SOURCE: “The Literary Background of the Idylls” and “The Influence of Theocritus,” in Theocritus, Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 113-49.

[In the following excerpt, Walker examines Theocritus's use of the herdsman-poet figure, his mixing of genres, his relationship to his contemporaries, and his influence and reputation.]

Theocritus began his career as a poet in the first quarter of the third century b.c.—that is, after a glorious period of almost five hundred years during which most of the Greek literary masterpieces which we study, admire, and enjoy today had found their first audiences. Thanks to the labors of the scholar-poets of the Alexandrian world, beginning with Theocritus' teacher Philetas of Cos, most of this impressive literary heritage was available to him—if only at the Library in Alexandria. It is thus hardly surprising that Theocritus' poetry, like the poetry of his Alexandrian contemporaries, echoes at times with the themes, motifs, and turns of phrase of earlier Greek literature.

Students of Theocritus have found Gow's detailed commentary to be an excellent guide to the literary background of the Idylls, and only a commentary of such generous length could do justice to the many problems which arise in judging the relationship of a turn of phrase, motif, image or narrative outline to earlier Greek literary sources or parallels. Gow's notes should be supplemented with Dover's notes, more recent scholarship, and, it is necessary to add, a desire to grasp the original poetic intention of Theocritus.

One example will have to do. In “Idyll XI” ll. 17-18 Theocritus describes Polyphemus “sitting on a high rock and looking out to sea.” Gow would have us see in these lines a reminiscence of Odyssey V ll. 156-57, where Odysseus, held captive by the nymph Calypso on her island, pines away with longing for his home across the seas:

          … he sat on the rocky shore
and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet
scanning the bare horizon of the sea.”

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

Polyphemus, however, is not weeping; rather, by taking up his position on the high rock, he has raised his spirits as well, as it were. The phrase in “Idyll XI” l. 18 es ponton horōn (“looking out to sea”) is actually closer to the phrase horoōn ep'apeirona ponton in Iliad I ll. 349-50, where Achilles, whose love Briseis has been taken from him by Agamemnon, is described as follows:

          … Achilleus
weeping went and sat in sorrow apart from his companions
beside the beach of the grey sea looking out on the
                    infinite water.

(translated by Richmond Lattimore)

If Achilles is looking out to sea, it is because his mother Thetis, whom he is about to address, is a sea-dwelling Nereid; Polyphemus looks seawards, since he too is about to address a Nereid. So far, so good. But the question remains to be answered whether the comparison of Odysseus and/or Achilles with the Theocritean Cyclops was worth making in the first place? Do we really expect that Theocritus intended his audience to make something of the matter, or not? I suspect not, and I suspect that Gow did not expect it either, which is why his remark that “Theocritus is probably conscious also of Odysseus on Calypso's island—Od. 5.156”¹ means little; Theocritus may have been conscious of this and several other things as well, but “Idyll XI” is anything but a record of his private stream of consciousness.

The excursus that we have just made into the briarpatch of traditional commentary has been useful, I believe, in establishing three points which should be kept in mind when approaching the problem of sources, antecedents, parallels, etc. First of all, much of Greek literature has been lost; given the absence of many potential sources, or their survival in only fragmentary form, it is frequently impossible to judge exactly how much literary indebtedness Theocritus incurs in the Idylls. Second, the Alexandrian period enjoyed learned references and the reworking of older themes, it is true; but the art of literary reminiscence was, at least with the best poets, a subtle and sophisticated procedure, and should be studied as such—that is, one should endeavor to elucidate the original poetic intention, if one's remarks are to have any critical value. Finally, attention must be given to the exact wording of a Greek passage cited as a source or inspiration, since there is no other way to determine whether an allusion is being made or whether there is simply an accidental similarity of expression; there are, after all, only so many ways of saying “looking out to sea.”

I EARLIER GREEK LITERATURE AND PASTORAL

Much speculation has been made about the origins of Greek pastoral poetry. Was Theocritus its creator? Or did Theocritus draw heavily on pastoral motifs and themes which he found in earlier Greek literature? Both questions deserve to be answered in the affirmative, as we shall see. There is hardly a single motif or theme in Theocritus' pastoral poetry which does not have its roots in earlier literature, and yet it is equally true that nothing like Theocritus' Pastoral Idylls had ever been written before. In this section, we shall examine five dimensions of the Herdsman-Poet figure (the key element of Theocritean pastoral) in order to back up this paradoxical assertion: the herdsman as a figure described with a certain amount of realism, the herdsman as lover, the herdsman as rural musician and player of the syrinx, the herdsman as rustic singer, and the herdsman as poet.

Homer's Odyssey provides several vividly realistic portraits of all four categories of herdsmen and their life in the ancient world. Eumaeus the swineherd is one of the key figures of the Odyssey from Book XIV onwards; however, there are no swineherd protagonists in the Pastoral Idylls. Eumaeus, interestingly enough, was actually the son of a landowner, and only became a swineherd after he had been abducted by Phoenician seafarers and sold as a slave to Odysseus' father Laertes (XV ll. 403 ff.). It is possible that Homer sees his noble background as accounting for his innate courtesy and hospitality; if so, the Renaissance tradition of the noble in pastoral exile has a distant origin indeed. Odysseus treats him as a social equal, in spite of his low status as swineherd and slave. Along with Philoetius the cowherd, who plays an important if not major role in the last books of the Odyssey (from XX l. 185 on), Eumaeus helps Odysseus defeat the suitors of Penelope and regain his rightful kingdom of Ithaca.

The Cyclops Polyphemus appears in Book IX of the Odyssey as a man-eating monster who also exercises the peaceful profession of shepherd. His portrait was considerably modified by Philoxenus, and it is this Sicilian version of the myth that Theocritus put to such good use in his Pastoral Idylls. Eumaeus, Philoetius and Polyphemus are all mentioned by name in “Idyll XVI” ll. 53-55; obviously, Theocritus already was seeing Homer as a creator of pastoral protagonists when he wrote his petition to, or complaint about, Hiero II of Syracuse.

Another Homeric herdsman, this time a goatherd, is mentioned by name at the end of “Idyll V.” Melanthius was the only male servant of Odysseus to betray his master. As Stanford notes on Odyssey XVII l. 212, “his actions gave Greek goatherds a bad reputation for ever afterwards.”

With Homer's brief account of the story of Boukolion in the sixth book of the Iliad (23-26) appears the oldest Greek literary reference to the theme of the loves of a herdsman and a nymph, a theme which finds its ultimate Theocritean expression in the treatment in the Pastoral Idylls of the myth of Galatea and Polyphemus. It will become an extremely important thematic strain for later European pastoral, since it links the world of the lowly herdsman to the semidivine realm of Eros, and allows the figure of the herdsman-lover to emerge.

Also in the Iliad appears the earliest Greek literary association of herdsmen with the music of the syrinx. Homer's description of the shield of Achilles (XVIII ll. 478-613), a magnificent work of art created by the god Hephaestus, is frequently cited as a source for later pastoral descriptions as well as the prototype for the type of ekphrasis represented by the description of the sculptured cup in “Idyll I.” Homer does indeed evoke a whole rural world in miniature, with farmers, reapers, a harvest festival, a vineyard, and the “Linos song” (“XVIII” ll. 569-72) which a boy sings to entertain those who are working at harvesting the grapes (for some strange reason, this work song is frequently cited as the earliest pastoral song). Homer also gives a dramatic description of some cowherds and their dogs attempting to save a bull from the attack of two lions (573-86), and a brief but lovely picture of sheepfolds and pasturelands (587-89). But it is the description of a scene of ambush and combat which is the most interesting from the standpoint of pastoral, since it describes, in vivid contrast with the preparations for the coming slaughter, two herdsmen playing on their pipes:

… when they were come to the place that was set for their ambush,
in a river, where there was a watering place for all animals,
there they sat down in place shrouding themselves in the bright bronze.
But apart from these were sitting two men to watch for the rest of them
and waiting until they could see the sheep and the shambling cattle,
who appeared presently, and two herdsmen went along with them
playing happily on pipes. …

(Iliad XVIII ll. 520-26, translated by Richmond Lattimore)

The joy which the herdsmen are taking in their rustic music is part of the terrible irony of the scene: a moment later the herdsmen are massacred.

Rhesus, a tragedy attributed to Euripides which draws heavily on the Iliad, provides an especially haunting evocation of the sound of panpipes before dawn, when the chorus says:

Already they are driving the sheep to pasture
on the slopes of Mt. Ida: I hear
the nocturnal cry of panpipes.

(Rhesus, ll. 551-53)

Thus far we have examined no instance of bucolic song as a specific motif in Greek literature before Theocritus, yet without song there could be no Theocritean pastoral at all. It is possible that Sicilian poets, starting with Stesichorus, were the first to elaborate on this motif, and that it was connected with the myth of the bucolic archpoet Daphnis; it is pointless to go into more detail on this matter, since the evidence is extremely scanty.²

However, one piece of evidence looks more promising from the standpoint of claiming a Sicilian origin for Theocritus' pastoral poetry. We have seen how the theme of a cure for love (the esthetic sublimation of the sexual instincts) pervades the Pastoral Idylls and indeed conditions the structure of the poetic sequence. A scholiast noted in connection with “Idyll XI” l. 1 (“There is no cure for love except the Muses”) that, in Philoxenus' poem on the same subject, Polyphemus gave the dolphins a message for Galatea, in which he claimed to be soothing the pain of his love with the help of the Muses; and Plutarch (Q. Conviv. 1.5) has preserved a fragment of the poem which indicates exactly the same idea. The fragment cited by Athenaeus (15.692d) is perhaps the opening line of the Cyclops' song to Galatea.

In Philoxenus' treatment of the Sicilian version of the Polyphemus myth, Theocritus would have found a transparent bucolic allegory at work in which the Cyclops represented Dionysius of Syracuse, Galatea the tyrant's mistress of the same name, and Odysseus the daring poet-lover himself, who braved the tyrant's anger for the sake of the love of a human Galatea, not a Nereid. Philoxenus may have thus given to Theocritus not only the inspiration for one of the major themes of the Pastoral Idylls, but also an example of how allegory could be used in connection with a pastoral scene involving a singing shepherd.

