There is a pleasant paradox about pastoral poetry: it is set in the countryside (or at least in a formalized idyllic landscape), its ideals are rural and bucolic, it glorifies summer ripeness—and it is invariably produced by urban intellectuals who have never themselves handled a spade, much less herded sheep, goats, or cattle, in their lives. It is, clearly, a perennial form of literary and social escapism, and one that may have concealed political undertones. It grafts a kind of yearning idealism onto a reality that was, in fact, peculiarly harsh and unrewarding. Thanks to Virgil, we tend today to think of Arcadia as Poussin saw it, the symbol of happy innocence, a golden dreamland of timeless shepherds (and even in Virgil a composite idealization of the Po valley and the hills of southern Italy).1 The real Arcadia was, and is, one of the remotest and most stubbornly backward areas in all Greece. It is possible that this very remoteness attracted Hellenistic poets searching for country roots, archaic customs, exotic aitia. The association of Arcadia with Pan will also have helped.2 Elements of the lost Golden Age were thought to survive among Arcadians: their simplicity and egalitarianism (a plain diet, community at feasts between master and slave) were regularly singled out for comment.3 Their homeland was distant, unwalled, mysterious, “an ancient Shangri-La.”4
The contrast between reality and symbol is instructive. We have to admit, urban mutations that we are, that the myth possesses immense durability and power: its antirealism has never interfered with its appeal, and may indeed have enhanced it. The cliché image of nymphs and shepherds—the former decorative and peripheral, the latter often homoerotic—in a stylized pastoral setting has lasted through centuries of European literature, and spilled over into the visual, even the musical, arts. The piping in Theocritus, the wind whispering through the pine trees, is the direct ancestor of L’Après-midi d’un Faune.5 Such a vision is closely bound up with the equally seductive dream of a lost Golden Age, or indeed of the millennium still to come: the nostalgia, or hope, for simple virtues, uncomplicated living, plain homegrown food, basic country values. The dream still haunts us today: the popularity of the western is one manifestation of it.6 We yearn for some kind of prelapsarian paradise. Today this haven has acquired familiar characteristics. It is ecologically balanced, free of industrial pollution and acid rain, full of stone-ground bread (if not homespun clothes), not to mention homespun platitudes. It is the motivating force behind the commune and, in one sense, the kibbutz. It explains all those executives who, in one way or another, go back to the land over the weekend or during vacations. That this should be an exclusively urban phenomenon is no accident. The real shepherd or farmer knows, too well, that his life is poor, dangerous, backbreaking, and without respite. Leisure plays little part in it. Hesiod was under no illusions whatsoever on this score,7 and a modern Greek shepherd, a poor dirt farmer anywhere, will echo his sentiments.
The pastoral dream, then, is the special property of the gentleman poet, living on patronage from a Ptolemy or an Augustus: when Marie-Antoinette played at being a milkmaid, the charade did not require her to get up at four in the morning and milk obdurate cows in freezing weather with chilblained hands. Yet—and this is the odd thing—the pastoral tradition did derive, originally, from a genuinely rural and traditional folk art (piping, dancing, singing competitions), and the moral ideal it propounds has a good deal to be said for it. It probably, in the last resort, is better to drop with fatigue from hoeing potatoes than to be poisoned, slowly, by synthetic food additives and carbon monoxide. Simple life, simple values do have the edge in many ways over cultured urbanism. What has always tended to cloud the issue is the fact that the ideal projected by city-dwelling intellectuals tended, very soon, to become formalized in a literary genre with its own rules, which floated it free, in a somewhat rootless fashion, from its actual origins.
The country has always generated its particular functional art forms. In Greece, both ancient and modern, we know of milling songs, sowing songs, reaping songs, songs for harvest and grape treading: these are, strictly speaking, agricultural rather than pastoral, the distinction being between the life of plowing and arable cultivation on the one hand, and the breeding of herds, whether cattle, sheep, or goats, on the other. All formal pastoral poetry stems from the latter activity (Theocritus has plenty about herding, only one idyll involving reapers). Since one of the essential ingredients of the myth is leisure (literary rentiers tend to bring their own luggage with them when they go exploring), this is not altogether surprising. No one could even pretend that a field laborer has an easy time of it; but there are plenty, field laborers included, who will cheerfully tell you that the herdsman’s life is almost as ideal as the bucolic poets make it out. To correct this misapprehension one need only study the primitive shepherds and goatherds, often seasonally transhumant, of Greece and Yugoslavia and Albania.8 Sleepless nights in midwinter during the lambing season, the ravages of wolves and disease, long hours exposed to bitter cold and driving rain, the rescue of beasts from deep and dangerous crevasses, the setting of broken limbs—these are not activities that feature in the literary pastoral tradition, where the sun is always shining and the flocks, for long stretches, can take care of themselves.
