Wordsworth on Nature is like Virgil on boxing; I prefer Theocritus, who had obviously been a bit of a bruiser himself, as his account of the Amycus-Pollux match shows.
ROBERT GRAVES, “The Road to Rydal Mount”2
An Athenian poet of the sixth century BC enjoyed an abundance of givens. He knew his fellow-citizens shared his dialect, landscape, history, and traditions, and when it came to poetry itself, expectations having to do with music, genre, and diction. A poet writing in Syracuse in the third century BC couldn’t bank on such a commonality. Syracuse was big, with Alexandria the largest Greek city at the time. It had had a turbulent history, and, despite political vagaries, the messy interregna between tyrants, there was the tenuous memory of a mother culture, the Corinthian source. Unsettling and enriching elements derived from its relations with the rest of Sicily, with Italy and the north of Africa. The population had diversified well beyond the Greek core. A poet writing there could not take much for granted.
In Alexandria, nothing at all could be taken for granted. In the first century of its existence, few Alexandrians felt like natives. In the busy port, with its wide avenues and narrow alleys, a mess of languages and dialects was spoken. The city was Greek, but the racial mix was unlike that in any previous Greek city. Here religious observances and superstitions were a tangle. At the great library writers and intellectuals from the entire known world—not only Greeks—were at work, many of them supported, scholars suggest, by the Ptolemies themselves. In a few decades Alexandria had grown from a literal backwater into an imperial capital, a spectacular colonial imposition upon Egypt, with dazzling façades, the architectural weight, the colonial determination of a phenomenon intended to last.
Theocritus’ Idyll XV, “The Festival of Adonis,” evokes the city at his time through the eyes of two immigrant gossips, Gorgo and Praxinoa, who, as he did, came from Syracuse. Arsinoe, Ptolemy Philadelphus’ queen, has organised an exhibition and concert at the royal palace in honour of Adonis. The general public is to be admitted. These gossips, though bumptious and coarse, are independent-minded and agreeably awed by the scale and opulence of festive Alexandria. The little drama of the idyll begins with Gorgo knocking on Praxinoa’s door and urging her to come out into the festive streets. Praxinoa leaves her two-year-old with a maid and the women (they are prosperous) accompanied by two servants set out, chatting about husbands and other brittle subjects. Scene two is set in the street: they struggle through the crowd, exchanging words. In the third scene they reach the palace, banter with other exhibition-goers, defend the dignity of their dialect, and listen to a famous singer who ends her song by conjuring Adonis. Gorgo adds a little coda, praying that next year will bring around the same plenty and celebration.
The poem gives Theocritus occasion to note some of the benefits that Ptolemy Philadelphus has effected. There is a sense of popular access to the king, improvements in street safety, a widening prosperity, a general tolerance. The poem also celebrates the resilient virtues of Syracuse in the immigrant women. As they chatter, an Alexandrian tries to silence them:
Quiet, women! Chattering like two barn-door fowls.
You set my teeth on edge with your flattened vowels.
To this, unhesitatingly, remembering that Corinth was the mother city of Syracuse, and that Bellerophon was one of Corinth’s most famous sons, albeit equine, Praxinoa retorts,
What bird might you be? The crested ignoramus?
We come from good Corinthian stock, the same as
Bellerophon.
C. M. Bowra insists that, for poetry, the move in time and space from Athens to Alexandria entailed a narrowing of imagination and expressive freedom: the “openness” of democratic Greece is attenuated into poetic servility in Ptolemaic Alexandria.3 About these Syracusan women there is nothing servile, nor does the city they inhabit seem restrictive. Bowra forgets how centuries of poets served tyrants with praise: Pindar, his favourite, is hardly a democratic spirit. Poets’ lives themselves were, he declares, “narrower,” as though political integration and the acceleration of history it entails, the freedom to travel, the amazing resource of the libraries in Alexandria and elsewhere, the diversity of cultures on show, impoverished imagination. Bowra’s is an odd take on the growth of cosmopolitan culture, nostalgic for the brief stabilities of tyranny and democracy, with their very different dynamics and their fragmented poetry.
By destiny and design, Alexandria was cosmopolitan. The sustaining countryside, the fields and olive orchards, the pastures and enclosures close at hand and familiar to the citizen of most Greek cities through to the third century, were unfamiliar in North Africa. Apollonius in Argonautica, Book IV portrayed its climate as mercilessly hot, dry and unredeemed. The steamy Nile delta sustained flora and fauna quite unlike those to which the Greek immigrant was accustomed. Apart from Apollonius, Alexandrian poets came from older Greek cities and brought in their luggage more coherent cultures. They unpacked them gingerly in the shimmering strangeness of a new kind of world. Here diverse Greek traditions come together in a complex flowering of verse, before it atrophies under the devoted care of Rome.