There were early precedents for linking the figures of the Herdsman and the Poet—the ironic synthesis which was to create the Theocritean Herdsman-Poet figure. At the opening of the Theogony, Hesiod had described in a famous passage the exact circumstances under which the Muses first inspired him to become a poet:

One day the Muses taught Hesiod to sing beautifully
while he was shepherding his lambs under Mt. Helicon.
And the first thing the goddesses told me was this:
“O shepherds who dwell in the fields, you disgraces to mankind,
you walking stomachs—
we know how to tell many lies that sound like the truth,
and how, when we so please, to tell the truth as well.”
Thus ready of speech spoke the daughters of mighty Zeus,
and broke a laurel branch, and gave it to me as a staff. …

(Theogony ll. 22-30)

The contrast between the lowly shepherds and the rather sharp-tongued Muses is amusingly drawn; this humorous contrast between the humble status of the herdsman and the divine gift of song was to become an important element of the ironic perspective of the Pastoral Idylls. Theocritus may well have wished the reader to remember this episode when, in “Idyll VII” ll. 128-29, he had Lycidas give Simichidas his stick “as a present from the Muses.”³

A recently discovered inscription on the island of Paros has revealed that the lyric poet Archilochus also claimed to have received his first inspiration from the Muses while he was driving a cow to market.⁴ Since herding was traditionally seen as an occupation for the young (even the sons of the Homeric nobility were herdsmen in their youth, cf. Anchises, Paris), and since poetic genius was likely to manifest itself at an early age, the association of the Muses with the life of young herdsmen in the fields was a natural one, which Theocritus could easily make plausible as a realistic motif in the Pastoral Idylls.

In looking back to earlier Greek literature for the sources of Theocritean pastoral, attention must be paid to the specific use to which pastoral motifs were put. In the Iliad, for example, there are a number of pastoral similes, some of them of striking beauty:

As when in the sky the stars about the moon's shining
are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness,
and all the high places of the hills are clear, and the shoulders out-jutting,
and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from the heavens
and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the shepherd. …

(Iliad VIII ll. 555-59, translated by Richmond Lattimore)

But it would be an error to find in this simile an early expression of the pastoral theme of the Herdsman-Poet's delight in natural beauty as we find it in the Pastoral Idylls (cf. opening of “Idyll I”). Homer is not claiming that his shepherd is in an ecstasy of aesthetic contemplation, but rather (as George Soutar pointed out)⁵ that he is glad that the night is too bright for sheep stealing or for sudden storms to threaten his flock—compare Iliad IV ll. 275-79:

As from his watching place a goatherd watches a cloud move
on its way over the sea before the drive of the west wind;
far away though he be he watches it, blacker than pitch is,
moving across the sea and piling the storm before it,
and as he sees it he shivers and drives his flocks to a cavern. …

(translated by Richmond Lattimore)

In both cases the Homeric herdsman has a purely practical relationship with Nature and natural beauty. In addition, the similes are used in order to provide the greatest possible effect of contrast with the wartime episodes in the context of which they occur: the watchfires of the Trojans in the first instance, and the maneuvering of the Achaean troops in the second.

Although in this search for the origins of Theocritean pastoral I have emphasized a number of pastoral motifs which occur in earlier Greek literature, the specific use of such motifs in Theocritean pastoral cannot be fully explained by reference to Homer, Hesiod or any other poet. But recently attention has turned to the prose writings of Plato, which seem to present a greater analogy with Theocritean pastoral than anything we have considered previously. Clyde Murley's article “Plato's Phaedrus and Theocritean Pastoral” was a trail-blazing piece of research, and still stands as an example of a sophisticated discussion of origins. According to Murley, “Plato presents a certain technique of nature description as a background for formal and artificial conversation” which provides “a fairly complete scheme of such Idylls as Theocritus VII, once we substitute ornamental prose for verse.”⁶ Murley's detailed comparison of the Phaedrus with Theocritean pastoral avoids superficial rapprochements, and yet it manages to suggest a connection between Plato and Theocritus which challenges earlier assumptions about the origins of Pastoral. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, in the chapter on the origins of Theocritean pastoral in his recent book The Green Cabinet, gives support to Murley's conclusions when he writes, “I should argue that the very earliest occurrence of a pastoral line is in Plato's Phaedrus (241 D1) “Wolves love the lamb; so lovers crave their boy.”⁷

II MIME, MIXTURE OF GENRES, AND MYTH

It is probably the influence of Sophron, the fifth-century Syracusan creator of the literary mime, which accounts for the formal similarities between the dialogues of Plato and the Pastoral Idylls of Theocritus. Unfortunately, only fragments of Sophron's mimes survive. Plato admired these scenes, frequently in dialogue form, which Sophron wrote in rhythmical prose, and may have found in them the formal inspiration for his first prose dialogues which dramatized scenes from the life of his teacher Socrates. Theocritus may have found in his fellow Syracusan's occasional use of rustic protagonists (such titles as “The Tunafisher” and “The Fisherman and the Farmer” have survived) the encouragement he needed to bring herdsmen into the framework of the Hellenistic mime, which was considered, ast least by Herondas, as a genre dealing primarily with urban life and low life.

The genre of the literary mime in Hellenistic times is linked with the name of Herondas (or Herodas),⁸ a contemporary of Theocritus who survived only as a name until 1891, when his editio princeps was published on the basis of a newly discovered papyrus. The mime was originally a popular, subliterary genre which must have corresponded to the modern comic skit as put on in nightclubs and evening television shows.

In an interesting essay on the origin and development of literary genres, David Craig listed several hypothetical laws of generic evolution, three of which apply well enough to the genre of the literary mime as practiced by Herondas and Theocritus:

The rise of a genre is likely to occur along with the rise of a class (e.g. in average wealth, in the proportion of the population belonging to it).

A new genre is likely to piece itself together out of motifs, styles, means of circulation that had belonged to some medium not thought of as art proper.

Such an emergence is likely to take place at a time of social upheaval and rapid change.⁹

Originally a popular genre, a subliterary form of entertainment for the urban masses, the mime reached the peak of its literary development when it was taken up by literary artists of the caliber of Herondas and Theocritus, at a time when the poorer free citizenry of the Greek-speaking world was finding new and unprecedented opportunities for economic prosperity in the empire which Alexander and his successors had won for them.

However, the literary mime was not in itself a popular genre—its language was too artificial and “literary”—but rather represented the result of the infiltration of popular taste into the ranks of a highly educated and tradition-conscious intelligentsia which had followed, like the less-educated masses, the flag of Greek hegemony in Egypt and Asia, and had benefited from the new sources of patronage in the cultural centers of the oikoumenēe. There is a special vitality in the literary mime which bears witness to the vitality of the popular genre out of which it developed—a vitality which is lacking, for example, in the Alexandrian miniature epic, even though the latter caters to an equally Alexandrian taste for realistic descriptions of middle-class domestic life. A similar vogue can be found in Hellenistic sculpture of the sort which portrayed with great freshness of inspiration old women, beggars, and slaves.¹⁰ This new taste for the realistic treatment of themes drawn from the life of the ordinary people of the oikoumenē was no doubt the result of the new spirit of social democracy which flourished paradoxically under political tyranny; the old landowning aristocracy of mainland Greece was an anachronism in the new world of the oikoumenē, and so was its antidemocratic system of values.

Since Theocritus and Herondas were writing at the same time, as far as we can determine, it is hard to say whether one followed in the tracks of the other or not. But it is certainly correct to state that their approach to the genre of the mime was quite different. This is best illustrated by a comparison of Herondas' sixth and fourth mimes with Theocritus' “Idyll XV.”

“Idyll XV” opens with the arrival of Gorgo, who has come to chat with Praxinoa after breakfast. The scene (“XV” ll. 1-43) is quite lively, as Matthew Arnold emphasized in a series of exclamations (“What freedom! What animation!” etc.); but it can hardly be compared with the bawdry of the conversation between Koritto and Metro in Mime VI of Herondas, which revolves around the topic of a female masturbatory device (baubōn) which a clever cobbler makes and sells under the counter. Herondas' fourth mime, like the second part of “Idyll XV,” shows two women admiring works of art; the scene is a temple complex dedicated to the god of healing Asclepius, to whom Kynno and Kokkale have brought an offering. The mime is partly a tribute to the realistic art of the painter Apelles, and partly, like “Idyll XV,” a study of the impact of art on alert but unsophisticated minds—a theme inspired by the socially democratic spirit of the oikoumenē. But “Idyll XV” contains a striking if typically Theocritean addition to the stock devices of the urban mime: the hymn to Adonis which, for all its parodistic overtones, represents that element of song which distinguishes Theocritus' mimes from those of Herondas, and which becomes the centerpiece in most of the pastoral idylls.

It is a commonplace to maintain that Hellenistic poets achieved whatever degree of originality with which they may be credited through the mixture of traditional literary genres. This mixture of genres is clearly discernible in the urban and pastoral mimes of Theocritus. “Idyll XV,” as we have just seen, is a literary mime to which Theocritus has joined a subtle parody of an Alexandrian hymn. This insertion of song into the context of mime is to be found in all of Theocritus' mimes, pastoral as well as nonpastoral, with the exception of “Idyll II” (where the incantation might be considered a form of song, however), “Idyll IV” (where song is at least mentioned), and “Idyll XIV.” The songs themselves present great generic variety: amoebaean songs in “Idylls V” and “VI,” a Daphnis song in “Idyll I,” snatches of work songs in “Idyll X,” and so on. Narrative frames, lacking in the mimes of Herondas, play an important role in “Idylls VI,” “VII,” and “XI,” and destroy the dramatic illusion which the mime, in its origin at least a purely dramatic form, sought to maintain.

Corresponding to the mixture of genres in the Pastoral Idylls is the mixed radical of presentation: narrative (the narrative frames), dramatic (the mime elements proper), and lyric (the songs). This mixed radical of presentation was to become one of the hallmarks of the pastoral genre which developed out of Theocritus' Pastoral Idylls. Eventually it became possible for European Pastoral to favor one radical of presentation over another and give birth to the pastoral novel, the pastoral drama and the pastoral lyric; this process of generic evolution will be examined in the last chapter of this book.

For Northrop Frye, the Greek mime was “a dead center of complete realism” which could be best described as “representing human life without comment and without imposing any sort of dramatic form beyond what is required for simple exhibition.”¹¹ However, the most recent editor of the text of the Mimiambi, I. C. Cunningham, raises an important issue when he writes: “For a work of literature to be realistic in any meaningful sense, not only must the content be realistic, but the language in which it is written must be that which the characters would use in similar situations in real life.”¹² Since Herondas puts a sixth-century version of the Eastern Ionic dialect into the mouths of his Hellenistic characters, it is difficult to find in his mimes a foretaste of the European realistic theater of the end of the nineteenth century. The artificial nature of Herondas' language distinguishes his literary mimes from the popular mime as well as from the mimes in prose of Sophron; the same may be said of the pastoral and nonpastoral mimes of Theocritus, although the question of language is somewhat more complicated, and will be treated in section IV of this chapter. It is enough for the moment to note that the Alexandrian who ridicules the Doric accent of Gorgo and her friend Praxinoa in “Idyll XV” ll. 87-88 does so in exactly the same dialect! Of course, an exact reproduction of spoken conversation (as in unedited transcriptions of taped conversations) would be intolerable even for a reader of modern novels, most of which purport to reproduce conversation realistically, but which in fact iron out or eliminate the hesitations, repetitions and parataxis which are the natural characteristics of ordinary speech. However, criteria for literary realism are relative, and a Greek reader may not have felt the use of an archaic dialect in verse to be as artificial as we would today.