Yet the sun did shine, and not only in summer; there were times, for long stretches, when the pastoral scene was much as the poets represent it. Herding is a lonely business, and the shepherd’s pipe must be one of the oldest forms of solo entertainment in the world. (Modern shepherds carry transistor radios, even sport the occasional Sony Walkman, another symbolic confrontation of cultures.) A herdsman played to while away the time. If he had a companion, they would play together or in turn, sing rival songs, cap one another’s efforts. There is no reason to believe that Theocritus was doing anything but picking up common tradition when he made his swains exchange gossip about their sex lives, or even have sex with each other.9 The nexus of associations between goats, sex, shepherds, and Pan is assuredly no accident. Nor is the connection of Pan with the dangerous noon hour, when the sun is high, shade limited, the air in summer sultry, and the siesta liable to bring bad dreams, often of an erotic sort.10 Panic terror and the sexual drive are inextricably linked. There is also, of course, that other solace of the lonely, no less popular with herdsmen than with any other isolated group: no accident, again, that among his other attributes Pan should have been associated with masturbation.11
Most of these phenomena show up, to some extent formalized, in the Idylls of Theocritus. Thus he is drawing on a genuine tradition, not merely rehashing literary models: in that sense his roots go deep. He is an early pioneer (if not the originator) of the pastoral idyll, at a point when reality can break in still: today it is generally assumed that it was he who “established and codified the landscape,”12 though in antiquity he was regarded as preeminent in the genre rather than as its originator.13 It seems indisputable that he based his inspiration on the actual habits, observed at an impressionable age, of Sicilian herdsmen.14 The patterned repetition of key lines is “characteristic of folksongs, games, wedding-songs, lullabies, spells and other substitute categories of poetry,”15 and Theocritus may well have adapted this kind of traditional oral poetry for his own purposes. Singing matches, for instance, are a genuine feature of the pastoral tradition in Sicily.16 Yet the process of codification was literary enough, and we can see how soon formal sclerosis set in by a comparison with the later work of Bion and Moschus—or indeed of Virgil in the Eclogues. Despite his originality, Theocritus was no more immune than his contemporaries from the curious attitude to literature that we have already noticed among Hellenistic intellectuals (p. 172), “as if its province had been defined at some date in the past and it had been forbidden to advance in certain directions or to penetrate below a certain phenomenological level.”17
In a sense what Theocritus created was a subbranch of epic, crossed with mime.18 Like Callimachus, he was adept at reducing heroic material to a mundane or quotidian level, while at the same time also introducing touches of low-life realism or colloquial speech, and “surrounding his lowly characters with a literary dimension by citing mythological precedent for their humdrum, prosaic activities.”19 At the same time, the genesis of Theocritean country song is probably not altogether remote from that of American country-western. We certainly find Theocritus’s herdsmen engaged in all the traditional pursuits: competing in song or on their pipes, whittling away at woodcarving to pass the time, serenading girls while some friend watches the flock, exchanging reminiscences and good-natured (or not so good-natured) banter, talking about, or practicing, barnyard sex of the sort popular in rural areas. They drink, they are malicious gossips; they are not above beating up women out of jealousy.20 They know all about hopeless passion, which, as good Greeks, they feel to be an encumbrance: to be really enjoyable, sex should stand on a par with eating and drinking. The example of the animals they herd is a clear inspiration to them. If half the joy of the pastoral myth derives from its emotional simplicity, half also depends on its obsession with rude productive plenty, the Cockaigne vision: pailfuls of milk, sweet dripping honeycombs, sheepskin jackets, great round cheeses, apples and plums galore, wine in brimming bowls, Demeter “with wheatsheaves and poppies in either hand.”21
This ideal had been established long before Theocritus’s day. The plays of Aristophanes, especially those from his earlier period, emphasize the pleasures of rural peace against the harsh demands of war. A striking example is The Acharnians (425), in which a simple, but far from simpliste, old countryman, Dicaeopolis, makes his own private peace with Sparta, while the chorus talks nostalgically of the pleasures of planting vines and figs and olives.22 Other comedies of the period have numerous references to the kind of never-never land where the rivers run with wine or soup, and thrushes pop themselves, grilled, into people’s mouths of their own accord, and automation, of a purely magical kind, has removed the need for hard work.23 If there is a core of historical truth behind the Golden Age myth, it probably looks back to the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods, when the nomad hunters, who lived off wild fruit and crops and berries as well as the animals and fish they speared or trapped, were slowly being replaced by agriculturalists living in settled communities, plowing, sowing, bound to a year-long calendar of backbreaking toil, faithfully reflected in Hesiod’s Works and Days.24
It is surely no accident that the ideal is always pastoral, never agricultural (at least not until Virgil’s day, and only then as propaganda for Augustus’s back-to-the-land movement):25 nymphs and shepherds, not nymphs and field hands, much less the three-tined rectitude of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. To peasants scratching a bare living from the soil, the herdsman’s or hunter’s life must have seemed idyllic indeed, Arcadian in the ideal sense. To chase deer, spear fish, or, later, to sit on a warm thyme-scented hillside piping about Amaryllis or Galatea while the sheep and goats got on with feeding themselves—what bliss. Hesiod faced the grim facts of a Greek winter, the searing cold northers that could “skin an ox”;26 the Theocritean tradition conspired to pretend that winter did not exist, that the Greek countryside was bathed in eternal sunshine, a fiction maintained to this day by the National Tourist Board. Even Aristotle regarded the shepherd’s life as one of supreme idleness, with hunters, brigands(!), fishermen, and fowlers coming next, in descending order, and the wretched peasant, as always, the drudge among food gatherers.27
This, then, was the formal genre that Theocritus crystallized, and passed on, ultimately, to Sannazzaro, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and their ever more artificial and literary successors, till the Industrial Revolution burned the heart out of such sugary conceits. Theocritus himself had not acquired the stylized sentimentality that makes Virgil’s Eclogues so offensive in places; but he was a city dweller, a poet, an intellectual, whose love affair with the countryside was conducted in vacation time. He may have longed for the simple life, may have dreamed of getting back to nature; but he was not dependent on nature for his livelihood. In one sense this enskyment of rural simplicity was really an attack on the vast, impersonal cities of the Hellenistic world. Ever since Socrates’ day the Cynics, to look no farther, had been attacking the values of polis and, a fortiori, megalopolis, urbanism. As real political power declined, individualism and quietism, contracting out of the rat race, became increasingly attractive, and were symbolized by the physical rejection of town for country.