Idyll II, the magical “Pharmaceutria,” like Idyll XV develops a female character. As with Apollonius’ Medea and Callimachus in the Hecale, an Alexandrian poet creates and explores a feminine sensibility, and here, also, female sexuality. Elsewhere his verse emerges from paedophile and homosexual enthusiasms, but here a woman finds a convincing voice.4 Simaetha, his protagonist, is desperate to draw her lover back. He has gone off with another, male or female, she is not sure which. Simaetha proves to be a sorceress and witch, an apprentice Medea. Her confusion, skittering between emotions, contributes to the clarity of a poem which understands how hate and love, desire and resentment inhabit a single mind, torture and extend without dividing it.
In the first section Simaetha is desperate for her man Delphis, and not vice versa: a poetic innovation. Delphis has failed to visit her for twelve whole days (and nights). She plans to confront him with his neglect tomorrow at the wrestling school where he spends most of his spare time. Obviously he is a young man of leisure, and she a girl with time to stand and stare—one who owns a slave. Pending tomorrow, she exercises magic to lure him back, calling on the mysterious moon and on Hecate. In the second section she begins to chant. Delphis is from Myndus, a town on the coast of Asia Minor, not far from Cos. He is self-obsessed and has stolen her happiness. Her magic involves melting images, burning bits of his clothes and chanting awful imprecations, all of which end demanding not his death but his desperate and needy return, a fantasy that plainly images her own desire for him.
In the concluding section, having spun a magic wheel, she evokes the Lady Moon and tells her the story of her love. She went to watch a parade and spotted Delphis and a mate coming from the gym with their shining brown-curled beards and their handsome naked chests. Her heart “burst into flame” and she went into a decline. She sent her slave girl to summon him from the wrestling school. He came, she was paralysed with fear and desire. Her careful stanza-and-refrain account continues until, overcome by the memory of desire, her verse turns to straightforward narrative of what she did, drawing him into her bed, and what he did. They loved. But now his eye has wandered. One detail electrifies the poem. Delphis used to leave his oil-flask, for greasing his body at the wrestling school, at her house. It gave him an excuse to come there three or four times a day. This particular stays in the mind, a token of trust and intimacy—betrayed. The fact that he has left his precious oil-flask indicates the intensity of his supplanting passion. Simaetha ties her story in with Ariadne’s and Medea’s. She bids farewell to the Moon, who has listened patiently and silently to her tale and her lament.
More characteristically, Theocritus is an elegist; he incorporates into his verse elements from the drama, mime, epic, epinicean poetry and the “new poetics” of Callimachus. There is remarkable wholeness in his artificial poetic world, and integrity of purpose, too: it is a paradox that thematic artificiality and poetic integrity—at odds in earlier phases of Greek culture—go together in Alexandria.
Theocritus wrote idylls. The term, unrelated to the term “idyllic” in modern English, was first used by Pliny the Younger as a way of describing poems which were not long.5 An “idyll” was originally a small picture or portrait (stressing not only the scale but the human content—an idyll is not merely descriptive but follows a character or set of characters). Tennyson loved the open genre and the term and used it to describe widely divergent kinds of poem in his own oeuvre. In the case of Theocritus, whose surviving poems apart from the epigrams are lumped together under the head, the idyll can include bucolic work, town mimes, panegyrics, hymns, lyrics and brief epics.
Theocritus’ little epics are among his most compelling work, concentrating on a brief episode in a larger legend or myth. His “scaling down” of narrative tends to foreground characters and their state of mind, or their moral significance. The poems arrest the familiar flow of larger tales—Homer’s, Apollonius’—to distil and define. In Idyll XI, “The Cyclops,” the poet addresses his friend Nicias. Love is incurable. Only the Muses—by way of therapeutic love-song—can alleviate its discomforts. Nicias as a physician and poet should know this. The story of Polyphemus and Galatea takes on a new pathos. Polyphemus is a young Cyclops, his chin only just fuzzing with beard. He may not be handsome, he concedes, but he is rich. He sits above the sea longing and calling to the sea nymph Galatea. He wants to learn to swim so he can dive into the sea and find and kiss her. In this beauty-and-beast fable the beast, sincere and touching, and irredeemably ugly, loses.