In Frye's neo-Aristotelian terminology, the Greek mime presented its image of life in a mixture of the low mimetic and the ironic modes; that is, the reader or spectator in Hellenistic times would have felt slightly superior to the protagonists of some of Herondas' scenes from middle-class life, if only because less educated women were the protagonists, and quite superior to the protagonists of his scenes of low life, which featured pimps, slaves, etc. The same would have been true for the reader of Theocritus: any literate Greek of the oikoumenē would have felt superior to the herdsmen of the Pastoral Idylls, since herdsmen were low men on the totem pole of Hellenistic society, social exotics, anachronistic survivors of another age when stock-breeding had been the main source of wealth, and young princes herded cattle.

However, the Theocritean herdsman was, as we have seen, more than just a herdsman: he was a Herdsman-Poet, a figure who synthesized the attributes of the least literate class with those of the Hellenistic intelligentsia. Herondas' characters, by way of contrast, were no more than what they seemed to be, and the same can be said of the characters of the nonpastoral mimes of Theocritus. What accounts for the difference between pastoral and nonpastoral mimes is something that Northrop Frye considered to be a phenomenon unique to modern Western literature (especially Joyce and Kafka): “the reappearance of myth in the ironic.”¹³ Behind the humble figure of the Theocritean herdsman looms the myth of the Poet, a tragic myth in the case of Daphnis, a comic heroic myth in the case of Polyphemus. Both myths are in fact variations on the myth of Orpheus, who was torn apart after losing Eurydice and forswearing the love of women (cf. the situation and “sufferings” of Daphnis), but who also managed to bring back the shade of Eurydice thanks to the charm of his singing in the first and more comic half of his story. It is this presence of the myth of the poet's life which constitutes the most striking difference between the Mimiambi of Herondas and the Pastoral Idylls of Theocritus.

III THEOCRITUS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

“When it comes to singing, I am still no match for the worthy Sicelidas of Samos or for Philetas—just a frog competing with grasshoppers.” With these modest words (“Idyll VII” ll. 39-41), Theocritus mentions two of his older contemporaries by name, and praises them in a transparent pastoral allegory. Philetas, as we have seen, was one of the first scholar-poets of Hellenistic times, and had been the tutor of the young Ptolemy Philadelphus before Theocritus came to the island of Cos. Only fragments of Philetas' poetry survive, but it is easy to imagine how influential he must have been, thanks to his connections with the court at Alexandria as well as to his depth of scholarship and poetic genius. We are in a better position to assess the poetry of Sicelidas (or Asclepiades) of Samos, many of whose epigrams have survived. His poetry is unusual for its expression of wit and feeling in a simple and direct manner. Its subject matter is primarily the love of courtesans (hetaerae).¹⁴

Lycidas replies to Theocritus-Simichidas' praise of Asclepiades and Philetas in a rather cryptic manner:

How I hate builders who try to make houses rise
to the height of the peak of Mt. Oromedon;
and I hate those birds of the Muses
who waste their energy crowing against the man from Chios.

(“VII” ll. 45-48)

The passage is commonly taken to mean that Lycidas (and by implication, Theocritus himself) felt that it was impossible to rival Homer (the bard of Chios), and that the modern, that is, Alexandrian poet's chance of success lay with the smaller forms of poetry, and not with the epic or the longer forms.

Callimachus was the most vocal defender of this Alexandrian taste for the miniature in literature, and the prologue of his Aetia is the most impressive statement of his position which has survived. The following two lines, later imitated by Virgil in Eclogue VI ll. 3-5, purport to be the words of Apollo, and present Callimachus poetic credo in a nutshell:

Singer, fatten the animal for sacrifice as much as you can,
but keep your Muse nice and thin.

(Aetia I ll. / 23-24)

Since Theocritus' Idylls are certainly the finest inspirations of the slender Alexandrian Muse, it is usually assumed that, through the words of Lycidas in “Idyll VII” ll. 45-48, Theocritus was publicly declaring his adherence to the Callimachean principles of literary composition.

Callimachus, like Theocritus, was an expatriate from a Dorian city (Cyrene, on the coast of Libya) who eventually found a patron in Ptolemy Philadelphus (cf. Hymn IV ll. 160 ff. and “Idyll XVII” ll. 58 ff.).¹⁵ He was associated with the Library, and compiled the Pinakes, a catalogue raisonné which was a pioneering work in the field of literary history. He was a scholarly poet with a charming sense of humor; I have already quoted his witty response to Theocritus' “cure for love” topos in “Idyll XI” (see Chapter 2, section VII).

Callimachus' approach to the problems of writing epic narrative without crowing against the bard of Chios may have inspired Theocritus' poems on epic themes, especially “Idyll XXIV” (“The Little Heracles”). In Callimachus' Hecalē, which dealt with the theme of Theseus and the Marathonian bull, the heroic side of Theseus' adventure was apparently subordinated to the evocation of the old woman Hecale, in whose humble dwelling the mighty hero deigned to take refuge. This “domestication” of heroic themes is part of the shift in Alexandrian literature from high mimetic to low mimetic and ironic narrative modes, and corresponds to the decline of aristocratic standards in literature, at a time when the position of the traditional landed aristocracy was being taken by the newly prosperous middle classes who formed the social backbone of the Greek cities founded by Alexander and his successors.

Callimachus mentions Theocritus by name in one of his epigrams (“LIII”), and in another (“XXIV”), he pays tribute to the vogue of pastoral which Theocritus' Pastoral Idylls had started in Alexandria:

Astacides the Cretan goatherd was abducted by a Nymph
from the hill, and now he is worshipped as a hero.
No more shall we shepherds sing of Daphnis
in the shade of Dictaean oaks, but only of Astacides.

The motif of the Daphnis song is taken straight from Theocritus, in all likelihood; and the abduction of a goatherd by a Nymph reflects the general theme of the loves of a herdsman and a Nymph which is found throughout the Pastoral Idylls as well as the fate of Hylas in “Idyll XIII.”

However, pastoral motifs had been used in lyric poetry before Theocritus. Anyte, a poetess of the early third century b.c. like Theocritus came from an area (Arcadia) traditionally associated with the songs of herdsmen, and wrote in Doric dialect. The following epigram is worth quoting, since Webster finds in it “the beginning of pastoral poetry”:¹⁶

Stranger, rest your weary limbs under the elm;
sweetly murmurs the wind in the green leaves.
Drink cool water from the spring. Travellers
love this spot on a hot summer day.

Such epigrams perhaps prepared the way for Theocritus' later success at the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria, although it is unfair to see in their mere use of pastoral motifs the origin of Theocritean pastoral poetry, which is characterized above all by the presence of the Herdsman-Poet, a figure who is totally absent from this epigram and others like it.

The influence which folk songs and poetry had on some of the European Romantic movements can be documented; and it is possible and even likely that, to some extent, Theocritus based his pastoral poetry on the actual songs of the Greek herdsmen of his day. It is hard to account for his stylistic use of repetition, refrain, and amoebaean exchange in any other way. However, the question will probably remain moot, unless some collection of Hellenistic herdsmen's songs miraculously surfaces from the sands of Egypt. In the meantime, the following modern song will have to serve as an example of what herdsmen's songs might have been like in the time of Theocritus. It was sung by a Greek shepherd of Kalymnos, accompanied by his son on the tsambouna or bagpipes, and is titled “The Shepherd and the King” (“Ho Boskos ki ho Basilias”); in it a king and a shepherd lay a wager, the shepherd's sheep against the king's own wife:

“Now you tell me, good shepherd,
what will you wager?”
“I'll wager a thousand sheep
with silver bells
and my best lamb
with the silklike wool.”
When the shepherd
brought his sheep,
the shepherd brought his sheep
down to the watering place,
the queen appeared
at a far-off window:
“I wish I were a shepherdess
and cheesemaker
so I could hear the birds singing in the mandri
and make fresh cheese.”

(recorded, transcribed, and translated by Ellen Frye)¹⁷

In this modern song an actual herdsman sings about a legendary herdsman and a king; in “Idyll VII,” Lycidas sang about Comatas and the evil tyrant. The simple pastoral life is praised by an actual shepherd-singer, just as it was by Theocritus' herdsman-poets; the song celebrates a world of singing birds, sheep-pens (mandri), and cheesemaking which is reminiscent of the world of the Pastoral Idylls—compare the song of the Cyclops in “Idyll XI,” especially lines 34-49, for the motif of pastoral wealth, and lines 63-66, which offer a striking parallel to the words of the queen at the end of the modern Greek song, where, however, the “come live with me and be my love” topos is changed to “I wish I could come live with you and be your love.”

Apollonius (“of Rhodes”) was the only major Alexandrian poet to be born in the city of Alexandria. His romantic epic The Voyage of Argo (Argonautica) was the most serious attempt on the part of a Hellenistic “bird of the Muses” to “crow against the bard of Chios.” Virgil was certainly encouraged by his daring; his portrait of the impassioned queen Dido in Book IV of the Aeneid was partially inspired by Apollonius' magnificent narration of Medea's love at first sight for Jason in Book III of the Argonautica. Simaetha, Theocritus' impassioned would-be sorceress, mentions the name of Medea (“Idyll II” l. 16); Gow writes that “the third book of the Argonautica and this Idyll are the chief surviving specimens of the intimate analytical handling of love themes which is agreed to have been the most important legacy of the Alexandrians to European poetry.”¹⁸

It is generally assumed that Apollonius and Callimachus were at each other's throats over the question of the relevance of the Homeric epic as a model for Hellenistic poetry. Callimachus apparently felt that long poems were out of the question; Apollonius disagreed. Since Theocritus apparently took the side of Callimachus, scholars have been eager to see in Idylls “XIII” and “XXII,” in which Theocritus treated material which Apollonius also treated in the Argonautica (Book I ll. 1207 ff. for the Hylas episode, Book II ll. 1-97 for Polydeuces' fight with Amycus), illustrations of the artistic consequences of this Alexandrian battle of the books. Gow has argued that Theocritus rehandled Apollonius' material in order to bring his versions more in line with the Callimachean ars poetica;¹⁹ Webster is less impressed with the evidence for a Theocritean onslaught on poor Apollonius;²⁰ Dover is willing to grant Gow this point, but adds, “Which of the two poets has handled the theme[s] better is a matter on which readers disagree.”²¹ Readers might at least agree that the problem has all the makings of a perfect scholarly controversy, since there is no way to settle the issue short of an accurate dating of the various stages of composition of the Argonautica and of the two idylls of Theocritus in question—and such accurate dating is, fortunately or unfortunately, impossible.

