, the goddess Artemis seems central to Simaetha's recovery of herself.

80. On Egypt's tradition of magic, see, e.g., Siegfried Morenz, Ägyptische Religion (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), esp. 27-28; John Baines, “Society, Morality, and Religious Practice,” in Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 164-72 (“Magic and Divination”). On the influence of Egypt's magic on Greeks, see, e.g., Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 65-67.

81. For discussion (with references), see chapter 4, where I examine “Idyll 15”'s representation of Arsinoe's Adonia.

82. E.g., Lysias's Euphiletus, in his self-defense for murdering Eratosthenes, traces Eratosthenes' passion for Euphiletus's wife to his seeing her attending a funeral (Lys. 1.8). Also, for an important reminder of the public nature of many of Greek women's religious roles, see Helene P. Foley, “The ‘Female Intruder’ Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae,” Classical Philology 77 (1982), esp. 1-5.

83. The movement of “Idyll 15”'s women from a private house through Alexandria's streets to an Adonis festival (traditionally a women's festival) enables Theocritus to explore an unusually full spectrum of female-male encounters and relations, both hostile and sympathetic: between husbands and wives, mothers and sons, men and women strangers, a king and subject women, a goddess and a youth.

84. On the significance of Mise's descent for Mime 1's plot, see Stern, “Herodas' Mimiamb 1,” 161-65.

85. On the snake-burning as a scapegoat ritual, see Gow, Theocritus 2:430 n. 91; Jacob Stern, “Theocritus' Idyll 24,” American Journal of Philology 95 (1974), 357.

86. Cf. Callim. Hymn 2, which represents a male ceremony of Apollo.

87. Although “Idyll 26” ends with the poet-narrator ostensibly disassociating himself from Pentheus, the poem begins with a detailed description of the women's ritual activities (1-9), which puts both audience and poet-narrator in Pentheus's position as intruders. In Euripides' Bacchae, Pentheus spies on less ritually veiled activities than in “Idyll 26,” e.g., bacchantes singing bacchic songs and repairing their wands (1054-57; see too the messenger's report at 680-711). For a summary of scholarship comparing Euripides' Bacchae and Theocritus's “Idyll 26,” see K. J. McKay, “Theokritos' Bacchantes Re-examined,” Antichthon 1 (1967), esp. 16-20.

88. The end of “Idyll 26” absolves Agave and her sisters of blame (37-38). This is not a typical move: traditionally in Greek literature women who kill their children suffer retribution (see, e.g., Jeffrey Henderson, “Older Women in Attic Old Comedy,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 117 [1987], 112). But in Theocritus's “Idyll 26,” Pentheus's mother and her sisters are absolved of his murder through Dionysus. A possible subtext here is that in a world of autocratic hegemonies, powerful and well-connected royal women (e.g., Olympias, herself a bacchant of Dionysus; Arsinoe II) could commit terrible (kinship) crimes with impunity: thus Olympias had Philip Arrhidaios (her stepson) executed and forced his wife Eurydice to commit suicide (Diod. 19.11; see Macurdy, Hellenistic Queens, 41-42; Elizabeth D. Carney, “Olympias,” Ancient Society 18 [1987], 59).

89. Cf. Theocritus's representation of a public Adonia, sponsored by Arsinoe, and open to a public, mixed audience. In chapter 4, I discuss the poetic challenges involved in commemorating a public, official celebration of a traditionally private, countercultural festival.

90. By having the celebrant-narrator use the image of … “a wax doll in the sun”; trans. A. W. Mair, “Callimachus” [1921], in Callimachus: Hymns and Epigrams; Lycophron; Aratus, trans. A. W. and G. R. Mair, 2d ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955], (131; 91) to describe Erysichthon as he wastes away, the poet highlights Erysichthon's feminized position in subjugation to Demeter: through hunger, Demeter transforms Erysichthon from a fierce leader of men to a subordinate. Also, the celebrant's use of the imagery of a lioness and a hunter repositions Erysichthon as fierce but hunted (hence feminized) when he replies to Demeter's warning: … “with a look more fierce than that wherewith a lioness looks on the hunter on the hills of Tmarus—a lioness with new-born cubs”, (trans. Mair, “Callimachus,” 129; 50-52).