Idyll XIII, “Hylas,” Tennyson’s favourite idyll, retells a tale Apollonius includes in the Argonautica, but here with a thrift that endeared him to Calli-machus. Again, the poet addresses Nicias. Heracles, being in love, took lovely young Hylas with him when he joined the quest for the Fleece. This passion of Heracles proved that boy-love was not effeminate or weak. Hylas’ death is rendered with piercing precision, a star falling out of the sky. Heracles survived his loss and, the poet adds consolingly, Nicias will survive his lover’s passing on to other pleasures. This poem is the pure water which, in his “Hymn to Apollo,” Callimachus says a poet must raise to Demeter’s lips.
Impure but powerful, Idyll XXII, “The Dioscuri,” is the most discussed and interpreted of the idylls in recent times. It begins by announcing the two parts to follow, the boxing match and the armour and spear contest. The aetiology of Castor and Polydeuces, sons of Leda and Zeus, is established. Polydeuces’ part combines epic narrative and dialogue, a mixed genre appropriate to an event in which the god is sweetly reasonable and the ensuing conflict not his fault. Castor’s part of the poem is rendered wholly in epic terms and recalls the cruelly wasteful combats in the Iliad.
The brothers are by vocation rescuers of men in trouble, whether they are storm-tossed, threatened, betrayed.
You, the twin-helpers of men on earth, excellers
In words and music, on horseback, at the games …
Theocritus enters Apollonius’ narrative territory again, but with a light knapsack. The Argo, passing the turbulent rocks, lands at Bebrycia. “Out went the ladders, down the vessel’s side” suggests how high the ship was, how vast its hull. The twins find a lovely unspoiled spring surrounded with trees and prepare to drink. What appears to be a steroid-addicted bodybuilder with thick ears and iridescent muscle confronts them: King Amycus. He challenges Polydeuces: the loser will become the victor’s slave. Amycus blows through a stentorian conch and summons the Bebrycians out of the woods to watch. The threat to Polydeuces is Amycus’ sheer bulk: like a New Zealand All-Black, he strolls down the pitch and scores a try; opponents simply bounce off him. But Amycus has met his match: he is pummelled and dented; he sweats until he seems to melt and at last concedes defeat. Polydeuces makes him swear not to attack future travellers, a gentle fate for one who fights as dirtily as Amycus does. Compared with Apollonius’ circumstantial narrative, Theocritus’ version is more vivid and thematically purposeful.
The complementary half of the poem concerns Lynceus and Idas, Aphareus’ sons. They were betrothed to the daughters of Leucippus by an old family pact. Castor and Polydeuces stole the girls away. The brothers ambushed the divine rapists at Aphareus’ tomb. In this instance Lynceus and Idas were sweet reason, the Dioscuri the aggressors. Castor chopped off Lynceus’ fingers and when Lynceus turned away he was hacked upward “from flank to navel,” spilling out his guts. This story does little credit to Castor. Idas in rage wrenched a column from his father’s tomb and attacked Castor. Zeus deflected the attack and himself killed Idas with a lightning flash. The moral is that the sons of Tyndareus are invincible, whether their cause is just or not. Theocritus concludes with a paean to poets, blessed by the Dioscuri and by Helen and all the heroes who went to Troy.
They owe their glory to a poet, the man of Chios
Who took for theme Priam’s city, the Achaean ships,
The battles round Troy, and Achilles, tower of the field.
I, too, offer tokens of the clear-voiced Muses …
This idyll relates to the Homeric and later hymns, that unbroken tradition which flowers again in Callimachus’ six poems. In recovering the legendary and archaic, the Alexandrian poets turned to the hymn tradition as an unalloyed source not only of materials but of forms. Such formal appropriation and allusion is integral to their sense of shaping and authenticating matter and tone. “Poems which reconstruct and adapt the past are, in two senses, a kind of historical writing,” says Richard Hunter. “The past, here represented by an earlier text, is seen through the new text, so that both ends of a historical process are displayed.”6 Joining the past poem with the new one is part of structuring, he adds. It is “to some extent their very purpose.”