The question of the relationship of Theocritus' poetry, and especially his pastoral poetry, to the visual art of his time has been carefully examined by T. B. L. Webster in Hellenistic Poetry and Art and The Age of Hellenism.²² Webster examines, as does Lawall, herdsman-satyr figures in the plastic arts.²³ He also deals with the difficult question of the relationship of the poetic locus amoenus to its analogues in the visual arts. According to Webster, the artistic motif of the vineclad grotto of the Nymphs and Dionysus was the source of Theocritus' pastoral scenes, and also inspired the artificial bowers constructed for drinking parties. If Webster's hypothesis is correct, then it helps account for the use in Theocritean pastoral of motifs of symposiastic origin (the kōmos, “symptoms of love,” Lycidas' rustic symposion in “Idyll VII,” etc.), since the pastoral landscape would have readily suggested the idea of a drinking party. The realistic depiction of children (cf. “Idyll XXIV” “The Little Heracles”), or old people (cf. the old fisherman on the cup in “Idyll I”), and of domestic animals (throughout the Pastoral Idylls), and more generally what Margarete Bieber²⁴ has called “Rococo trends in Hellenistic art,” presents obvious analogies with Theocritus' literary art, although the question of the significance of these analogies is still a matter for further research to uncover.

IV LANGUAGE, STYLE, AND VERSE

The seven Pastoral Idylls as well as the four mimes of Theocritus were written in a predominantly Doric dialect of Greek. The poems to patrons and the poems on epic themes mix epic-Ionic and Doric dialects, with the exception of “Idyll XXII,” which, like “Idyll XII,” is in pure epic-Ionic. All of the poems just mentioned are in hexameters. “The Distaff” (“Idyll XXVIII”) and the two remaining poems on paederastic love (“Idylls XXIX” and “XXX”) resurrect the old Aeolic dialect and meters of Sappho and Alcaeus. Most of the epigrams are in Doric elegiacs.

So much for the bare linguistic facts of the matter. What do we make of them? The closest imitation of Theocritus' pastoral language in English might be found in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender; John Dryden thought so, at any rate, and considered Theocritus' Doric a perfect model for rustic speech: “The boorish dialect of Theocritus has a secret charm in it which the Roman language cannot imitate. But Spenser, being master of our northern dialect, and skilled in Chaucer's English, has … exactly imitated the Doric of Theocritus.”²⁵ Gow is willing to grant the traditional point that Theocritus' Doric had some flavor of rusticity for a third-century audience (the koinē or standard Greek of the Macedonian kingdoms was basically Attic), but he goes on to give a philologically more sophisticated picture of the language of the Pastoral Idylls and the mimes:

Theocritus's dialect is artificial, peculiar to himself, and not consistent even in his own usage. He is not writing his native Syracusan, nor is he imitating those who had written it before him (Epicharmus and Sophron, for instance) as in the Aeolic poems he imitates Sappho and Alcaeus. … As Burns modified his native Ayrshire dialect with words drawn both from other parts of Scotland and from literature, so Theocritus, but much more freely.²⁶

But Dover plays down the element of artificiality which Gow wants to stress: “Perhaps as many as half the words in Theocritus which seem to us ‘poetic’ when we consider them from an Attic standpoint were not so from a Dorian standpoint” and would have been everyday language for a Doric-speaking Syracusan or Coan.²⁷ In addition, a literate Alexandrian Greek was perfectly used to Homeric language (epic-Ionic), and had a higher tolerance for deviation in poetry from the contemporary spoken norms than we do today, influenced as we are by William Carlos Williams and the American art of plain speaking. I suspect that the actual effect of Theocritus' poetic language on his audience resembled, from the standpoint of archaism, the effect of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor on contemporary American readers, and that the Doricisms were no more exotic for non-Doric speakers than the various dialects used by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn were for its original audience.

The style of Theocritus in his Pastoral Idylls is admirably suited to his bucolic subject matter. The use of repetition is especially sophisticated since it aims at an effect of artless simplcity which is in fact completely calculated. The use of refrain and amoebaean exchange is, as we have seen, probably borrowed directly from subliterary genres, perhaps from actual herdsmen's songs. Dover's edition contains an excellent analysis of Theocritus' style which even the Greekless reader will find of value.

The music of Theocritus' verse is something that is within the powers of practically any reader to appreciate, even if his Greek is less than Shakespeare's. It is a style which has immediate appeal; in classical times the critic Hermogenes called it “smooth,” and Demetrius mentioned its “sweetness.” This sweet musicality is based on a very marked preference for alliteration and assonance, which creates a continual echoing of sounds, and thus dampens potentially harsh effects; it frequently results from the close repetition of words and parallel constructions. The most noteworthy feature of Theocritus' Doric, the broad “a” sound (which replaces the Attic “ē”), is used to smooth out vowel coloring. The total effect of Theocritus' verse music in the Pastoral Idylls is unique in Greek literature.

According to Legrand,²⁸ this strong musicality may have resulted from the fact that Theocritus' poetry (along with most scholarly Alexandrian verse) was intended for reading only. Deprived of traditional musical accompaniment and recitation, the Alexandrians were led to compose with more regard for the inner ear. The quite obvious and strong effects of Theocritus' verse may well owe a good deal to this absence of the traditional lyric radical of presentation. In addition, since Theocritus' herdsmen are frequently supposed to be singing, something was certainly needed to inject this absent but imagined music into their hexameters. The verse itself trips along in a lively manner, dactyl after dactyl. It is often interrupted by a strong pause before the fifth foot (the so-called “bucolic dieresis”) which gives a peculiarly rhythmic swing to this bucolic version of the Homeric meter of epic recitation.

.....

The influence of Theocritus' poetry on the course of Western literature is a topic for a lengthy study by itself, for no other Greek author was as often imitated and as successfully imitated at times as Theocritus. However, two basic points should be kept in mind: Theocritus influenced Western literature primarily through Virgil's reworking of the themes and motifs of the Pastoral Idylls in the Eclogues; and his direct influence can be traced as a rule only in the works of those poets (Virgil, Sannazaro, Ronsard, Milton, Gnedich, Arnold, et al.) who knew enough Greek to read him in the original.

Theocritus' Pastoral Idylls created a new literary genre, and individual idylls became the prototypes for its various forms: Idylls “III” and “XI” for the pastoral monologue, “Idyll V” for amoebaean song, etc. Such a great quantity of mediocre verse in the pastoral vein exists that scholars and critics tend to forget that the pastoral tradition which Theocritus' Pastoral Idylls initiated also inspired a few undisputed masterpieces of European literature: Virgil's Eclogues, Garcilaso's three eclogues in Spanish, Tasso's Italian pastoral play Aminta, Milton's “Lycidas,” and L'Après-midi d'un faune of the French poet Mallarmé. These and other less celebrated works of European Pastoral attest to the formal influence of the Pastoral Idylls and to the perennial fascination of the world of herdsmen-poets and herdsmen-lovers to which the imagination of Theocritus gave birth.

I IMITATION OF THEOCRITEAN MOTIFS

The influence of Theocritus is most easily seen in the frequent and close imitation of Theocritean motifs by later poets working in the pastoral tradition. Such a frequent and close imitation of motifs is the most constant feature of European pastoral poetry, which developed as the result of an unusually deliberate process of assimilation and imitation of earlier models. One example will have to do. In “Idyll VI” ll. 34-39 the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus remembers a moment of comic narcissistic self-admiration:

Actually, I am not as bad-looking as people say I am.
The other day I looked at my reflection in the sea—the sea was calm—
and my beard looked good, my one and only eyeball looked good,
—as far as I could tell—and my teeth
gleamed whiter and brighter than Parian marble.

With his single eye in the middle of his forehead, and the single shaggy eyebrow above it, the young Cyclops could easily think of himself as a freak, unless he made, as he did, a determined effort to find himself attractive.

In Virgil's imitation of the same motif in Eclogue II ll. 25-27, a certain amount of the humor is lost, since the shepherd Corydon does not have the Cyclops' reasons for being afraid of being called an ugly freak by his neighbors:

nec sum adeo informis: nuper me in litore vidi,
cum placidum ventis staret mare; non ego Daphnim
iudice te metuam, si numquam fallit imago.
Nor am I as ill-favoured as all that. Down by the sea the
other day, I saw myself reflected when the dying wind had
left the water calm. You could compare me even with Daphnis,
and I should have no fears—if mirrors do not lie.

(translated by E. V. Rieu)

Ronsard's poem Le Cyclope Amoureux (The Cyclops in Love) is probably the best of the Renaissance imitations of “Idyll XI” which stay close enough to the original to qualify, at least by Renaissance standards, as translations. Yet, although Ronsard's poem is an expansion of the Greek model for his eclogue (306 lines, as opposed to 81 for “Idyll XI”), the motif of “Idyll VI” ll. 34-39, included here through the process of contaminatio (see Section II), seems unexpectedly compressed:

Certes je me cognois, je ne suis si difforme
Qu'en beauté je ne trouve agréable ma forme:
Ma face l'autre jour dans l'onde j'esprouvay,
Quand la Mer estoit calme, et beau je me trouvay.
Indeed I know myself, and am not so misshapen
That with my own beauty I cannot be taken.
Th'other day in the sea at my image I gazed
When the water was calm, and my beauty I praised.

(ll. 273-76)

In fact, Ronsard is not imitating Theocritus but rather Ovid's imitation of the Theocritean motif in the Metamorphoses (Met. XIII ll. 840-41):

Certe ego me novi liquidaeque in imagine vidi
Nuper aquae placuitque mihi mea forma videnti.
Indeed I know myself; the other day I saw myself reflected in the water,
and as I gazed, I grew pleased with my beauty.

The following quotation from Marvell's “Damon the Mower” demonstrates that wit and ingenuity had their place in the process of introducing traditional Theocritean motifs into European pastoral poetry. Since the speaker is equipped with a scythe, it is only natural for him to gaze at his reflection in its polished surface:

Nor am I so deformed to sight
If in my scythe I looked right;
In which I see my picture done,
As in a crescent moon the sun.

(ll. 57-60)

To go on simply listing the various imitations of Theocritean motifs would quickly degenerate into a pedant's game of source-hunting or Quellenforschung. What is important to grasp is the way in which these motifs were used by various poets working in the Western pastoral tradition, starting with Virgil.

II VIRGIL

Theocritus' Idylls had some impact on later Greek poetry, if we can judge by the little which survives of what might have been a harvest of Greek bucolic verse of the later Alexandrian period. Bion's “Lament for Adonis” must have been inspired by the hymn to Adonis in “Idyll XV” as well as by the use of refrain in “Idylls I” and “II.” The “Lament for Bion” was partly modelled after the lament for Daphnis in “Idyll I;” it became the prototype for the European pastoral elegy.²⁹ The pseudo-Theocritea—works once attributed to Theocritus but now generally considered to be by imitators, although they still retain their numbering as Idylls—were frequently imitated by later poets (Idylls “VIII,” “IX,” and “XXVII” especially), and several probably were already associated with the genuine poems of Theocritus when they were included in an anthology of bucolic verse edited by the grammarian Artemidorus (first century b.c.). This was presumably the edition which Virgil pored over while he was composing his Eclogues. A late but significant witness to the reputation of Theocritus throughout antiquity is to be found in the pastoral color and style of Daphnis and Chloe, (c. a.d. 200), a prose work by Longus³⁰ which deserves to be called the prototype of the Renaissance pastoral romance.