Despite their realistic associations, Theocritus’s shepherds, it has been well said, remain “idealised types unencumbered by real herds or interests beyond their erotic fancies. Their song flows forth in faultless hexameters. They are better lovers and poets than shepherds.”28 Not that this conscious stylization prevented quite a few delicate—and class-conscious—Alexandrian critics and their successors from asserting that Theocritus’s herdsmen were too real, that their cheerful chat about sheepskins and sodomy gave off an improper smell of the midden, that they were not literary enough. This probably explains the curious and, to my mind, wholly erroneous modern determination to make Hellenistic pastoral poetry the begetter of the pathetic fallacy, that odd habit (first labeled by Ruskin)29 attributing to nature, both animate and inanimate, human characteristics or reactions, especially in response to the vicissitudes of living persons.30
Yet two points strike one instantly about such a claim. First, cases of the true pathetic fallacy in Hellenistic pastoral are surprisingly rare. The Lament for Bion, a late work, wrongly attributed to Moschus (fl. 150), and in fact probably composed (ca. 50?) by some follower of Bion himself, is the best-known, and most often cited, example.31 The whole of nature—rivers and orchards, rocks, flocks, and birds—is here summoned to lament the dead poet. It is the pathetic fallacy run wild. Yet this poem cannot be duplicated anywhere else: it is unique. Bion’s own Lament for Adonis32 contains only one instance of the figure,33 with mountains, woods, and springs weeping for Adonis; and Theocritus is almost equally sparing: Daphnis is mourned by his herds, by mountains, by oaks, but also howled over, in natural style, by wolves and jackals.34 When the poet invites all nature, in a familiar adynaton,35 to reverse the rules of the natural order through grief, with owls hooting to nightingales, brambles bearing violets, and pears growing on pines,36 there is no indication that this bizarre appeal is answered. Theocritus, indeed, goes out of his way to avoid the pathetic fallacy, and at least one salutary warning has been voiced against the dangers of applying “the nineteenth-century yardstick, product of realism and scientism” in an ancient Greek context.37
Second, and in contrast, there is no evidence to support, and much against, the theory that the pathetic fallacy had its true beginning in the Hellenistic period. Insofar as the concept can be isolated, it would seem to have been around (exactly as we might suspect, given its animistic flavor) since the very dawn of history. Fifteen hundred years before Homer, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, mountains and rivers, wild ass and gazelle, lion and leopard, all weep—wild answering to wild—for the dead Enkidu.38 Anthropomorphism allows the river Xanthus every kind of human reaction in its fight with Achilles;39 the lovemaking of Zeus and Hera induces joyful fertility in the blossoming earth,40 a passage with strong undertones of sympathetic magic. This last example has particular importance for us, since in the Hellenistic period it was, precisely, that aspect of the pathetic fallacy as index of a universal sympathy between nature and mankind, microcosm and macrocosm, that was picked up and developed by Stoicism (below, p. 633). The absolute fatalism in the notion of the heimarmenē, man’s ineluctable impermanence, the brief life sparked from an eternal sleep,41 was to be offset by the sympathy for that impermanence supposedly inherent in the natural order:42
Ever when mallows perish along the garden rows, orGreen parsley, or curly sprouting dill, thereafterThey come back to life, enjoy another year’s growing: yetWe men, big and strong though we are, yes, and clever,That first death we die, we sleep on, deaf, heedless,In the hollow earth, a long sleep, sans end or waking.(Lament for Bion, 98–104)
The Stoic world order, aiming to fill a gap left by the now largely discredited (and uncomfortably anthropomorphic) Olympians, reverted, in paradoxical fashion, to something in essence much older, a numinous universal pantheism, in which the natural order was bonding agent as well as generic force. To describe this world view in terms of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy involves severe limitations, and can be, on occasion, very misleading.