The connection between Homeric Hymn XXXIII, “To the Dioscuri,” and the opening of Idyll XXII, is instructive. The earlier poem is a prayer, the later adds narrative, aetiology, and a set of contrasts, or agons, not only in narrative but in narrative style, contrasts which underline the paradox of the poem’s “moral,” that whatever the gods do is right, even when it is wrong. Men and gods have become hard to distinguish: the Dioscuri, the Ptolemies. Comparable moral cruelty marks the end of Idyll XXVI, “The Bacchae,” which tells the same story as Euripides’ play. Pentheus spies on the Bacchantes’ ritual. They catch him and dismember him: his mother wrenches off his head, his aunts his arms; he is torn asunder. Rejecting emotion, rejecting “natural feeling,” the poem declares: Pentheus transgressed, his doom was just.7
Most of the poems are composed in hexameters, but the hexameter had changed in balance, volume, suppleness, allusiveness. Not only the classical narratives but the new bucolic note that Theocritus strikes, and for which over many centuries he was most celebrated, was original. What would the poetic beginnings have made of these ends: moon-faced Hesiod, peering over the wall into a Theocritean pasture? Theocritus’ rustic world, like that of his imitators Moschus, also of Syracuse, and Bion of Smyrna, and of other urban and urbane shepherds of later ages in Rome and in Europe, was scented with something other than sweat and manure. Here the reader experiences not the awful daily boredom and discomfort of real shepherds, but cultured leisure, subtly metered, with pretty, kempt shepherdesses, fluffy livestock, rich harvests which seem to tumble of their own accord into the barns. And winter? Not this year. Death happens and provides the pretext for a delicious, protracted plangency. And no matter how many pipes and flutes are mentioned, the poetry is not accompanied by literal music. The music is as much a fiction as the pastures, goats and sheep are.
Hesiod, who spoke plainly to his ne’er-do-well brother Perses, to the Muses and the gods, would have been similarly forthright with Theocritus, though the Syracusan was a type of man remote from any he had ever met. Is this, he might have asked, the last chapter of my once hard-bitten tradition? In early times poets were accosted by the Muses, who filled them with grace by making use of them: poets were vehicles through which the Muses spoke. Now the Muses are at best an archaising trope to serve the poet, the gods have receded along with the actual stones and dust of the fields and the panting, scrawny reality of real midsummer sheep. This is not the end of the Hesiodic tradition but the beginning of something else. Or else agriculture and landscape have evolved beyond recognition in a short five centuries. Theocritus’ idyll is a fantasy of rural life, a travesty of the rural world. The poet is no longer a preceptor, delivering practical and moral wisdom in memorable language, disclosing the mysteries of the origin of the world and the hierarchies of the gods. Now lambing and shearing and milking and herding, sowing and tending and harvesting, binding the vines, pruning the olives, and all the drab, brutish dailiness and nightliness of rural life have been refined away. This is not unlike Paradise, or Eden retrieved.
Bowra insists that Theocritus loved “the country,” unlike, he says, Callimachus.8 If he loved the country, why is there not more weather? The very expression “he loved the country” is a sentimental anachronism. In the bucolic idylls, the duties of men to one another and to the gods are more or less forgotten. The skies are blue, the grass green. Such conflicts as exist are staged and resolved. What starts with Theocritus, not with the didactic literalist Hesiod, is a pastoral tradition, and we tend to look back at his bucolic poems and distort them through lenses he ground in the first place. “Bucolic” is a term Theocritus introduces in Idyll I to describe the kind of poem he is writing. It derives from the word for cowherd. The sense came to include sheep herds and goatherds as well. In Idyll VII, the most complex and rewarding of the bucolic poems, Simichidas, whom critics take to be the voice of Theocritus himself, invents a verb: to bucolicate, or make herdsmen’s songs.9
The emergence of bucolic poetry as a distinct genre marks a “dissociation of sensibility,” the break between a fundamentally urban and a rural, or rurally informed, imagination. Once a city reached a certain size, a break was inevitable and transactions between city and countryside necessarily and fundamentally changed. The bumpkin, the rural innocent, the melodious and romantic herdsman all come of age in a poetry which is more escapist than nostalgic, since it reflects not a lost order but an idealised one. Theocritus’ best modern translator, Robert Wells, insists too much on the poet’s “realism,” as though acknowledging invention would somehow devalue the verse. He repeats the seventeenth-century view that Theocritus “keeps too close to the clown.”10 Is it realism to portray rural people as hicks? Only from a resolutely urban perspective. How much banter, wit and verbal humour occurred in actual meetings between shepherds?
Proximity to the clown is a negative aspect of Theocritean idealisation. We do not pretend that caricature is realistic when it emphasises a nose, moles and beetling brows, displacing the natural balance of a face. Idealisation can lead to sentimentalism and, as the urban sensibility takes hold, to the intolerable condescension from which Wordsworth decisively delivers the countryman and the tradition two millennia later. What Wells calls the “paradox of graceful clumsiness” is part of the problem of pastoral: the grace belongs inevitably to the language and is attributable to the poet; the clumsiness belongs to the subject he is describing—or whose stereotype he is invoking. It is less a paradox than a natural divorce, as in all parodic forms, between the delivery and the thing said. A decorative anguish can be great poetry, but it is not to be confused with actual anguish. Daphnis in Idyll I is no more grieved for than Milton’s Lycidas: elegy is a pretext, the text is something else. “Even when Theocritus takes up an ancient legend about Daphnis, who must have been a kind of year-god”—why must?—“he scales it down to a touching and not too disturbing pathos.”11 There is an aloof unkindness in making death a pretext, or the pained lover risible, however “scaled down” the tragedy or the passion, however genteel and forgiving the laughter. In the end bucolic poetry and its pastoral legacy patronise intimate feeling because they are inherently parodic. They contribute to the sceptic’s and the stoic’s cause: disbelieve it, or control it.