91. “Idyll 17”'s inclusion of matrilineal identifications in a male-centered poem (an encomium of Ptolemy) underscores Theocritus's thematic emphasis on the importance of women in this poem (as elsewhere). On the prevalence of matrilineal identifications among women, see Marilyn Skinner, “Greek Women and the Metronymic: A Note on an Epigram by Nossis,” The Ancient History Bulletin 1 (1987), 39-42.

92. Cf. Skinner's evaluation of Nossis Ep. 8 Gow and Page (= A.P. 6.353) which, by emphasizing the resemblance of a daughter to her mother, “implicitly repudiates the very structures of patriarchy by transforming the evidential basis for claims of paternity into a proof of the mother's vital role in the reproductive process” (Marilyn B. Skinner, “Nossis Thēlyglōssos: The Private Text and the Public Book,” in Pomeroy, Women's History, 28, 30 [quote taken from 30]).

93. For pre-Callimachean literary passages, see, e.g., Eur. Hipp. 161-69, Phoen. 355. On the risks of childbirth, see, e.g., Pomeroy, Goddesses, 84-85; Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Life: From Conception to Old Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 65-80. In Sparta, at least by c. 500 b.c., women who died in childbirth joined men who died in battle in being granted the exceptional honor of having their names inscribed on tombostones; the women either by Lycurgan law (Plut. Lyc. 27.2, if read with Latte's emendation) or by “de facto exemption by c. 500 … from the Spartan prohibition on named tombstones” (Paul Cartledge, “Spartan Wives: Liberation or Licence?” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 31 [1981], 95; see n. 72 on Latte's emendation).

94. See also Callim. Hymn 3.20-22; Aetia 3, fr. 79 (Diana Lucina); Eur. Iph. Taur. 1464-67 (an aition for the dedication to Artemis at Brauron of woven garments of women who died in childbirth). Cf. Callim. Hymn 3's aition for Artemis's role as goddess of childbirth: in contrast, she gave her own mother no pain either in childbirth or pregnancy (22-25).

95. In the fourth century and Hellenistic period, however, mothers seem to have taken more significant roles in arranging marriages: documents attest that mothers and fathers together, even mothers alone, were giving away brides (Xen. Oec. 7.11; P. Elephantine 1, dated 311/310 b.c.; for discussion of P. Elephantine 1 and other Hellenistic examples, see Pomeroy, Goddesses, 126-30; idem, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, 86-87, and esp. 90). For the suggestion that a seducer's mother might promote a seduction, see Lysias 1.20, where Euphiletus relates a report that his wife, when attending a Thesmophoria, went off to the temple with the mother of Eratosthenes, his wife's seducer.

96. In the Odyssey's typical cyclopean family, a mother is more subordinated: … “Each male rules over his children and his wives” (Hom. Od. 9.114-15 O.C.T.). For Hellenistic representations of the cyclopes as mature monsters, see, e.g., Callimachus's Hymn 3.46-86, esp. 51-56 (e.g., … “the terrible monsters like unto the crags of Ossa”; trans. Mair, “Callimachus,” 65; 51-52). Cf. Theoc. “Id. 7”'s mature Polyphemus, “who pelted ships with mountains” (trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:67; 152), whom Simichidas invokes in a wine appraisal as a drunken shepherd dancing among his pens (153).

97. The poet intensifies the horror of Pentheus's dismemberment by having Autonoa answer Pentheus's question and thus show that she recognizes him as human if not as her nephew (18-19).

98. For another Hellenistic example of a strong, independent mother, see Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4.866-79. By having Peleus recall, when the long-absent Thetis suddenly appears, how Thetis abandoned the family, how she threw a shrieking baby Achilles to the ground when Peleus interrupted her nightly routine of placing the baby in the fire, Apollonius draws attention to the theme of strong, independent (and volatile) mothers and the dangers they offer their families. (This theme is not without resonance in a story that features Medea.)

99. The exact situation in “Id. 15.”77 is uncertain (see Gow, Theocritus 2: 285-86 n. 77). … But the male involved at “Id. 15.”77 need not be the bridegroom (although Praxinoa's use of the phrase might be more pointed in the context of an Adonia if a bridegroom and bride were intended).