As a pioneer in the pastoral genre, Theocritus enjoyed certain real advantages. Largely spared the problem of reshaping a literary heritage, he was in a good position to dictate that heritage himself, to achieve “an Alexandrian rationalisation of loosely established forms.”43 He stands at the very edge of the formal, romanticized pastoral landscape, with Hesiod’s real-life drudgery still lurking in the background. He knows a good deal of genuine country lore, including a whole mass of Märchen, proverbs, popular songs (still flourishing in Greece today as laïkà tragoúdhia), and, most interesting of all, popular magic.44 Even if this is simply an aspect, comparable to Kazantzakis’s regional borrowings in his Odyssey, of the Alexandrian quest for realism, it is singularly convincing. At the same time the dark side of the herdsman’s life is played down: destructive mercenaries, famine, freezing sleet, buzzards, spontaneous abortions do not figure prominently in the Idylls. Instead we are treated to the harvest-home dream of fertility and abundance, a perpetual shimmering cloudless noontide. The pastoral dream was what appealed to the Graeco-Roman world: of all the Hellenistic escape routes, this one proved by far the most popular.
Rightly or wrongly, the piping sunlit shepherd was associated with the idea of leisured idleness, what the Greeks called hēsychia and the Romans otium—“vacation, freedom, escape from pressing business, particularly a business with overtones of death.”45 From here it was only a short step to Epicurean ataraxia, freedom from stress and worry in an idealized utopian landscape.46 The connection between Epicureanism and pastoralism lies in the remoteness from the mundane world of commerce and politics that the pastoral scene presupposes; and leisure, of course (as every novelist, not to mention every experimental psychologist with a cageful of rats at his disposal, is well aware), begets love, or, more particularly, sex. Fontenelle was not the only critic to see that “pastoralism is the product of a marriage between idleness and love,” with hillside or riverbank as a backdrop to seduction, of boys and girls alike.47 Theocritus’s idylls addressed to boys by an aging homosexual (29, 30) have an oddly moving, Cavafy-like quality about them, a terrible consciousness of temps perdu:
By your soft lips I beseech you,Remember that you, too, were youngerA year ago, that before we can spit we’re oldAnd wrinkled: youth once fled can neverBe caught back again, it wears wings on its backAnd we are slow to run down things that fly.(Id. 29.25–30)
The urban-rural tension sometimes intrudes, and it can have a timeless, class-conscious component. In Idyll 20, for instance (whether spurious or not makes no difference to this particular argument: the idea was in the air), a city girl rejects a herdsman because of his chapped lips, black hands, and filthy smell (9–10); nearly two centuries earlier, in Aristophanes’ Clouds (423), the rich old farmer Strepsiades’ socially superior wife was faced with an identical problem: money may talk, but it can also stink, sometimes strongly enough to turn the stomach of even the hardiest gold digger.48 Such flashes of uncomfortable realism, however, are comparatively rare. For the most part Theocritus’s pastoral characters have no real interests except their own intense emotions: in this they foreshadow the attitudes and behavior patterns common in nineteenth-century European fiction, and probably reflect similar bourgeois assumptions in their creators.
The concept of the countryside as an ideal retreat, embodying a kind of basic vitality unattainable by man in the polis, can be traced back at least as far as Plato’s Phaedrus, but it took Theocritus to get the pastoral dream launched on its long literary career.49 By Virgil’s day, as we have seen, sentimentalized and symbolic shepherds—non-smelly, esthetic, sheepless—were highly fashionable. The late (2d c. A.D.?) Greek romance Daphnis and Chloë even has a young pastoral couple too innocent to know about sex, the ultimate paradoxical joke to anyone brought up within reach of a farm. The way was being made ready for Marie-Antoinette and her Watteauesque milkmaids. Theocritus, right from the beginning, offers a mannered complexity of style in elegant contrast to the simple life that he is ostensibly celebrating: many of his idylls are as richly ornamented as fine Hellenistic jewelry. John Ferguson draws a fascinating parallel between the mannered pseudo simplicity of Theocritus and a famous diadem from Canosa, in southeastern Italy, “covered with exquisite ornamentation in the form of artificial flowers and leaves formed of gold, enamel, and precious stones.”50 Those familiar with the later work of Yeats will at once connect such a phenomenon with his great Byzantium poems, and reflect that pastoral mannerism has an odd history, and crops up in unexpected places.
We know little about Theocritus himself, and even that is both confused and ambivalent.51 He was probably born between 310 and 300, and died about 260:52 his career thus coincided with the golden age of Alexandrian culture under Ptolemy II, and Callimachus, Aratus, and Apollonius were his near-contemporaries. He was a native of Syracuse in Sicily,53 spent some time on the island of Cos,54 and rather more in Alexandria. On Cos he came under the influence of Philetas:55 Idyll 7—a program piece set on the island, and referring to Philetas as an already established poet (40)— purports to be autobiographical, and describes a group of literary friends celebrating harvest festival with songs and good cheer. It has been suggested that the first seven idylls, with their predominantly bucolic mode, form the output of Theocritus’s “Cos period,”56 and the theory is in many ways attractive, since no early work can be shown to have been written in Sicily, but almost all show acquaintance with the eastern Aegean.57 This does, however, leave the early Syracusan period an unavoidable blank. On the other hand, the highly disturbed conditions prevalent in Sicily during Theocritus’s lifetime (above, p. 217), with devastation and brigandage matters of common occurrence, would not be conducive to pastoral fantasy—hungry mercenaries being all too liable to slaughter sheep or cattle58—and may well have brought about Theocritus’s emigration.