Idyll I, of all Theocritus’ poems, has the clearest legacy in Greek, Latin and European poetry. It stands behind Bion’s “Adonis” and Moschus’s “Bion,” it marks the poetry of Virgil and Catullus, it prefigures “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adonais” and Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” The theme is less Daphnis’ death than elegy itself: Theocritus’ conceit is that one shepherd begs another to recite a favourite song. The poem proposes a kind of hierarchy: at the bottom a nameless Coan goat-herd, suppliant and willing to pay for the performance; and above him the talented sheep-herd Thyrsis, from far-off Aetna in Sicily (he may be another stand-in for Sicilian Theocritus). The dialogue between goatherd and shepherd frames the elegy. Each enjoins the other to perform and the goatherd prevails, inducing Thyrsis to sing the old favourite the “Passion of Daphnis.” He has offered Thyrsis a very good fee: a nanny goat producing copious milk and a wooden cup richly sculpted.
The cup itself is an interesting artefact. Carved ivy runs around the rim, and below it three panels are arrayed: a woman courted by two lovers, her “kindly indifference” to both; an aged fisherman with a heavy net; beyond him, a vineyard in which a boy stands guard and two foxes circle, one to steal his quarter-loaf, while unaware he fashions a cricket cage. The cup is brightly coloured. Poets may not receive payment from tyrants and rich patrons, but here in the pasture a simple goatherd is willing to part with his all for a few minutes’ exquisite song. Wells compares the descriptions of the cup, with its discrete panels, to the structuring of the sequence idyll by idyll: each a separate sections, yet relating to the poems before and after.
If the poem is taken as a whole and compared with other idylls, the Pindaric strophe, antistrophe and epode structure of the epinicean odes comes to mind. Many of the idylls divide into three or six natural sections, and the form, though attenuated and subtilised, seems to integrate the poems. In the second part of this idyll, Thyrsis performs his “Lament for Daphnis,” a song which feels familiar to English readers because of “Lycidas” and other elegies. Daphnis dies of unrequited love. Hermes comes, then Aphrodite. She teases Daphnis and he taunts her in return with Anchises, Adonis, her mortal loves. He bids farewell to Aetna (because, like Thyrsis, he too is a Sicilian shepherd) and urges Pan to leave Greece for Sicily. He envisages a nature turned topsy-turvy with his death, and then he dies, and even Aphrodite cannot rouse him. The lament is lovely and light, with a charmed refrain.
After dialogue and lament, the third part of the idyll, the epode as it were, consists of Thyrsis peremptorily demanding his fee. The plangent notes have hardly died down before he declares, “Now give me the goat and the carved cup.” And the goatherd gratefully and promptly obliges. We have been party to a simple, graceful, unclumsy poetic transaction.
Theocritus’ bucolic poems—just under half of his surviving corpus—inhabit a world designed by sentiment on a kind of Platonic template. Inevitably, for all their elegance of expression, even the vivid recollection of open-air buggery in Idyll V, “Goatherd and Shepherd,” has a designer feel. The poem is set in the south of Italy, in the instep. Comatas looks after the goats and Lacon the sheep. They start arguing, then gamble a kid against a lamb in a singing competition. It is dialogue-cum-debate, like the famous contest of Hesiod and Homer, with an equally dubious outcome. Comatas, the elder, claims to have taught Lacon to sing. What kind of singing? How did he teach him?
When I buggered you I taught you to moan and groan
Like a nanny bleating when the billy shoves it in.
After more insults or home truths are exchanged, Morson, on his way from town, turns up and both contestants accept him as judge. Now that they have an audience, the second section begins. Lacon clearly inclines to lad love (Cratidas being his particular favourite) while Comatas likes girls. But Comatas recalls, a second time, buggering Lacon.
Remember the time I bent you over that tree,
How you wriggled, grimaced and pushed back hard on me?
In the third section, the time for prizes arrives and Morson rewards Comatas, requesting a slice of lamb when the time of sacrifice arrives. Morson all along has had his mind more on the eventual feast than on the actual contest. The judge has been pre-emptively corrupted.