100. Cf. Dover, Theocritus, 206, who suggests that Theocritus may just be “satirizing the unthinking use of clichés.”

101. On how this identification offers a female take on heroism by suggesting its great cost to Hecabe (the loss of Hector), and on the Adonis hymn in general, see chapter 4.

102. J. C. Austin, “Significant Name in Herondas,” 16, explains the name Lampriskos as emphasizing vigor. … I would like to suggest another possibility: that the name Lampriskos could also signify “a dim light,” thus indicating a dull schoolteacher.

103. See Xen. Oec. 7.12 (Ischomachus's advice to his wife that they will jointly plan how to train the children and thus be rewarded with good support in old age). Cf. Ar. Nub., in which class differences between husband and wife lead to the father taking sole charge of their son's education.

104. On elderly Greek parents' dependency on their children, see, e.g., W. K. Lacey, The Family in Classical Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 25, 116-18; Garland, Greek Way of Life, 261-62. For evidence of Athenian legislation requiring children to care for parents, see, e.g., Dem. 24.107 and Diog. Laert. 1.55 (both cited in Lacey).

105. For useful discussions of Herodas's Mime 5, with attention to irony and social issues, see David Konstan, “The Tyrant Goddess: Herodas's Fifth Mime,” Classical Antiquity 8 (1989), 267-82; idem, Sexual Symmetry, 164-66.

106. Sparta differed from the Greek norm by including such practices as wife-sharing (for a convenient summary of the evidence, see D. M. MacDowell, Spartan Law [Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986], 82-88; for an explanation of Spartan marriage practices, see Stephen Hodkinson, “Inheritance, Marriage, and Demography: Perspectives upon the Success and Decline of Classical Sparta,” in Classical Sparta: Techniques behind Her Success, ed. Anton Powell [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989], esp. 90-93).

107. For evidence of this male attitude toward female slaves in the fifth and fourth centuries, with special attention to Athens, see Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 138-43. For discussion of Mime 5's inversions of normative values, see Konstan, “Tyrant Goddess”; idem, Sexual Symmetry, esp. 165. …

108. On “the absence of male heads of household” in Mime 5, see Konstan, “Tyrant Goddess,” 269; idem, Sexual Symmetry, 163, 165-66.

109. See, e.g., Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, 89-90.

110. On the thematic focus on human helplessness before the gods in Callimachus's Hymns 5 and 6, see Anthony W. Bulloch, “The Future of a Hellenistic Illusion: Some Observations on Callimachus and Religion,” Museum Helveticum 41 (1984), esp. 225-28. As Bulloch remarks on the fate of Chariclo (and her son Teiresias) in Hymn 5, “now we find that they [the gods] can be randomly and unpredictably violent, even to the closest friends, and scarcely even acknowledge the friendship” (228).

111. On Callimachus's emphasis on “die Frau als Mutter” (especially sorrowing mother), see Konrat Ziegler's important article, “Kallimachos und die Frauen,” in Die Antike 13 (1937), 23-24: “Dieser Dichter weiß etwas von Mutterliebe und Mutterleid” (24).

112. Ziegler, “Kallimachos und die Frauen,” 24.

113. E.g., Polyphemus's mother in “Idyll 11,” whom he blames for not fostering his courtship of Galatea although she sees him wasting away for love (67-69). But note Ep. 20 Gow, attributed to Theocritus, which represents an inscription for a Thracian nurse's tomb monument set up by her male nursling (cf. Callimachus's Ep. 50). On the authenticity of the epigrams attributed to Theocritus, see Gow, Theocritus 2:527: “It can hardly be said that there is objective evidence against the authenticity of any of these 22 epigrams.” See also Gow and Page, Greek Anthology 2:525-27. But cf. P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:575 and 2:819 n. 175. On the manuscript tradition, see R. J. Smutny, The Text History of the Epigrams of Theocritus, University of California Publications in Classical Philology, vol. 15, no. 2 (Berkeley, 1955).