But without Virgil's Latin imitations of the Pastoral Idylls and the mimes, it is fair to say that the poetry of Theocritus would not have had the influence on Western literature that we are tracing. The Eclogues were the vehicle by means of which the forms and motifs of Theocritean pastoral poetry were passed on as one of the chief legacies of Classical literature to modern European literature. Yet even though they incorporated and preserved a vast amount of Theocritean material, the Eclogues of Virgil are above all an original work of the Roman poetic genius; it is as if a Greek temple had been dismantled and a Roman villa constructed out of its materials.

A rough idea of how Virgil proceeded to change a Theocritean idyll (or several Theocritean idylls) into a Latin eclogue can be gotten by examining the way Virgil used “Idyll XI.” Cartault compiled the following list of Virgilian borrowings: XI.19 (Theocritus) to II.6 (Virgil); XI.20 f. to VII.37 f.; XI.25 f. to VIII.37 f.; XI.29 to II.6; XI.31 f. to VIII.34; XI.34 f. to II.21 f.; XI.38 f. to II.23 f.; XI.40 f. to II.40 f.; XI.42 to II.45; XI.42f. to IX.39; XI.51 to VII.49; XI.56 f. to II.45 f.; XI.65 to II.28 f.; XI.72 f. to II.69 f.³¹ It should be clear from this list that Virgil got most of his materials for Eclogue II from “Idyll XI,” although one should add that he borrowed from “Idylls III” (along with “Idyll XI,” the model for the type of pastoral monologue of which Eclogue II is the first Latin example), “VI, VII,” and “X” as well; and that “Idyll XI” was also put to use when Virgil composed Eclogues VII, VIII, and IX.

This process of using several sources in order to create a new poem ought to have a name. The term contaminatio, originally used to designate the process through which Terence borrowed elements from two or more Greek plays for one of his Roman comedies, fits Virgil's procedure in most of his eclogues, and is an even more useful term when applied to the Humanistic poetry of the Renaissance, a period when literary borrowings were a sign that a scholar-poet knew his classical authors. Pastoral poets starting with Virgil made contaminatio into a standard feature of the European eclogue.³²

It is immediately noticeable from Cartault's list that Virgil did not use all of “Idyll XI” in his Eclogues. Although he used the greater part of the song of Polyphemus in “Idyll XI” (19-79) as material for his Eclogues and for Eclogue II in particular, he seems to have found no use at all for the motivating idea of the narrative frame (“Idyll XI” ll. 1-18 and 80-81) which is of such crucial importance for the understanding of Theocritus' last pastoral idyll. Indeed, one is forced to conclude that Virgil deliberately avoided any mention of the Theocritean idea that poetry can be a cure for love. This discovery enables us to understand how Eclogue II differs radically from its Theocritean model.

In Eclogue II, the shepherd Corydon (a name borrowed from “Idyll III”) is desperately in love—a situation which Theocritus dramatized with the lovelorn Cyclops in “Idyll XI.” But Corydon is no mythic Cyclops, and his love is no Nereid but a boy, Alexis, whose favors have been bought by Iollas, the wealthy farmer who presumably owns Alexis as a slave. Corydon, who is perhaps a slave himself, is in no position to compete with Iollas for the favors of Alexis; indeed, Alexis cares nothing for a mere shepherd's gifts, since Iollas can always offer more (56-57). All Corydon can offer is his songs, but Alexis (like Galatea in “Idyll XI” and Amaryllis in “Idyll III”) cares nothing for them (6).

The context of “Idyll XI” was mythological; in Eclogue II, the situation is delineated in terms of greater social realism. Alexis is no figment of Corydon's imagination (Galatea, in contrast, appeared only in the dreams of Polyphemus in “Idyll XI”), and Corydon, unlike Polyphemus, is no archetypal pastoral poet, although he would like to pass as one. Corydon's world is no landscape of the mind, but an all too confining spot in the social structure of the Italy of Virgil's time. Corydon gazes across an unbridgeable gap; but it is not the gap which lies between the real and the imagined (the girls of Sicily, and the dreamlike Galatea, for Polyphemus), but the social abyss which separates him from the wealthy Iollas. It is this particular social and economic disparity which puts Corydon's plight far beyond the cure of song.

Thus Corydon is a more romantic and tragic figure than Polyphemus. Virgil has deliberately toned down the comic-ironic dimension of the Theocritean model, and has made his herdsman protagonist the vehicle of a very different theme, which is the tragic-romantic counterpart of the comic Theocritean theme—at least, up to a point. Toward the end of the eclogue, Virgil gives to Corydon two lines of seemingly great tragic intensity: noticing how the sun is going down, and the shadows are lengthening, Corydon complains that his love, unlike the sun, has lost none of its power to burn:

me tamen urit amor; quis enim modus adsit amori?
A Corydon, Corydon, quae te dementia cepit?

(68-69)

But love scorches me all the same: is there then no
                    limit to love?
Ah Corydon, Corydon! What madness has seized you?

But Corydon is hardly capable of bearing the burden of tragedy for long—line 69 is in fact a paraphrase of Theocritus “XI” l. 72 (“O Cyclops, Cyclops—where have your wits flown away to?”). It leads to a comic reversal of the situation, which is perhaps not altogether satisfactory from the standpoint of motivation (certainly not when compared with the corresponding reversal in “Idyll XI”), since we wonder how the hot fire of love can be so easily quenched: “You will find another Alexis, if this one disdains you” (73, invenies alium, si te hic fastidit, Alexin). In spite of his occasionally romantic utterances, Corydon is a rusticus (56), a basically comic figure, a sad clown.

But even a rustic's love can have tragic overtones which transcend the power of pastoral poetry to allay. No act of the imagination can quite conceal the fact that Corydon's frustration reveals to him the pain of life in a world where social injustice and inequality are the natural features of the pastoral social landscape. The Theocritean Cyclops in his mythological Sicilian landscape was, of course, a stranger to such a realistic vision.

Virgil imitated the general pattern of the song of Polyphemus as it is found in “Idyll XI” of Theocritus, but studiously avoided any restatement of the idea which motivated it, because he wished to use the figure of a rustic lover not only for comic and ironic purposes, but also as a vehicle for the tragic and romantic theme of social injustice which played such an important role in the Eclogues—a theme totally absent from the Pastoral Idylls. Eclogue II continues the theme of Eclogue I, where the sufferings of the unfortunate Meliboeus (whose lands have been confiscated) are in no was cured or mitigated by the songs of the more fortunate and leisured Tityrus. Virgil's Eclogue II, by maintaining Corydon in his ambiguous posture (midway between Meliboeus and Polyphemus, as it were), maintains the tension between two opposing themes: the world of social injustice, and the “play” of art.

Thus Eclogue II deliberately avoids explicit thematic unity—unlike “Idyll XI” and its single interpretive frame of reference. Eclogue II is a good example of Virgil's artistic practice in the realm of pastoral in that, for all its Theocritean touches, it remains faithful to the dual task which Virgil set for his Eclogue Book as a whole: to reflect the world of the mind (the literary Arcadia of neoteric poetry, the Theocritean pastoral patrimony) as well as the political and social world of Rome.

It cannot be denied that Virgil significantly enlarged the scope of the Theocritean pastoral idyll, frequently to the point where the “counterforce” (the impingement of the wider world of history and politics) appears to be more important than the idyllic vision itself.³³ In fact, he does this from the very first lines of Eclogue I, where the leisure of Tityrus almost cries out for a justification in the face of the desperate plight of Meliboeus, whose farm has been handed over to a veteran of the civil wars. (Meliboeus embodies a plea for social justice quite alien to the poetry of Theocritus.) Tityrus' justification, such as it is, is imperial patronage: “a god provided these leisures for us” (Eclogue I l. 6). Tityrus is expressing allegorically Virgil's gratitude to Augustus in flattering words of the sort Theocritus had avoided in his Pastoral Idylls. But this kind of tribute to a patron's generosity is not really out of place in the Eclogues, since their major point is to bring the wider world of politics into conflict with this type of pastoral leisure, and ultimately to opt for the wider world.

For Brooks Otis, this expansion of a Theocritean kernel according to such a new schema and viewpoint is the whole “secret” of the Eclogues. Otis's remarks on Eclogue I ll. 40-41 are significant:

At no point does he abandon the bucolic manner and diction: the name Octavian or Caesar is most carefully not pronounced, but the bucolic response: “Pascite ut ante boves, pueri, submittite tauros,” is enough. The deed has been done; pastoral, that most unhistorical of genres, has been Romanized and brought into history. The poet has now seen and said that poetry itself cannot live except by coming to terms with its age.³⁴

Of course, there are other ways of coming to terms with an age than by dragging in major political issues in allegorical form. But in terms of the later pastoral tradition in the West, one cannot make too much of Eclogue 1, as Curtius is quick to point out:

From the first century of the Empire to the time of Goethe, all study of Latin literature began with the first eclogue. It is not too much to say that anyone unfamiliar with that short poem lacks one key to the literary tradition of Europe.³⁵

However, it should be noted in passing (since this detail seems to have eluded the commentators) that in Eclogue I, at least as regards the general drift of the dialogue, Virgil owes something to Theocritus' “Idyll XIV.” This nonpastoral dialogue presents two old acquaintances, one who is ready to leave the country (Aeschinas), and the other (Thyonichus) who is ready to listen sympathetically, and who recommends Ptolemy as the finest patron a freeman could desire. Of course, it is as typical of Theocritus to attribute Aeschinas' troubles to a faithless girlfriend (this story occupies the center of this urban mime), as it is of Virgil to make Meliboeus a victim of social change. Indeed, Virgil picks up the same theme of social injustice again in Eclogue IX; in this darker eclogue, the older Moeris has not only been chased off the farm and almost killed by the new owner, but has lost his memory for beautiful verse as well (Eclogue IX l. 51: Omnia fert aetas, animum quogue). The eclogue is partially imitated from “Idyll VII” (Lycidas appears as an enthusiastic younger poet), but here again Theocritus' pastoral poem can claim none of the concern for social justice of Virgil's.

“Idyll XI” was the prototype for the most common form of pastoral monologue in the Renaissance, the pastoral love lament. Its motifs were known to most Renaissance poets, scholars, and readers through the Latin of Virgil's Eclogue II and the tradition of the Virgilian eclogue, although a minority could read the actual Greek text, and an influential Latin translation of the Idylls by Helius Eobanus Hessus appeared in 1531. In cases where poets were not necessarily familiar with the Greek text of the Latin translation of “Idyll XI,” their use of Theocritean motifs preserved by the Virgilian tradition of pastoral is all the more interesting, since it illustrates the great indirect influence Theocritus had on Western pastoral literature.³⁶ A history of the use of Theocritean themes and motifs would quickly turn into a history of the pastoral genre itself.