Such writing beguiles and persuades, but what it contains of rusticity, real in context, is not realistic. Critics who love Theocritus but are uncertain of his legacy insist on the actuality of his geography and try to tease out an answerable, literal world. Conditioned by a poetic tradition in which—hitherto—word has answered deed and object, even though in increasingly attenuated ways, they are reluctant to accept that in Theocritus, who suffers less acutely the formal strains and stresses of Callimachus or Apollonius, a crucial shift has occurred: the poetry exists in and for the illusions it creates in a language no longer necessarily earthed in contingencies.
Behind the deliberately coarse Doric diction and forms Theocritus devised from his native dialect for the bucolic poems there are, some critics affirm, echoes of actual “folk” material, rural song, traditional rhymes.12 Such elements are detected at the root of Stesichorus’ Sicilian verses, too. In Theocritus, “The effect is perfectly calculated, and derives not least from a three-way incongruity between the speaker and subject-matter, linguistic register, and literary form.”13 If indeed a long battle between mythos and logos was in progress, however, bucolic poets removed themselves from the battlefield into a buzzy, breezy parallel universe.14 Sir Kenneth Dover tells us that Theocritus delighted in building “a sophisticated construction on a popular foundation.”15 Would his poems have appealed to a shepherd or a common seaman? No, they are intended for readers rather than for popular recital. Would peasant or sailor have recognised their contribution to the “sophisticated construction”? If so, they might have resented the implicit condescension.
It seems unlikely that, in anything other than an allusive way, the bucolic idylls drew upon a rustic rural or oral tradition. They are poems based upon earlier poems, in a language deliberated not on a hillside but among the twists and coils of books in a library or on a terrace among professional men—doctors, lawyers, public officials—with a view of pastures and fields, livestock and herdsmen, about whom the poems purport to be. The transposition of polite dialogue from terrace or library on to these common figures was a pleasant task: what was particular became characteristic, the occasion moved from a contingent to a universal world. The point of bucolic poetry is that it is fiction, and as in all fiction the aim is to make it credible rather than literal. What might be realistic is the “courtesies of speech” which occur in the dialogue poems,16 but such courtesies belong to the “polite” classes. “The truth in his poems,” says Wells “lies between the speakers rather than with any single voice.”17 The use of proverbs grounds the poems in seeming folk wisdom, but the proverbs occur in a context which translates, and a dialect which refines them, assuming they were proverbs in the first place. It is possible that they are Theocritus’ invention or are sourced not in the fields but in preceding poems, including Hesiod’s.
Much is made of the actuality of Theocritus’ paths and landmarks. The long walk the shepherds take in Idyll VII is as readily traceable on Cos, pedestrian critics declare, as Leopold Bloom’s way through Dublin. The shepherds’ voices are credible, they add, even though the Doric dialect is synthetic and no one ever spoke it. There are no texts of folk-songs to corroborate the critics’ argument. Would folk metres have resembled the metres of the idylls (do popular Scottish and English ballad metres resemble blank verse?), would the spoken or sung diction relate in any way to the refined diction of the poems? Theocritus has left us writing, not song. Verse and music had been moving apart: the greater the weight of “meaning”—in the theatre, in the victory ode—the more the volume of the music had to be turned down, until it survived only in the patterning of verbal sounds, in metre, in repetitions and the formal rounds of the language itself. The divorce from music in written poems is complete, though they remember and acknowledge one another by fond allusion. A deliberate, walker’s reading of an idyll, following the very route the poem follows, hardly makes voices and incidents more actual. Even the pipes are, in a literal sense, silent: readers must conjure from the language another music, another world.
Such conjuring is pleasurable, nowhere more so than in Idyll VII, “The Harvest Festival.” Richard Hunter compares its form to Plato’s Lysis and Phaedrus, notes that the meeting with Lycidas is modelled on Homeric meetings, and draws attention to echoes of the proeme of Hesiod’s Theogony.18 It is a poem made of earlier poetry, and no less valid for that. Simichidas declares that his words have got through even to Zeus, who might be taken to be the divine Ptolemy Philadelphus addressed in Idyll XVII. If Zeus is Ptolemy and Simichidas is Theocritus, identities may be sought for other characters in this leisurely idyll. Some scholars argue that it provides evidence for a Coan school of poets.