114. E.g., “Idyll 15”'s housewives' fantasy relationship with Adonis.

115. E.g., in “Idyll 6,” Damoetas's Polyphemus credits old Cotyttaris with showing him how to ward off the evil eye.

116. On a more prosaic level, in “Idyll 11” Polyphemus claims that his mother will suffer when he tells her of his head- and footaches, but his report that she disregarded his earlier symptoms of lovesickness belies his expectations of her suffering now (67-71). Cf. “Idyll 10,” in which Milon mockingly suggests to lovesick Bucaeus to tell his mother his troubles.

117. Elaborations of Aphrodite's sorrow become dominant in later versions of the Adonis story: see, e.g., Bion 1 (“Lament for Adonis”), esp. 19-24, 40-62; Ov. Met. 10.722-27.

118. The only other gods to speak in Theocritus's poetry are Hermes (“Id. 1.”77-78) and Priapus (“Id. 1.”82-91). Note that all these gods with speaking parts appear in Thyrsis's song in “Idyll 1.” Also note that Aphrodite elicits a response from Daphnis while the others do not.

119. For discussion of Aphrodite's linkage with Arsinoe, in the context of Ptolemaic state ideology, see chapter 4.

120. Cf. Theoc. Ep. 4 (the statue of Priapus with a phallus dedicated to Aphrodite's works).

121. Segal aptly describes the water nymphs' feelings for Hylas as “maternal, enclosing love”: “They treat him as a mother treats a child” (Charles Segal, “Death by Water: A Narrative Pattern in Theocritus,” in Segal, Poetry and Myth, 58).

122. Griffiths characterizes “Idyll 15”'s Aphrodite as “dignified, loving, almost maternal” (Griffiths, Theocritus at Court, 125).

123. Cypris is mentioned at Hymn 4.21 (an island patronized by Cypris), Hymn 4.308 (Cypris's statue), Hymn 5.21 (Cypris's constant combing of her hair in contrast to Athena's modesty). Two epigrams feature Aphrodite as recipient of offerings: Ep. 5 (a nautilus shell), Ep. 38 (a hetaira's dedication). Elsewhere Aphrodite receives mention as patron of Eryx (Aet. 2, fr. 43.53), creator of orators (Aet. 3, fr. 82.2-3), mistress of Adonis (Iambus 3, fr. 193.37); Lyricus 227 includes Aphrodite in an epiphany of gods (also Apollo and the Erotes) at a sympotic night-festival. The Lock of Berenice features Cypris and Aphrodite Zephyritis (Aet. 4, fr. 110.56-57, 64), and Iambus 10, fr. 200a (four lines) describes the cult of Aphrodite of Mount Castnion.

124. Apollonius Rhodius, like Theocritus and unlike Callimachus, privileges female erotic subjectivity, and the art of his psychological portraiture has received much well-deserved attention (see, e.g., Anthony W. Bulloch, “Hellenistic Poetry,” ch. 18 in Greek Literature, vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, ed. P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985], esp. 591-93).

125. This theme, of course, corresponds to the relations of great goddesses and their consorts, e.g., Astarte and Tammuz, Cybele and Attis, Inanna and Dumuzi, Isis and Osiris. See Charles Segal, “Adonis and Aphrodite: Theocritus, Idyll 3.48,” in Segal, Poetry and Myth, esp. 68-70. On links between Daphnis and the male consorts Dumuzi, Tammuz, and Adonis (among others), see William Berg, Early Virgil (London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1974), 17-20, 197 n. 28; on Daphnis and Dumuzi in particular, see Halperin, Before Pastoral, esp. 112-14; Jasper Griffin, “Theocritus, the Iliad, and the East,” American Journal of Philology 113 (1992), 203.

126. By having “Idyll 3”'s goatherd cite among his role models Adonis and Endymion, Theocritus highlights the basic story pattern of love linked with death, and also draws attention to the amorous pretensions of a goatherd who aspires to the models of Adonis and Endymion.

127. Hera honors her for preferring the sea to Zeus (Hymn 4.247-48).

128. In Callimachus's poems, mothers can also be chaste: Teiresias's mother Chariclo belongs to Artemis's band (Hymn 5).

129. Whereas Theocritus typically domesticates and diminishes male monsters appearing in poems that feature their relations with women (e.g., “Idyll 24”'s Heracles and “Idyll 6”'s and “11”'s Polyphemus), Callimachus magnifies his cyclopes and thus emphasizes their frightening effects on females, e.g. Hymn 3.64-65: … “On those [Cyclopes] not even the daughters of the Blessed look without shuddering, though long past childhood's years” (trans. Mair, “Callimachus,” 65). In the context of Hymn 3, the cowardly, general female response contrasts with Artemis's precocious boldness: when just three, she sat on the cyclops Brontes' knees and tore hair from his breast for sport (72-79).