In 275/4, when Hieron II first came to power in Syracuse (as generalissimo but not, as yet, king),59 Theocritus made a bid for his patronage with Idyll 16.60 In these hexameters echoes of Pindaric and Simonidean lyrics abound, loaded flattery for Hieron, since his namesake in the fifth century had been a great patron of the arts, commissioning work from Pindar, among others. The approach suggests expertise in the business of landing patrons: this is no prentice work. However, Hieron remained obdurate: he had more urgent matters on his mind just then, including an imminent campaign against the Carthaginians,61 duly noted by the hopeful poet, who portrays them as trembling for fear, while Hieron himself (80–81) “girds him like the heroes of old, with horsehair crest shadowing his helmet.” (His victory, and subsequent Carthaginian alliance, were still clearly in the future at the time of writing.) Not even Theocritus’s picture of his poems as Graces, come home empty-handed from their quest for patronage, and crouching in the bottom of their box (5–12), stirred Hieron’s heart. The poet’s attack, in the process of touting for patronage, on contemporary commercialism is both vivid and socially revealing, a confirmation of trends we have already observed:
I cannot tell, for no longer, as in old times, are men zealousTo be praised for fine deeds, but by gain are overmastered.Each keeps hand close in pocket, casting round for new income,Wouldn’t rub off the very tarnish from his cash as a present,but is quick with the old excuses: “Charity starts at home; I’dBe glad of a handout myself,” or “The gods reward poets,”Else?” or “The finest poet’s the one who duns me for nothing.”(Id. 16.13–21)
When Theocritus turned his attention to Ptolemy II, however, he was far more successful. Ptolemy brought him to Alexandria, and supported him:62 in return Theocritus began to turn out poems that were less purely pastoral, more grandiose propaganda for Ptolemy’s monarchy. Idyll 17 is entirely devoted to this theme (see p. 146): the clear parallel drawn between Ptolemy and Zeus (1–4, 131 ff.) cannot but remind us of Callimachus (p. 172).63 It is odd that the unsuccessful bid for Hieron’s support should have turned out so much better a poem than the “stiff, conventional, sycophantic” tribute to Ptolemy,64 including the careful handling of his incestuous marriage (128 ff.), here legitimized by reference to the hieros gamos of Zeus and Hera. There is similar blatant flattery inserted elsewhere: in Idyll 14, for example, we find Thyonichus advising his lovelorn friend Aeschinas that if he wants employment as a mercenary (that regular fallback for the Hellenistic unemployed), or indeed patronage of any kind, Ptolemy is his man—generous, kind, cultured, gallant, a reliable paymaster (58–64). In Idyll 15 (which reveals close personal familiarity with Alexandria) there is no less starry-eyed a description of entertainment put on in the royal palace by Queen Arsinoë (21–23, 78 ff.).65 It is all a long way from the earthy rural innocence that forms a leitmotif in the earlier, more truly bucolic, idylls, where literary sophistication never interferes with the promotion of country matters. In Idyll 4, for instance, characters get thorns in their feet (50–55: “What a tiny prick, and still it undoes a man my size!”) or are caught “milling” some pretty little piece behind the barn (58 ff.), and indulge in cattle-chat (12–25) while their calves are nibbling the olive shoots (45). Theocritus has become, in effect, a court poet. There is always a price to be paid for patronage.
Where did Theocritus stand in the great literary quarrel between Callimachus and Apollonius? Very much, it would seem, on the side of Callimachus.66 He not only avoided the large (or inflated) book, but severely limited his overall production: it is unlikely that much, if any, of his work is lost, while quite a few poems in the canon may well be spurious.67 The key passage is in Idyll 7. The narrator, probably (though not certainly) a persona for Theocritus himself, seems to be under the tutelage of Philetas (40–41), and mock-modestly describes himself as no match— yet—for his teacher, but rather a frog to Philetas’s sweet-singing cricket. Lycidas replies endorsing this stand, and adds:
I find about equally loathsome the builder who strugglesTo raise his house as high as some tall mountain,(Id. 7.45–48)
In other words, keep it short; don’t try to compete with Homer. It is even possible that Idyll 5, ostensibly a contest, complete with insults, between Comatas the goatherd and Lacon the shepherd, carries some veiled allusions to the great literary quarrel. The accusations of theft—sheepskin coats, pipes, and whatnot (1–19)—could hint at literary plagiarism. Comatas says at one point how sad he is to see Lacon, his pupil since childhood, turn against him in this way (35 ff.), and we remember that Apollonius was said to have been taught by Callimachus (p. 203). “And when can I recall having heard or learned anything worthwhile from you, you vile and envious wretch?” Lacon inquires. To which the brief and pithy retort is: “Last time I buggered you.” The contest is turned over to a third party to adjudicate: we have a match on, Lacon tells Morson, to see who’s the better boukoliastas, singer of country songs (67–68). Comatas insists that it is his opponent who picks the quarrels (77). It is clear enough where Theocritus’s sympathies lie.