III EDITIONS, TRANSLATIONS, REPUTATION

It is one of the ironies of literary history that it was the least Theocritean of Virgil's Eclogues—Eclogue IV—which guaranteed the survival of the forms, themes, and motifs of the Theocritean pastoral idyll. Eclogue IV, whose theme of a new Golden Age ushered in by the birth of a child was interpreted by Christians as an amazing prophecy by a pagan poet of the birth of Christ, helped give Virgil a unique place among classical authors, and sanctioned the study of his works during a Christian Dark Ages when pagan literature and learning were often somewhat suspect. With the renewal of interest in Greco-Roman culture during the Renaissance, Virgil's Eclogues became the ultimate source of Pastoral as practiced and understood by poets such as Spenser and Garcilaso, who probably had little if any direct contact with the actual Greek text of the Idylls. Of course, various Latin translations were available to them, as we shall see; and it is also possible that more learned friends were able to translate the Greek text of Theocritus for them, as Ramler was later to do for Salomon Gessner. But as a rule, it was the Virgilian tradition of the eclogue which set the tone for Renaissance Pastoral.

However, a less obvious but still important line of direct influence can be traced in the various editions, translations, and imitations of the Idylls from the early Renaissance onwards. From time to time the Idylls had an important effect on poets who could consult the text in the original. Finally, as the Virgilian tradition of the eclogue, so influential during the Renaissance, lost its prestige in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, attention was drawn increasingly to what Theocritus had to offer as a poet in his own right—a process of reevaluation which has continued into our own time.

According to the hypothesis of Wilamowitz, the first complete edition of the Idylls (including idylls now considered pseudo-Theocritea) should be credited to Artemidorus of Tarsus, a grammarian of the first century b.c. His son Theon may have written the first commentary on Theocritus. Gow, however, finds the evidence for this “first edition” of the Idylls less than convincing. In fact, we know next to nothing about the early history of the text which Virgil imitated in his Eclogues.

Later Greek editors, inspired by the vogue of Attic Greek in the later centuries of Roman rule, probably eliminated some of the Doricisms of Theocritus' verse, but it is to them and to the long tradition of Byzantine scholarship that we owe the preservation of the Idylls. Byzantine manuscripts, such as the illustrated Theocritus of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where after one thousand years of Christian stewardship of pagan literature the god Pan was still represented with cloven hooves and a goat's head,³⁷ are the basis of modern editions of the Idylls, although none are earlier than the thirteenth century.

Scholia (word glosses and commentary) date back only to the tenth or eleventh century, but presumably incorporate notes of earlier commentators. The actual Byzantine manuscripts used in printing the first editions of the Idylls in the Renaissance were the product of a manuscript tradition which, after fifteen centuries of copying and recopying a text whose grammar and vocabulary were quite unusual, had become thoroughly contaminated. It took the labor of generations of modern editors and emendators to produce the reasonably accurate and accessible text that we find in Gow's edition of 1952.

Petrarch, the first poet to write eclogues of literary merit in modern times (Bucolicum Carmen, 1357), knew of Theocritus:

… I recall the singer born of Sicilian
Stock and his fellows, who, hiding in lairs from the lions, delighted
In songs of the tangle-fleeced flocks that they so carefully guarded.

Eclogue X ll. 165-67 (translated by Thomas G. Bergin)³⁸

But since he attributed to Theocritus the use of cryptic allegory (the “lairs” which supposedly enabled Theocritus to aim political satire at the “lions” or tyrants of his day),³⁹ a characteristic of Petrarch's Virgilian eclogues but one which was distinctly absent from Theocritus' Pastoral Idylls, it is clear that Theocritus was only a name to him. This would have been only natural, since few Western Europeans knew any Greek whatsoever from the time of the Dark Ages to the middle of the fifteenth century, and hence they had no access to the texts of the Idylls studied in the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire.

Throughout the fifteenth century Byzantine manuscripts of Theocritus found their way to Italy; in 1475, the Papal Library of Sixtus IV possessed three of them.⁴⁰ They were, of course, useless until Italians began to learn enough Greek to read them. Angelo Poliziano (Politian) became the first modern Western European to achieve perfect fluency in Greek; at the age of seventeen he was already writing epigrams in Greek, and his pastoral masterpiece Orfeo was the result of his precocious erudition joined with poetic genius. Poliziano lectured on Theocritus in Florence during the school year 1482-1483, about the same time that the first printed edition (editio princeps) of the Idylls was published in Milan by Bonus Accursius. A Latin translation of Idylls “I-VII” by the Venetian scholar Phileticus followed almost immediately; the Roman edition of 1482 was reprinted in Venice in 1500 and in Paris in 1503. The beautiful Aldine edition of Theocritus (Venice, 1495) formed part of the second volume of the epoch-making series of Greek texts published by Aldus Manutius. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Idylls had once again become of major interest to scholars and poets of the Italian peninsula.

Since Latin was the lingua franca of the educated in Renaissance Europe, fluency in Greek being confined to a small number of serious scholars, it is reasonable to assume that acquaintance with the Idylls of Theocritus was most furthered by Latin translations, such as the influential version of Helius Eobanus Hessus (Basel, 1531), and by bilingual editions (Latin-Greek), such as the edition sold ad scholas Coqueretias in 1550, which the French humanist Jean Dorat no doubt used to instruct some of the future Pléiade poets at the Collège de Coqueret in Paris.⁴¹ The traditional order of the Idylls (an unfortunate tradition, as we have seen) was established in 1566 by the edition of the Idylls contained in the Poetae Graeci published by Henri Estienne, who in 1579 brought out a magnificent volume (Theocriti aliorumque poetarum idyllia) with appendixes listing the numerous Theocritean references in Virgil and other pastoral poets.

Translation of Theocritus into the vernacular languages of Europe proceeded at a much slower pace. The Sixe Idillia (Anonymous) published at Oxford in 1588 included translations of only three of the authentic idylls of Theocritus (Idylls “XI,” “XVIII,” and “XXX”). “The Shepherds Starre” (1591) was a greatly expanded paraphrase of “Idyll III” which hardly deserves to be listed as a translation at all. The Elizabethans probably had little direct acquaintance with the pastoral poetry of Theocritus; not a single edition of the Greek text of the Idylls appeared in England until the seventeenth century.

Theocritus was presumably much better known in Renaissance France and Italy. Pierre de Ronsard and Antoine de Bäf were the most fervent admirers of the Idylls. Ronsard imitated Theocritus frequently, beginning with his imitation of “Idyll XI” in “Le Cyclope Amoureux” (1560), and Bäf published imitations of Idylls “VI,” “X,” and “XI.” Spenser was much indebted to the French school of pastoral poetry in his Shepheardes Calender (1579), and may well have absorbed the spirit of Theocritean pastoral poetry in the imitations and translations of the Pléiade poets. But the single most important vernacular vehicle for Theocritean themes and motifs was Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia (1504), a pastoral romance mixing prose and verse, which Jean Martin translated from the original Italian into French in 1544.

Although individual poems of Theocritus were translated now and then during the two centuries which followed the earlier editions of the Greek text of the Idylls, complete or nearly complete translations of the Idylls began to appear only towards the end of the seventeenth century: the English translation of Thomas Creech in 1684, the French translation of Longepierre in 1688, an Italian translation by Anton Maria Salvini in 1717, a Spanish translation by Juan Francisco Sandoval in 1752, and finally a German translation by S. H. Lieberkuehn in 1757. Thus until the last decade of the seventeenth century an appreciation of the Idylls was usually confined to a small circle of classical scholars and to an even smaller circle of Hellenists—which included, let it be emphasized, poets such as Sannazaro, Ronsard, and Milton (but not, in all likelihood, Spenser, Marvell, or Garcilaso) who read Theocritus in the original and made major contributions to the pastoral genre in their own vernacular literatures. The ordinary reader of Theocritus was typically someone like Fielding's character Abraham Adams in the novel Joseph Andrews (1742), the scholarly clergyman who read Greek for pleasure and was able to cheer up his friend Joseph with a quote from “Idyll IV:” “He concluded with a verse out of Theocritus, which signifies no more than. That sometimes it rains, and sometimes the sun shines”⁴² (cf. “Idyll IV” l. 43—Corydon cheers up Battus with the same platitude).

The name of Theocritus was traditionally linked with Virgil's in most of the earlier critical writings on Pastoral, and if preference was given to one over the other, it was usually to Virgil. However, as the Virgilian tradition of the eclogue played itself out and fell into increasing disrepute, more attention was paid to the original creator of the pastoral idyll. The publication of Ambrose Philips's eclogues in 1709 stirred up a controversy which helped to arouse critical opinion in favor of Theocritus. Partisans of Alexander Pope championed the elegance of his Virgilian pastorals and ridiculed Philips's slight attempt at Theocritean realism; but the artificiality of Virgilian pastoral had lost much of its prestige, and Theocritean realism was the wave of the future. Where once Theocritus had been criticized for his vulgarity (“Is it not true that the speeches in the Idylls smell too much of the countryside?” asked Fontenelle disdainfully in his Discours sur la nature de l'églogue), now he was praised for his naturalness and simplicity. John Gay wrote his Shepherd's Week (1714) as a parody of Ambrose Philips's eclogues, but readers were more inclined to ignore the parodic humor in their admiration for the realistic transposition of traditional pastoral themes and motifs to the English countryside. Gay's praise of Theocritus' rustic style was ironic (“He rightly, thoughout his fifth Idyll, maketh his Louts give foul language, and behold their Goats at Rut in all Simplicity”),⁴³ but Goldsmith's later reaction to Gay's attempt at pastoral burlesque was more typical of the times: “Gay has hit the true spirit of pastoral poetry. In fact he more resembles Theocritus than any other English pastoral writer.”⁴⁴ Robert Burns did no more than reflect the eighteenth century's growing preference for the vivid realism of Theocritus' pastoral mimes over the greater artificiality of the Eclogues of Publius Vergilius Maro, when he exclaimed:

But thee, Theocritus, wha matches?
They're no herd's ballats, Maro's catches!(45)

The appearance of the Swiss poet Salomon Gessner's first collection of German prose idylls in 1756 marked the beginning of a short but interesting revival of Theocritean pastoral, of little intrinsic merit but of some importance as a preparation for the growth of European Romanticism.⁴⁶ Gessner knew no Greek but was apparently introduced to the Idylls by his more learned friend Karl Wilhelm Ramler.⁴⁷ Gessner's admirers were wont to compare his idylls with the pastoral poetry of Theocritus. This was certainly a case of comparing great things with small; since, as Herder pointed out, Gessner's Idyllen hardly measured up to the Idylls of Theocritus, which had “originality and passion, the two essentials of poetry, that are completely lacking in the poetry of Gessner.”⁴⁸

But the European vogue of Gessner's Idyllen, made possible primarily by the French translation (Idylles de M. Gessner, 1762) with its preface by Turgot, the future finance minister of Louis XVI, stimulated new interest in Theocritus as well. A spate of German translations of Theocritus in the second half of the eighteenth century bore witness to the desire of a large and Greekless reading audience to discover Gessner's illustrious classical model. Until that time, Germans had read Theocritus only in small numbers. With the translations of Lieberkeuhn (1757), Schwabe (1770), and von Finckenstein (1789), Theocritus was put in the hands of Gessner's many Greekless but enthusiastic readers. Eventually a major German poet, Eduard Mörike, was to undertake a partial translation of the Idylls (Idyllen des Theokrit, 1855—a translation of Idylls “I-VI,” “X,” “XI,” “XV,” “XVI,” and “XXVIII”); the result was predictably the best of all modern translations of Theocritus.