130. The maiden chorus suggest that Menelaus should have left Helen at her mother's side last night (13), praise Helen's potential for motherhood (21), promise they will think the next day of Helen as “tender lambs long for their mother's teat” (41-42), and pray that Helen and Menelaus will have sons (51).

131. The poem begins and ends with powerful, maternal women. The poem opens with Ino, Autonoa, and Agave (two of Pentheus's aunts and his mother, 1), then moves to Semele (Dionysus's mother and another of Pentheus's aunts) and Dionysus (6). The poem closes with a hymnic envoi that moves from Dionysus (through his father Zeus, included in a relative clause, 33-34) back to Semele and her sisters (35-38).

132. Mother and young similes: Id. “2.”108-9, “3.”15-16, “12.”4, “13.”12-13, “14.”32-33, “14.”39-40, “18.”41-42, and “26.”20-21. Father and young simile: “Id. 13.”8. It should be noted here that patrilineal descriptions are more common than matrilineal, but they appear with greatest frequency in epic narratives featuring male, heroic action and in court poetry emphasizing family dynasties: Idylls “15,” “17,” “18,” “22,” and “24.”

133. Male seers appear in Theocritus's extant poems only twice, both times in heroic contexts: in “Idyll 6,” Damoetas assumes the voice of a cyclops, who rejects a seer's prophesy, a motif that enables Theocritus to allude ironically to the Homeric story of the cyclops's blinding (Od. 9.509). In “Idyll 24,” Alcmene, Heracles' mother, consults the seer Teiresias about the meaning of the snake incident.

134. A patriarchal world typically disregards its old women; Hellenistic art and literature was making them visible and part of the public discourse. Thus, for example, Callimachus's Hecale features an old woman who gives hospitality to Theseus, a young hero on a quest, and in Herodas's Mime 1 an old bawd comes to visit (and solicit) a young married woman.

135. For discussion, see chapter 4.

136. Martin Robertson, A History of Greek Art, 2 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1:388-89; R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture, 65. See, e.g., the beardless, effeminate Dionysus represented on an Attic red-figure pelike, c. 340, from the British Museum E 424 (illustration available in Thomas H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece: A Handbook [London: Thames and Hudson, 1990], 52, no. 49) and the fourth-century representation of a fleshy, beardless adolescent Hermes on a carved column from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (illustration available in Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture I: The Styles of ca. 331-200 B.C. [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990], plate 5).

137. For important cautions concerning extrapolating dates and artists from Roman copies of fourth-century or Hellenistic art, such as the girlishly plump Apollo Sauroktonos (lizard-slayer), commonly attributed to Praxiteles, and the Pothos (the yearning one), commonly attributed to Skopas, see Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture, esp. 87, 91.

138. See, e.g., O. Murray, “Symposion und Männerbund,” 50.

139. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 69-73 (with illustrations from vase paintings); 79-80 (with several examples from fourth-century and Hellenistic literature, e.g., Rhianus's Ep. 3 Gow and Page [= A.P. 12.93], on the charms of various boys, starting with Theodorus's … “plump ripeness of flesh and virgin bloom of limbs” (trans. W. R. Paton, The Greek Anthology, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916-18), 4:329, rev.; 3-4).

140. On Hellenistic sculptures of hermaphrodites, see Robertson, History of Greek Art, esp. 1:551-52; Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age, esp. 149; Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture, 328-30; R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture, esp. 133-34, 156. On hermaphrodites in Greek vase-paintings, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 72. On the hermaphrodite in general, see Marie Delcourt, Hermaphrodite: Mythes et rites de la bisexualité dans l'antiquité classique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958); idem, Hermaphroditea: Recherches sur l'être double promoteur de la fertilité dans le monde classique (Brussels: Latomus, 1966). All the above have plates showing hermaphrodites in Greek art.