Yet in the last resort, like so much Theocritean criticism, such interpretations remain no more than speculative. Seldom can any poet have put less of himself, in any direct sense, into his poetry. This impression is only reinforced by his formalism. Even his descriptions of scenery and artifacts—the cool spring, the shady pine tree, the hum of bees round the hive68—have an artificial quality about them. It has been suggested that what he often does is describe not so much the physical world around him as various examples of contemporary art, reality at one remove: the practice known as ekphrasis (p. 205). One famous, and fascinating, instance of this occurs in Idyll 1.69 A shepherd’s rustic cup of ivy wood (kissybion) is described in detail (27–55): deep, two-handled, freshly carved and waxed, with a decoration of ivy and vine leaves. The kissybion seems to have been something of a literary confection, as the passage devoted to it by Athenaeus makes clear.70 It has one handle, or two, or none; it is the same as a skyphos, or, alternately, a kypellon; it is a small cup, or again, as Homer knew it, a large bowl.71 About all that Athenaeus’s sources agree upon is that it was made of ivy wood, and essentially a lower-class vessel, being used by “swineherds, shepherds, and rustics.”
Thus Theocritus’s description of the elaborate carving with which this kissybion is embellished offers one more example of epic convention refigured (above, p. 206), the more striking since there is no earlier example in literature of a mere kissybion being decorated at all,72 and in particular since the scenes on the cup cannot but recall those on Homer’s Shield of Achilles and the pseudo-Hesiodic Shield of Heracles.73 The contrasts of theme are piquant and subtle. There is a glittering amplitude about the world portrayed by Homer (and imitated by pseudo-Hesiod): the circle of earth and heaven are there, marriages, the exercise of justice, warfare, and cattle-lifting, but also reapers, vintners, herdsmen, sheep at pasture, lords and ladies dancing, all ringed with the stream of Ocean. It will be noticed that Homer’s picture includes the domain of Theocritus (rather than standing in simple antithesis to it), so that the effect in the Idylls is one of self-imposed limitations. Homer is no stranger to two men quarreling over one woman, Theocritus’s opening scene (32–38), but here the erotic has wholly eclipsed the heroic, and in what follows all the scenes are of private, rural endeavor: the old fisherman gathering his net, neck muscles swelling with the effort; foxes raiding a vineyard while the boy left to guard it plaits a cricket cage. On top of this low-keyed naturalism, Theocritus has deliberately, for his own literary benefit, confused two kinds of cup, a skyphos and a Megarian bowl, ignoring the handles of the first in order to get in two extra scenes and an acanthus decoration, and indifferent to the fact that the second would not stand steady for milking.74 So much for the literary visual eye in action. But the consciousness of the visual arts remains strong.
This is equally true of Theocritus’s landscapes and genre scenes. In Idyll 15 the Adonis bower, part of the festival tableau in Ptolemy’s palace, has Erotes, Amorini, flying from branch to branch, wreathed and beribboned (120–21), all just as we find them in Graeco-Roman painting.75 Bowers, grottoes, nymphs, goats: this kind of formal pastoral landscape is instantly familiar to us from the Pompeian wall paintings.76 A remarkable number of the Theocritean epigrams seem to be, precisely, descriptions of, or accompaniments to, painting and statues.77 There is, once more, a paradox about the constantly reiterated criterion of realism in the visual arts (we find this in Herodas, too)—the grapes so lifelike that birds peck at them (above, p. 92)—since, of course, the technique is pure artifice, an ingenious trompe-l’oeil deception. False perspectives, literary pastoral: the retreat from reality greets us on every side. The bucolic scene is out of place and time, an eternal bee-loud noontide.78 Amid oaks, willows, elms, bays, myrtles, near the obligatory cave and spring (or waterfall)—their innocence counterpointed against the sophistication of his audience79—Theocritus’s characters compete, converse, and, intermittently, copulate, only being “recalled to business occasionally by the antics of their animals.”80
Yet the pursuit of genuine realism existed, as we have seen, both in literature and in art: the interesting (but by no means surprising) thing is that it tended to concentrate on the city rather than the country. Good examples in Theocritus are Idylls 2 and 15, in which we move away from the formalized rural setting to a dramatized scene or monologue involving urban characters. An obvious visual parallel here is provided by the street scenes of the mosaicist Dioscorides of Samos, who worked in the second century B.C. but probably drew on third-century models.81 In The Magicians (Id. 2) we watch Simaetha—whose name, interestingly, resembles those elsewhere given to cows or she-goats, with a hint of sexual libidinousness implied82—performing an authentic magical ritual to recover her lost lover, Delphis, slowly shifting from the obsessional circularity of passion (well symbolized by the revolving wryneck on its frame) to a mood of stoical survival and endurance, come what may.83 In Idyll 15 we follow the two Syracusan housewives, Gorgo and Praxinoa, from their meeting in Praxinoa’s house (complete with baby and nursemaid), through the crowded streets of Alexandria, past mounted guards and jostling Egyptians, to Ptolemy’s royal palace.84