André Chénier, Chateaubriand, and Leopardi shared the late eighteenth century's love for the Idylls,⁴⁹ but perhaps the most interesting instance of Theocritus' influence on European literature thanks to the vogue of Gessner was to occur in Russia.⁵⁰ Pushkin credited Anton Delvig with “making the delicate roses of Theocritus bloom in the Russian snow,” but it was actually Delvig's friend Nikolay Ivanovich Gnedich (1784-1833) who was most inspired by the Greek poet. Gnedich knew Greek well, and had genuine talent as a poet; his translation of “Idyll XV” (“The Syracusan Women”) is still famous. He had been blind in one eye since childhood—a fact which perhaps accounts for some of his interest in the one-eyed Cyclops of “Idyll XI.” The immediate literary stimulus for his humorous version of “Idyll XI” (“The Cyclops” 1813) was the earlier version (1807) of Merzlyakov, which mixed Russian folk verse and popular expressions rather incongruously with the thoroughly Greek subject matter of Theocritus' original poem. Gnedich decided that the total transposition of the material was called for, and presented in his Russian eclogue a Cyclops who sings of Galatea from a window of his home in St. Petersburg! This parodic use of Theocritean material prepared Gnedich for the task of responding with greater originality to the spirit of the Idylls. In the foreword to translation of “Idyll XV” (1820-1821), he urged a return to Theocritus as a model for the idyll; but what interested him most was not the pastoralism but the vivid realism of the Idylls and their evocation of scenes from the daily lives of ordinary people. Gnedich was the first to follow his own literary advice, and published in 1821 a memorable Russian idyll, “The Fishermen” (Rybaki), inspired by “Idyll XV” as well as by the pseudo-Theocritean Idyll XXI.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century to our own time a growing number of editions and translations of Theocritus (including translations into Catalan, Czech, Hungarian, Modern Greek, Polish, Russian, and Swedish) have made the poet's works available to what is probably a larger number of readers than at any time in history. Yet little direct influence of Theocritus is to be found in the significant poetry of the times. No doubt, two masterpieces of English Romanticism, Shelley's “Adonais” and Arnold's “Thyrsis,” are pastoral elegies which derive ultimately from Theocritean models.⁵¹ However, an unexpected and strikingly original recreation of the pastoral monologue as exemplified by “Idyll XI” can be found in “The Afternoon of a Faun” (L'Après-midi d'un faune, 1876) of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé; my article “Mallarmé's Symbolist Eclogue: The ‘Faune’ as Pastoral” deals with its relationship to the themes and motifs of the Theocritean tradition.⁵²

IV THEOCRITUS TODAY

Theocritus has yet to find his ideal American (or English) translator. Writing to his mother on the subject of his recently composed pastoral elegy “Thyrsis” Matthew Arnold remarked that “the diction of the poem was modelled on that of Theocritus, whom I have been much reading during the two years this poem has been forming itself. … I meant the diction to be so artless as to be almost heedless” (my italics).⁵³ This may not be a completely satisfying definition of the problem of finding an adequate English equivalent of Theocritus' Greek pastoral style, but it makes one regret that Arnold never did for Theocritus in England what Morike had done for him in Germany. Of course, there is nothing more taxing than to make artfulness appear “heedless” and “artless,” yet this is just what Theocritus' learned amalgam of dialects succeeds in doing in the pastoral poems and mimes.

The best of the recent translations (the one by Barriss Mills) is thoroughly colorless in its style—a virtue, in that at least it can be said to avoid false color—and maintains an even if modest level of poetic resonance. What remains to be attempted, in my opinion, is a vividly alert translation of the Pastoral Idylls and mimes into a non-standard literary English which could combine some of the charm of the dialects used in Huckleberry Finn with a light touch of archaism of the sort found in The Sot-Weed Factor. I doubt very much, however, if Robert Frost's New England pastoral idiom would be a good model: I can imagine Theocritus' herdsmen as hillbillies, but not as Yankees.

The Pastoral Idylls and mimes of Theocritus are semidramatic in their radical of presentation. Since it is unlikely that any translator will be able to do full justice to the poetic merit of the best of Theocritus' verse, other means of communicating its charm and fascination should not be neglected. A staged English version of “The Syracusan Women” (“Idyll XV”) would, I believe, easily meet with applause. But the other mimes, as well as the entire sequence of the Pastoral Idylls, might also go over well with modern theater audiences, especially if music of the appropriate sort (Country Western? Andean flute music?) and pantomime (the death of Daphnis in “Idyll I,” for example) were to enhance the production. I personally look forward to the time when some enterprising theater company will dare to invite audiences to an evening of Theocritean mime.

Aristocratic versions of pastoral, from the Renaissance onwards, rarely if ever took the Theocritean Herdsman-Poet equation at face value; shepherds' robes were only, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, “the fancy dress of court games.”⁵⁴ Once the figure of the shepherd-courtier faded away at the end of the eighteenth century, the Theocritean Herdsman-Poet equation vanished almost completely from European poetry. Wordsworth's shepherds or country people are not truly joined with the poet in universal brotherhood: he is a poet, they are herdsmen, and never the twain shall meet. But it is possible that in modern democratic America, whose Mark Twains have been roughing it for generations, a more Theocritean form of Pastoral could take new birth, free of the taint of educated condescension or elitist pride, in which the figure of the poet who earns his living taking care of livestock would resurrect old myths of human freedom and universal brotherhood.

Finally, the Theocritean perspective on eros and creativity challenges a number of modern cultural assumptions.⁵⁵ The singing Theocritean Herdsman may seem a hopelessly Utopian figure to modern Western man who, having resigned himself to a radical division between working hours and leisure time, can barely imagine a life where work and creative play would be constantly joined together; and who, having sacrificed his dreams of happiness to the greater efficiency of the economic system, only desires to have his work rewarded with the highest possible salary and his leisure time devoted to the greatest possible accumulation of sense pleasures. By way of contrast, the Theocritean Herdsman-Poet transforms work (the herdsman's tasks) into play (the poet's song), and devotes his most idle hours to the freely chosen sublimation of eros (the love for Amaryllis, Galatea, etc.) in the direction of song, the symbol of the liberating activation of the creative impulse throughout the Pastoral Idylls. Whether this imagined reconciliation of the pleasure principle with the reality principle is only a dream, or whether the idyllic vision provides us with a glimpse of a new era of human freedom, is not the least of the questions Theocritus might inspire us to ask.

Notes

1. Gow's note on “Idyll XI” l. 18.

2. See Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), pp. 32-33 and footnotes 9-11.

3. See Ulrich Ott, “Theokrits Thalysien und ihre litterarischen Vorbilder,” Rheinisches Museum 115 (1972): 134-49. See also, for a brief account, Segal, “Theocritus' Seventh Idyll and Lycidas,” pp. 22-23.

4. Dover, p. lxiii.

5. George Soutar, Nature in Greek Poetry (London, 1939), pp. 111-12.

6. Clyde Murley, “Plato's ‘Phaedrus’ and Theocritean Pastoral,” Transactions of the American Philological Association LXXI (1940): 282.

7. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, pp. 41-42.

8. For a complete introduction to Herondas, see Frederic Will, Herondas (New York, 1973).

9. David Craig, “Towards the Laws of Literary Development,” in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, ed. David Craig (Baltimore, 1975), p. 160.

10. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, see the astonishing statute of an old peasant woman going to market.

11. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York, 1968), p. 285.

12. Herodas: Mimiambi, ed. I. C. Cunningham (Oxford, 1971), p. 14.

13. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 42.

14. For a discussion of Ascelepiades, see Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, I, pp. 562-67.

15. Ibid., pp. 717-92, for an excellent presentation of Callimachus.

16. T. B. L. Webster, The Age of Hellenism (New York, 1966), p. 64.

17. Ellen Frye, The Marble Threshing Floor: A Collection of Greek Folksongs (Austin, Texas, 1973), p. 217.

18. Gow, p. 35 (Vol. II).

19. Ibid., pp. 231-32, 382-84.

20. Webster, Hellenistic Poetry, pp. 65-66.

21. Dover, p. 181. For a discussion of Theocritus as a critic of Apollonius, see Otis, Virgil, pp. 398-405.

22. Webster, The Age of Hellenism, pp. 64-72; Hellenistic Poetry, pp. 163-66.

23. Webster, Hellenistic Poetry, 165-66; Lawall, pp. 80-82 (Lycidas as satyr) and frontispiece.

24. Margarete Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (New York, 1961), pp. 136-56.

25. Dryden's Dedication of Virgil's Pastorals, quoted in Kernin, Theocritus in English Literature, p. 21.

26. Gow, p. lxxiii (Vol. I).

27. Dover, p. xxxix.

28. See Ph.-E Legrand, La Poésie Alexandrine (Paris, 1924), pp. 133-37.

29. For an excellent study and bilingual anthology of the European pastoral elegy, see Thomas Perrin Harrison, Jr., The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology (Austin, Texas, 1939). For a full presentation of “Lycidas” as a pastoral elegy, see Scott Elledge, Milton's “Lycidas” (New York, 1966).

30. For a sensitive study of Daphnis and Chloe, see William E. McCulloh, Longus (New York, 1970).

31. A. Cartault, Ëtude sur les Bucoliques de Virgile (Paris, 1897), pp. 102-03.

32. See, in Ida Maïer, Ange Politien (Geneva, 1966), the chapter “La ‘contaminatio,’ constante de l'art d'écrire.”

33. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964), pp. 25-26.

34. Otis, Virgil, p. 136.

35. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), p. 190.

36. See my article “‘Poetry is/is not a cure for love:’ the Conflict of Theocritean and Petrarchan Topoi in the Shepheardes Calender,” Studies in Philology, LXXVI, 4 (Fall, 1979), 353-365.

37. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York, 1953), p. 163.

38. Petrarch's Bucolicum Carmen, trans. Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven, 1974), p. 157.

39. Ibid., Bergin's note on X ll. 164-65, p. 241.

40. R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage (Cambridge, 1954), p. 279.

41. Alice Hulubéi, L'Églogue en France au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1938), p. 42.

42. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (New York, 1950), p. 94 (Book Two, Chapter II).