141. See Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 54-55 (with references). See too, e.g., Ar. Nub. 964-66, 973-76.

142. Segal, “Death by Water,” 60.

143. For Sappho, like Theocritus, Aphrodite is the major deity.

144. For Greek and Latin examples of the use of “down” imagery in descriptions of young males, see Headlam and Knox, Herodas, 38 n. 52. On youth as valued in eromenoi, see David M. Halperin, “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens,” ch. 5 in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 90. For ancient references on “the sexual appeal of youthfulness to women,” see 182 n. 21.

145. This is probably not Asclepiades of Samos. For discussion of authorship, see Gow and Page, Greek Anthology 2:150, who also note the ironic use of down imagery here: “Adolescence is less admired by this lover than by other Greeks” (2:150 n. 46.1).

146. In attributing this fragment to Callim. Hecale, scholars often conjecture that the speaker is Hecale as she views young Theseus (see, e.g., A. S. Hollis, Callimachus: Hecale [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], 184). Cf. Theocritus's presentation of Simaetha recalling her first view of Delphis and his companion, which, like Callim. Hecale fr. 274, includes a comparison to helichryse: … “Their beards were more golden than helichryse” (“Id. 2.”78).

147. On the homoerotic appeal of youth, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 85-86.

148. Dover suggests that representations of Ganymede (and Tithonos) can serve as touch-stones for Greek male beauty (Greek Homosexuality, 6). Thus, e.g., Dioscorides Ep. 10 Gow and Page (= A.P. 12.37.3-4): … “His thighs were much more honey-sweet than Ganymede's” (trans. Barbara Hughes Fowler, Hellenistic Poetry: An Anthology [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990], 289). On the motif of Ganymede in pederastic Greek epigrams, see Tarán, Art of Variation, 7-51. On Ganymede's appearances in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

149. On the hermaphroditism of Erotes, see Delcourt, Hermaphroditea, 54-59 (“Éros androgyne”); Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 72 (and figures rs12 and rs20).

150. Although this Theocritus need not be the Hellenistic poet from Syracuse (on the uncertainty, see Gow and Page, Greek Anthology 2:161, on Ep. 6 = Callim. Ep. 52), Callimachus and Theocritus do seem to engage in poetic dialogue elsewhere; e.g., Callim. Ep. 46 may well be a witty response to Theoc. “Id. 11” (for discussion, see Bulloch, “Hellenistic Poetry,” 573).

151. For an example of a direct comparison of an eromenos to Ganymede, see Alcaeus of Messene Ep. 9 Gow and Page (= A.P. 12.64). This epigram, a prayer to Zeus for Peithenor to win an Olympic victory, refers to Peithenor as Aphrodite's second son and requests that Zeus not seize Peithenor instead of Ganymede. For references to other Hellenistic epigrams comparing eromenoi to Ganymede, see Gow and Page, Greek Anthology 2:14 (on Alcaeus Ep. 9).

152. “Idyll 15”'s Adonia includes both men and women in its audience, as shown by the bystander's presence. Theocritus's “Idyll 15” emphasizes how the celebration of Adonis's reunion with Aphrodite, the Adonia, can offer married women a safe fantasy of erotic autonomy. Several of Herodas's mimes also suggest the possibility of freedom from the sexual tyranny of husbands: through a slave-boy in Mime 5, dildoes in Mime 6, a lover (although rejected) in Mime 1. Cf. Mastromarco, Public of Herondas, 93-94.

153. Gow, Theocritus 2:301 n. 129, remarks that the adjective … rosy-armed, used by the hymnist to describe Adonis at line 128, “is not used elsewhere of a male person.” On Adonis's immaturity and effeminancy, see also Marcel Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, trans. J. Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1977), esp. 102, 122.

154. On Atalanta's nakedness, see William S. Anderson, Ovid's Metamorphoses: Books 6-10 [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972], 523 n. 578-82: “Atalanta, like the usual athlete of ancient times, was running naked.”

155. For discussion of Ovid's version of Adonis's story (and the linkage of Adonis and Atalanta), see Detienne, Dionysos Slain, 26-52.