These idylls are, in effect, mimes,85 the mime being a short dramatic interlude, Sicilian in origin, with emphasis on characterization rather than plot or narrative: a music-hall sketch, a slice of (usually low) life, sometimes with a single performer, sometimes with two or more. Mimes in antiquity were divided into two categories, pantomimes (hypotheseis) and farces (paignia), the former being longer, more serious, and more elaborate, the latter short, comic, and “stuffed with coarse ribaldry and scandalous gossip.”86 Plutarch’s narrator in his Dinner-Table Discussions argues that such characteristics make mime (and Old Comedy) unsuitable as postprandial entertainment, whereas Menander is praised as highly moral (no homosexuality; vice punished, virtue rewarded), and lowbrow enough for even a soused guest to understand.87 The most important early mimographer, Sophron of Syracuse (fl. ca. 450), who in literary terms was probably the founder of the genre, wrote on topics very similar to those treated by Herodas (they both, for instance, share an interest in dildos), and was actually adapted by Theocritus, who is said, in particular, to have lifted the maid, Thestylis, in Idyll 2 from the earlier writer:88 the one sizable fragment of Sophron found on papyrus also, significantly, describes a sorceress and her assistant.89
Herodas, on the other hand, professed to be influenced by the sixth-century iambic satirist Hipponax,90 the inventor of the choliambic (“limping”) trimeter, or scazon, a line remarkable for its thumping reversed final foot; and it is true that he used both Hipponax’s meter and an artificial approximation to his Ionian dialect (whereas Sophron had written in Doric shaped to a kind of rhythmic prose). Fortunately—since little of either Sophron or Hipponax survives—these progenitors are not essential to an immediate appreciation of either Herodas or Theocritus in his mimetic idylls.91 When we compare either with some of the tantalizing papyrus fragments of mimes that have survived from antiquity,92 it is clear that his literary standards are markedly superior to theirs. These were popular, lowbrow entertainment, frowned on by the morally serious; whereas Sophron won high praise from no less an admirer than Plato, who borrowed his methods of characterization and kept his Mimes as a favorite bedside book.93 Yet the fragments possess a marvelous vulgar vitality that makes one wish we had more of them, regardless. They tend to be brassily obscene, with a more than Aristophanic relish for taboo words. One is set in India, is spoken partly in pseudo-native gibberish, and involves a native deity called Pordē (Fart). In another a woman is yelling to her slave “Come and fuck me,” and showers him with exotic insults when he refuses (“You found my cunt too rough a proposition?”).94
We sometimes forget how much our overview of Greek literature is conditioned by the morally costive Graeco-Roman and Byzantine pundits who sifted out what they thought worth preserving (especially as school texts, a selection process that always sets a premium on virtuous platitudes), and trashed, or ignored, the rest. Sometimes an oddity will survive from the trash heap to shift our perspective, and remind us how much we have lost, how perilous our generalizations about ancient literature must always remain. Herodas is very much a case in point.95 Despite his gift for graphic thumbnail sketches, he is not a writer of consistent dramatic skill or poetic achievement, and the greasy amorality that exudes from almost every line of his work would probably have ensured his literary demise even if he had been.96 Yet for us his sociohistorical value is immense; his total indifference to improving attitudes comes as a great relief, and his scabrous worm’s-eye view of life can, on occasion, be extremely funny. In 1891 a papyrus was found that contained seven of his mimiamboi virtually intact, and sizable (if baffling) fragments of several more. Scholars have been arguing over them ever since.
All we know of Herodas himself (fl. ca. 280–270) is that he was a contemporary of Callimachus and Theocritus in Alexandria, and working during the reign of Ptolemy II.97 Though the younger Pliny praised him,98 he does not seem to have been widely known or read. There is no good evidence either that he was a farmer or that he came from Cos (as the literary histories sometimes claim), though he may, like Theocritus, have spent time there.99 His realism needs careful watching, since his little dramatic interludes are highly artificial, written, as we have seen, in a bad literary imitation of Hipponax’s archaic Ionic salted with touches of Attic, even of Doric, and a (typically Hellenistic) mixture of two genres, the mime and the iambus, employing the matter of the first and the language and meter of the second—the iambus, especially the scazon, being originally the verse form regarded as appropriate for ridicule, satire, or declarations of private love. This, presumably, is why Knox translated Herodas into a fake archaic jargon so obscure that it often requires the Greek to elucidate what Herodas is actually saying.100
In Mime 1 we watch an old go-between or bawd attempt—unsuccessfully—to interest a grass widow in a new lover: her pitch shows Herodas at his best:
Child, how long is it now you’ve played the widow,Tossing alone on your single bed? Since MandrisAnd not one syllable has he written you, oh no,He’s forgotten you, he’s drinking from some new cup!And that’s where the Goddess is housed—why, every objectThat grows or is made abounds in Egypt: wealth,Wrestling schools, power, tranquility, renown,Gaudies, philosophers, gold, pretty young boys,And women (by our Lady!) in more numbersThan the heavens boast stars, for comeliness the equalIn his beauty contest (hope they missed that little whisper!).You silly girl, what’s going on in your mind? Why on earthKeep warming that stool of yours? Before you know itYou’ll be old, your bloom will be burned away, dead ash.Look around, change your tack for two or three days,Have some fun with another man—a ship can never ride safelyOn just a single anchor.(Mim. 1.21–42)
The arguments, temptations, and veiled threats all fail: Metriche announces her intention of remaining faithful to Mandris (about the only show of virtue in our surviving text), but still, with wry humanity, breaks out a pot of wine for her ever-thirsty visitor.