The narrator Simichidas and two friends are walking to Haleis, where other rural friends are to offer first fruits at the festival of Demeter. En route they meet with rustic Lycidas. Simichidas in the nicest of terms challenges Lycidas to a singing contest. Lycidas declares his settled dislike for overreaching poets and for those who feel they must compete with Homer. He agrees to the contest and delivers his poem first. It is about wishing an absent friend well and it is also about Daphnis’ hopeless love for Xenea. And about Comatas, locked in a box and fed by bees for a whole season because of the sweetness of his musical lips.
Simichidas declares that he too has been a shepherd and begins his song. He chooses Myrto, trots after her, but his friend Aratus is in love with the lad Philenus; and just as Lycidas has prayed for his friend’s deliverance from the box, so Simichidas prays that Philenus may lie unresisting beside Aratus. Should Pan fail to answer his prayer, Simichidas will invoke terrible punishments on the god and on the disobliging lad. It is a heated poem, and Simichidas wins the contest. Lycidas gives him his crook and exits, cheerful in defeat. The others continue on to Demeter’s feast and find a lush and relaxing scene, hardly ceremonial, strewn about in the grass, with fruit at every hand. They join in. The wine is especially rewarding. The poem ends with a prayer for next year’s ceremony, just as Idyll XV does.
These bucolic herdsmen are a means and a disguise: the poet speaks through them and hides behind them, their refined rusticity, their arch archaism. The herdsmen stand in for irony: they provide the necessary distance between the poem and the poet, the reader and the poem. Hesiod’s shepherding is credible, the advice he gives homely and even valid. Theocritus’ is stylised, the advice he gives in elegant aphorism has more to do with mannerly entertainment than with herding, germination and harvest. In an age like the Alexandrian, in love with aetiologies, at first the bucolic may seem like a return, in imagination, to beginnings; in fact, it is a parodic strategy, in some instances sending up, as the mimes can do, the search for “origins” itself, in others fulfilling a satirical function.
Theocritus’ bucolic poetry is leavened by his poetic personality, his gently penetrating imagination, his guilelessness. Later bucolic poetry is less generously, less virtuosically practised. Bucolic Theocritus is the poet our parents and grandparents encountered, hoary and venerable, a figure quite different from the poet we meet today. For them what mattered was the pastoral he gave rise to, an emphasis due to the impact of the idylls on later Roman and European poetry. F. T. Griffiths in Theocritus at Court was one of the first English-language scholars to attend closely to the non-bucolic poems. Many have followed him into this area.
Theocritus of Syracuse: a poet from a busy city. The scholia to Idyll VII say that his mother was Philina and his father Simichus.19 He was raised in relatively prosperous circumstances, receiving a good education and developing a strong attachment to the place. One particular literary form, the mime, was developed in Syracuse by Sophron (c. 470–400 BC), whom Plato read with pleasure and approval. Indeed mime may have left a mark on the form of Plato’s dialogues. Mime had its place in the growth of Attic comedy and certainly marked the idylls. Idyll XV is deeply indebted to it: the two women embody in their manner, speech and action the tradition initiated by Sophron: in them and other idylls mime itself adjusts to a changing world.20
In Alexandria Herodas, roughly a contemporary of the Alexandrian poets, developed the form, and eight of his mimes survive. He wrote of lower to low life in satirical iambs which could be made closely to resemble vulgar speech. His subjects too are vulgar: illicit forms of love, truculence, the charms of low life. Idyll XV is about as coarse as Theocritus gets, and even there the formality of the language provides a certain distancing. He does not resort to the iambic. The satire is less in incident and character than in the language, the distances it creates between how and what it says. Had Theocritus aspired to realism, he would have descended to the iambic. The mime tradition ensures, in Lesky’s view, that he does not become over-fanciful. In Idyll II, the magic wheel and spells, the whole drama of a woman trying to charm her lover back, is based on Sophron’s witch mime, a papyrus fragment of which survives. The kinds of magic are “low” and “popular”; there is corroboration for the techniques and spells in some surviving papyruses. Yet it does seem wilful to describe such vignettes as realistic, despite the exquisite and convincing detail.
The poet, it is generally thought, left Syracuse relatively early in his adult life. During the anarchic aftermath of the death of Agathocles, he may have made himself a refugee.21 Wanting to return later, when the political situation stabilised, around 275 BC he invited Hiero II of Syracuse to be his patron.22 Put another way, he wrote a magnificent begging letter with epinicean elements, Idyll XVI, commonly called “The Graces” or “The Charities,” to which Hiero appears to have remained insensible. Poets and artists, Theocritus says, bring graces, and tyrants, as well as other potential patrons, for the most part turn them away from their doors. In this case the graces who go out begging are the poems themselves, poor waifs; unvalued, they return at evening, dejected. It is a plangent and wry conceit.