156. On the hare as a love-gift for both men and women, see Schnapp, “Eros the Hunter,” 71-87.

157. See Pl. Leg. 633b; Detienne, Dionysos Slain, 24-25; Schnapp, “Eros the Hunter,” 72.

158. Ovid describes this flower as short lived (737-39). Interestingly, the anemone has both male and female parts (although perhaps not recognized as such in ancient times).

159. On the Greek eroticism of death, see, e.g., Emily Vermeule, “On the Wings of Morning: The Pornography of Death,” in Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 145-77: “It was a formal principle of Greek myth and literature that love and death were two aspects of the same power, as in the myth of Persephone or Helen of Troy” (159). See too Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Feminine Figures of Death,” in Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, 95-110. On the eroticism of death in Latin poetry, see Jasper Griffin, “Love and Death,” ch. 7 in Latin Poets, 142-62. Cf. the fashion for representations of beautiful, dying women in art and literature of the late nineteenth century (see, e.g., Bram Dijkstra, “The Cult of Invalidism; Ophelia and Folly; Dead Ladies and the Fetish of Sleep,” ch. 2 in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], 25-63).

160. Similarly, Dioscorides Ep. 3 Gow and Page (= A.P. 5.53).

161. The erastes hopes that he and his eromenos might experience such a reciprocity of love that their memory too might transcend death (“Id. 12.”10-11).

162. For this point, see also Ziegler, “Kallimachos,” 36.

163. Cf. Callim. Iambus 12, fr. 202.69, where the poet-narrator seems to be describing either Apollo (or himself) as still youthful and beardless. … For the suggestion that the description belongs to Apollo, see Rudolf Pfeiffer, Callimachus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949-53), 1:203-4 nn. 54ff.; to the poet-narrator, see Dawson, who translates “while my cheeks and chin are smooth and free of hair” (Christopher M. Dawson, “The Iambi of Callimachus: A Hellenistic Poet's Experimental Laboratory,” Yale Classical Studies 11 [1950], 115). C. A. Trypanis, “Callimachus” in Callimachus: Aetia, Iambi, Lyric Poems, Hecale, Minor Epic and Elegiac Poems, and Other Fragments; Musaeus: Hero and Leander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), follows Dawson.

164. R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture, 65, with illustrations 75, 76. For cautions on dating, see Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture, esp. 87 (as noted above).

165. On the homoerotic motif here, see Frederick Williams, Callimachus: Hymn to Apollo: A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 49-50 n. 49.

166. For the linkage between poetic and homoerotic amatory standards, see also Callim. Ep. 28. On the reference to homosexual courtship in Iambus 3, see, e.g., C. M. Dawson, “Iambi of Callimachus,” 38-39: since Euthydemus's defection, Callimachus “might as well live a eunuch's life” (quote taken from 39); P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria 1:739-40, 2:1040-41 n. 203. Callim. Ep. 32 (= A.P. 12.148) addresses a complaint of avarice to an eromenos. On the issue of payment for homosexual relations, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 106-9; on prices charged, see Halperin, “Democratic Body,” 107-12.

167. On the representation of female figures according to male standards of beauty in the archaic and early classical age, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 70-73.

168. On the close similarities between Theoc. “Id. 18.”22-32 and Callim. Hymn 5.23-28, see Anthony W. Bulloch, Callimachus: The Fifth Hymn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 131-40.

169. On the nuptial aspects of this simile, see J. M. Bremer, “Full Moon and Marriage in Apollonius' Argonautica,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 37 (1987), 423-26, who points out that the change in perceived application of the simile from Medea to Jason enables the reader to “experience the sentiments of the man and the woman very economically: in one and the same simile” (426).

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A Note on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations

All citations of Theocritus's Greek text are taken from A. S. F. Gow, Theocritus, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), vol. 1. All citations of Herodas's Greek text are taken from I. C. Cunningham, Herodae Mimiambi cum Appendice Fragmentorum Mimorum Papyraceorum (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1987). All citations of Callimachus's Greek text are taken from Rudolf Pfeiffer, Callimachus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949-53), unless marked otherwise. The sources of other texts are identified as they appear. All translations are my own unless marked otherwise. Ancient writers and works are abbreviated as in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2d ed., ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).