Few of the other mimes achieve this level of creative vividness. We listen to a pimp, in court, making his case against a rowdy sailor for abduction of one of the brothel girls (and parodying legal oratory in the process: Mim. 2). We meet a loquacious, prematurely aged, poverty-stricken mother lugging her no-good son off to be beaten by the local schoolmaster: the exchanges of mother and son offer a glimpse into that perennial problem, the generation gap (Mim. 3).101 We eavesdrop on a group of women, as featherbrained and talkative as Theocritus’s Syracusan matrons, making ex voto offerings in the temple of Asclepius, and praising, like so many Aunt Ednas, the realism of the artwork on display (Mim. 4; cf. above, p. 206). Eavesdropping, in fact, is what the audience seems to be doing more often than not, most obviously with the two bored housewives’ wink-and-snigger chat about dildos in Mime 6. (Cerdo the cobbler, who makes the dildos, shows up again in Mime 7, this time selling shoes, again to ladies: his public, as opposed to his under-the-counter, role.)102 A sadistic mistress, learning of her slave-lover’s infidelity with a neighbor, first wants him whipped, then decides on branding, and is only talked out of both by her maid (Mim. 5). Comparison may be made with an anonymous papyrus fragment on a very similar theme (the protagonist is the same foul-mouthed lady cited earlier): the slave here is punished for rejecting his mistress’s advances because he prefers a fellow slave.103 There is an unpleasant and obsequious slave named Malakos (“Softy,” or “Faggot”), and the mistress also attempts to poison her husband. Mime 8, badly mutilated, shows us, exceptionally, Herodas himself, telling a symbolic dream (16 ff.), in the context of a Dionysiac ritual, about his work’s harsh treatment by the critics, and his confidence in his own ultimate triumph.
It is all very Hellenistic, and, ultimately, very depressing. From the literary viewpoint, Herodas is a typical Alexandrian: he has found a species of art hitherto ignored by the intellectuals; he has revamped old meters and dialect forms; his works are pithy and brief. Low life, in fact, complete with vernacular platitudes, cleverly sauced up for Alexandrians with a certain nostalgie de la boue. It would be interesting, and valuable, to know just what sort of social cross section formed the audience for such entertainment. I cannot share the confidence of most modern scholars that Herodas was catering to select littérateurs, capable of picking up the most recondite allusions, rather than to the popular audience that enjoyed a lowbrow mime.104 At the very least I suspect there was something in Herodas for both categories to enjoy. Nor am I by any means convinced (though here there is wider disagreement) that performances of the mimiamboi were limited to one-man recitations, much less that such works were mere Buchpoësie. The alternative need not be an elaborate stage production with scenery (as Cunningham seems to imply),105 but rather the equivalent of the quick vaudeville sketch, which similarly lasts about five minutes, and can involve two, three, sometimes four actors.
But whatever our views on such topics, it is hard to deny that there is an awful void here at the heart of things. Extreme wealth on the one hand, grinding poverty on the other; stonily unself-conscious brutality, relentless commercialism; in particular, too many bored, stupid, and intermittently vicious middle-class women with time on their hands and no sense of purpose, more than ready to treat their slaves as animated tools in a way that might have surprised Aristotle. Here we hit on a central leitmotif of the period (see pp. 597 ff.). With Tyche supreme, and deified kings for gods (reflecting, on a more palatial scale, precisely the same materialist aims as the new bourgeoisie), it is not to be wondered at that Simaetha, in a desperate attempt to control at least her private life, should resort to magic, or that the magic should have erotic compulsion as its goal. What Simaetha, like most of the other characters that we meet, has on her mind is sex: more or less romanticized, but still compulsive and obsessional, the appetite of a spoiled consumer. It is no accident that the magic ritual described by Theocritus is authentic to the last detail, and has ample parallels in the magical papyri (see pp. 598 ff.): it was a deadly serious business, on a par with the discovery of a good cook.
Among consumer appetites, as any student of Athenaeus’s sources from this period is well aware, gourmandizing also ranked very high. Like the pursuit of sex, infatuation with haute cuisine became, at least among the propertied classes, a kind of substitute religion: “Give me sensation, and then again sensation” is a creed with a long history. Then, as later, it also produced its own backlash. The poor, as we shall see (pp. 590 ff.), turned rather to salvationist cults: if there was no hope for them in this world, at least the next one might offer rewards, not the least of which would be the spectacle of their temporal masters in torment for all eternity. But such cults also had something to offer a jaded bourgeoisie. In this world of relentless sensual self-gratification, it is not surprising that the Cynics should have found adherents among the well-to-do. Here was a need that, in the long term, pastoralism could never fill. The rentier might be glad, for a while, to dress his scholē, his idleness, in pseudosignificance by conjuring up a dream of Arcadia; but his heart was in the city, where his livelihood lay, and the herdsman’s piping, however literary, in the end still left him unsatisfied. To pay the piper presented no problem; but to call the right tune was a very different matter.