43. Preface to The Shepherd's Week.

44. The Beauties of English Poetry (c. 1765). Quoted in Kerlin, Theocritus in English Literature, p. 77.

45. Ibid., p. 81.

46. See Paul Van Tieghem, Le Préromantisme (Paris, 1948), Vol. II, pp. 207-311, “Les Idylles de Gessner et le rêve pastoral.”

47. John Hibberd, Salomon Gessner (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 27-28.

48. Fragments Concerning Recent German Literature (1766-1767).

49. See Stephen Rogers, Classical Greece and the Poetry of Chénier, Shelley, and Leopardi (Notre Dame, Ind., 1974).

50. In this paragraph, I follow the research of Mara Kazoknieks, Studien zur Rezeption der Antike bei Russischen Dichtern zu Beginn des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1968).

51. See the presentation and analysis of “Adonais” and “Thyrsis” in Harrison, The Pastoral Elegy.

52. Steven F. Walker, “Mallarmé's Symbolist Eclogue: the ‘Faune’ as Pastoral,” PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) 93: 1 (January, 1978): 106-17.

53. Quoted in Harrison, The Pastoral Elegy, p. 22.

54. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), p. 21.

55. Remarks inspired by Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York, 1955).

Selected Bibliography

(This bibliography lists only those books and articles which, in my opinion, are most likely to prove useful to the nonspecialist. Preference has been given to recent scholarship in English.)

Primary Sources

1. Texts, translations, and commentaries

dover, k. j. Theocritus: Select Poems. London: Macmillan, 1971. Greek text of the major poems, with excellent introduction and commentary. Greek-English vocabulary. The best school edition.

edmonds, j. m. The Greek Bucolic Poets (Loeb ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1970. Reprint of revised 1928 edition. Introduction, Greek text with facing English prose translation, and index. Useful, but largely superseded by Gow's edition. Includes other Hellenistic bucolic poems.

fritz, f. p. Theokrit: Gedichte. Tübingen: Heimeran Verlag, 1970. The major poems, with Greek text and facing German translation. Good commentary.

gow, a. s. f. Bucolici Graeci. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. (Reprinted several times.) Greek text and apparatus only. The average Hellenist will require an edition with commentary.

———. The Greek Bucolic Poets. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972. Reprint of the 1953 Cambridge University Press edition. English prose translation, brief notes and introduction. The “small Gow” for the Greekless reader. Includes translations of other Hellenistic bucolic poems as well.

———. Theocritus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952 (two volumes). The first volume contains the introduction, Greek text and facing prose translations of the complete works of Theocritus as well as pseudo-Theocritea. The second volume contains Gow's monumental commentary, a bibliography, an index and plates. Beyond praise. Completely fulfills the aim of an edition cum translation and commentary, which is to make a difficult text thoroughly accessible.

holden, anthony. Greek Pastoral Poetry. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973. Introduction, readable translations in prosaic verse, brief notes, glossary.

mills, barriss. The Idylls of Theokritos. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Studies, 1963. The best translation of Theocritus into English. A beautiful book, well printed and tastefully illustrated. Useless introductory essay.

mörike, eduard. Idyllen des Theokrit. [1855] A major Greek poet translated by a major German poet. Translations of Idylls “I-VI,” “X,” “XI,” “XV,” “XVI,” and “XXVIII”—unfortunately, Mörike never got around to “Idyll VII.”

rist, anna. The Poems of Theocritus. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Translation with commentaries.

Secondary Sources

1. The Idylls: Scholarship and Criticism

arnold, matthew. “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” in Matthew Arnold: Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962 (pp. 212-31). Includes a lively and polemical discussion of “Idyll XV” (“The Syracusan Women”). Arnold at his best.

austin, norman. “Theocritus and Simonides,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 98 (1967): 1-21. Emphasizes the tensions and contradictions which make “Idyll XVI” (“The Graces”) an interesting poem.

cairns, francis. Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972. Ingenious analyses of a number of Theocritus' poems from a classical generic perspective.

edquist, harriet. “Aspects of Theocritean Otium,” Ramus 4:2 (1975): 101-14. The theme of hasychia in the pastoral poems, especially Idylls “I” and “VII.” The article forms part of a special volume of Ramus on ancient pastoral (ed. A. J. Boyle) which deserves attention.

fabiano, gianfranco. “Fluctuation in Theocritus' Style,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 12:4 (1971): 517-37. Linguistic and literary analysis of the variety of styles found in the Idylls.

giangrande, giuseppe. “Theocritus' Twelfth and Fourth Idylls: A Study in Hellenistic Irony,” Quaderni Urbinati di cultura classica 12 (1971): 95-113. The technique followed by Theocritus to achieve ironic effects in two of his poems.

holtsmark, erling b. “Poetry as Self-Enlightenment: Theocritus 11,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 97 (1966): 253-59. Discussion of the motivating idea of “Idyll XI” (‘poetry is the cure for love’).

lawall, gilbert. Theocritus' Coan Pastorals: A Poetry Book. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. Epoch-making study of Idylls “I-VII” as a bucolic collection.

legrand, ph. E. Étude sur Théocrite. [1898] Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968. A classic study, dated but still interesting.

lindsell, alice. “Was Theocritus a Botanist?” Greece and Rome 6:17 (1937): 78-93. Entertaining piece of scholarly detective work.

magnien, victor. “La médecine et la philosophie dans le ‘Cyclope’ de Théocrite,” Acropole 2 (1927): 97-111. Discussion of the idea of a cure for love in “Idyll XI” in relation to Greek medicine.

mastronarde, donald J. “Theocritus Idyll 13: Love and the Hero,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 99 (1968): 273-90. A sensitive reading of “Idyll XIII” (“Hylas”): “the hero cannot remain heroic in love.”

murley, clyde. “Plato's ‘Phaedrus’ and Theocritean Pastoral,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 71 (1940): 281-95. Pioneering study of what Plato shared with Theocritus.

ott, ulrich. Die Kunst des Gegensatzes in Theokrits Hirtengedichten. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969. An analysis of Idylls “I,” “III-VII,” “X,” and “XI” in terms of structural contrasts. Excellent bibliographical references to German Theocritean scholarship.

segal, charles. “Death by Water: A Narrative Pattern in Theocritus (Idylls 1, 13, 22, 23),” Hermes 102 (1974): 20-38.

———. “Simaetha and the Iynx (Theocritus, Idyll II),” Quaderni Urbinati di cultura classica 15 (1973): 32-43.

———. “‘Since Daphnis Dies’: The Meaning of Theocritus' First Idyll,” Museum Helveticum 31 (1974): 1-22.

———. “Theocritean Criticism and the Interpretation of the Fourth Idyll,” Ramus 1 (1972): 1-25.

———. “Thematic Coherence and Levels of Style in Theocritus' Bucolic Idylls,” Wiener Studien (1977): 35-68.

———. “Theocritus' Seventh Idyll and Lycidas,” Wiener Studien 8:87 (1974): 20-76. Charles Segal has produced a series of fine articles on Theocritus whose wealth of critical observations and sophisticated methodology make it the standard by which modern Theocritean scholarship may be judged. Highly recommended.

williams, f. j. “Theocritus, Idyll i 81-91,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 89 (1969): 121-23. Interesting attempt to relate the story of Daphnis in “Idyll I” to the traditional Sicilian myth.

2. Cultural and Historical Background

devereux, george. “Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality and the ‘Greek Miracle,’” Symbolae Osloenses 42 (1967): 69-92. This and Dover's article (see below) are excellent discussions of Greek paederasty.

dover, k. j. “Eros and Nomos (Plato, Symposium 182A-185C),” University of London, Institute of Classical Studies Bulletin 11 (1964): 31-42 (see above).

peters, f. e. The Harvest of Hellenism: A History of the Near East from Alexander the Great to the Triumph of Christianity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Up-to-date reference work.

pomeroy, sarah b. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Chapter VII, “Hellenistic Women,” gives the cultural background information necessary for the understanding of Theocritus' treatment of women in Idylls “II” and “XV.”

tarn, w. w. Hellenistic Civilisation, third edition revised by the author and G. T. Griffith. New York: Meridian Books, 1952. A standard introduction.

toynbee, arnold j. Hellenism: the History of a Civilization. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1959. See Chapters VIII (“Macedon's Reception of Hellenism and Opening Up of the East”) and IX (“The Emancipation of Individuals from City-States”).

trypanis, c. a. “The Character of Alexandrian Poetry,” Greece and Rome 16:46 (January, 1947): 1-7. Short introduction to the topic.

webster, t. b. l. Hellenistic Poetry and Art. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964. A standard survey.

3. The Idylls and the Later Pastoral Tradition

bardon, h. “Bucolique et Politique,” Rheinisches Museum 115:2 (1972): 1-13. The tradition of mixing political allegory and pastoral stems from Virgil, not Theocritus.

berg, william. Early Virgil. London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1974. A good introduction to Virgil's book of eclogues. As a rule, commentators of Virgil tend to underestimate the achievement of Theocritus—Berg is no exception, unfortunately. Includes Latin text of the Eclogues with facing English translation.

elledge, scott. Milton's “Lycidas” (Edited to serve as an Introduction to Criticism). New York and London: Harper and Row, 1966. Milton's lyric masterpiece in the light of the tradition of the pastoral elegy starting (more or less) with “Idyll I.” English translations of major pastoral elegies; commentary and background.

harrison, thomas perrin, jr. The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1939. Rich bilingual anthology of European pastoral elegies, with commentary and notes.

marx, leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Opens a new theoretical and historical perspective on the pastoral mode. The first chapter introduces the term “counterforce.”

mcculloh, william e. Longus. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970. A sensitive study of Daphnis and Chloe, a Greek pastoral romance. Good discussion of the Theocritean influence.

otis, brooks. Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. The chapter “The Young Virgil” (pp. 98-143) is an excellent description of the Romanization of Theocritean pastoral in the Eclogues.

rosenmeyer, thomas g. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. A learned and impressive study of Theocritean pastoral from a generic perspective. A nondramatic conception of pastoral, with emphasis on the lyric elements and their later imitation. Makes a convincing case for considering Theocritus' Pastoral Idylls as the model for European pastoral.

van sickle, john. “The Unity of the Eclogues: Arcadian Forest, Theocritean Trees,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 98 (1967): 491-508. Excellent discussion of Virgil's transformation of Theocritean pastoral.

walker, stephen F. “Mallarmé's Symbolist Eclogue: the ‘Faune’ as Pastoral,” PMLA 93:1 (January, 1978). “L'Après-midi d'un faune” viewed from the perspective of Theocritean pastoral.

———. “‘Poetry is/is not a cure for love:’ the Conflict of Theocritean and Petrarchan Topoi in the Shepheardes Calender,” Studies in Philology LXXVI, 4, (Fall, 1979), 353-365. The indirect influence of Theocritus on Spenser.