Now the cry is, “Give me the money, keep the praise,”
And each man cradles silver under his shirt,
Jealous even of its tarnish, with greed in his eyes
And a smug rebuff on his lips: “It’s all in Homer”;
“The gods will look after poets—that’s their job”;
“Charity begins at home”—and goes no further;
“The poet I like is the one who costs me nothing.”
The case for supporting poets is straightforward: material need (on their part) and transcendent need (on the patron’s). “We remember even their horses” when they—the rich and powerful—commission wisely. As wit ness he calls Homer’s poems into the box, proving by demonstration how they have memorialised men, and deftly evoking in a small space Homer’s vast narratives. It is a strategy of miniaturisation which Callimachus would have praised, as he would the closing prayer for Hiero himself and for Syracuse. The poem was, sadly for Theocritus, its own reward: Hiero II got a free advertisement. When Theocritus delivers the much-quoted line “Homer is enough for everybody,”23 his intention is ironic: the sufficiency of Homer is a tactic that those who do not wish to patronise a new poet, a new poem, deploy. It lets them off the hook.
From Syracuse the young poet went to southern Italy and then to Cos, to which he is deeply indebted. There he may have become a disciple of the native poet Philetas, whose works perished. Perhaps he knew and studied under Asclepiades of Samos, the epigrammatist. The Vita says, “he listened to Philetas and Asclepiades, whom he mentions.”24 The fact that he mentions them may be why the Suda suggests he studies with them. Did he also pursue medical studies under Praxagoras on Cos?25 He certainly met Nicias of Miletus—poet and physician—who became a friend and earned three warm mentions in the poems. Indeed, Idyll XXVIII, called “The Distaff,” talks about the journey from Syracuse26 to Miletus, the poet carrying a Sicilian distaff as a gift for his friend’s wife, Theugenis. He addresses the distaff as though it were a person, female, his travelling companion. The poem owes much to Sappho and Alcaeus.
The bucolic poems, judging from the plants Theocritus mentions, were composed on Cos, not in Alexandria or back in Sicily. Theocritus, Wells suggests, has two aspects: the Syracusan, which is bucolic, and the Alexandrian, which explores myth and legend. One revels in relative freedom; the other, while not cowering, feels the weight of asserted authority as a burden. Cos is the pivot, as it were. “Dorian in culture yet a part of Ptolemy’s empire, Cos enabled him to hold the contradictory elements in his life more fully in play.”27 It is a persuasive, though a schematic, account.
Cos, just off the coast of Asia Minor, a whole archipelago north of Rhodes and two away from Egypt, was important to the Ptolemies. Ptolemy Philadelphus was born on the island; Cleopatra, a generation later, may have parked some of her treasures there. The island was “in the family,” as it were, and to live on Cos was to be subject to Ptolemaic rule, though authority was attenuated by remoteness. When his poem to Hiero went unanswered, Theocritus wrote another kind of begging letter to Ptolemy Philadelphus, Idyll XVII, an encomium to the king and to his deified mother and father. Starched with respect, it is a kind of epinicean grovel. Addressing a patron who regards himself as divine and with whom, unlike Hiero II, the poet can share little in common, Theocritus does not make himself heard.
Where Hiero II remained silent, Ptolemy Philadelphus responded; or, in any event, Theocritus arrived in Alexandria and remained there long enough to become identified, with Callimachus and Apollonius, as one of the great Alexandrian poets. Lesky insists there was contact between Theocritus and Callimachus, and a close aesthetic understanding. It is reckoned that his verse was composed on Cos and in Alexandria, but the Doric dialect was a form of the speech of Syracuse, the idiom of all but Idyll XXII, which is in Ionic, and Idylls XXVIII, XXIX and XXX, which are in Aeolic. The issue of dialect arises with Callimachus as well: he was, after all, a scholar of dialects. Each dialect has different literary associations: a poet might signal generic or thematic elements, affiliations or shifts by choosing one dialect over another. Among the epinicean poets, the choice of dialect often relates to the provenance of the patron, but by the time of the Alexandrian poets, practical had given way to poetical considerations. The choice of dialect was part of the artifice of a poem. Dialect becomes an important element in a poem’s technique.28
Theocritus’ poems survive in relative abundance. “The most complete representative of our manuscript tradition,” Lesky says, “the Ambrosianus 104 (15 th/—16th c.), contains thirty Idylls and the Epigrams.”29 Papyrus fragments of a thirty-first idyll have been found, and a Syrinx, which, as a technopaignia, uses a variable prosody to imitate objects. Not all the idylls and epigrams that survive under his name were by Theocritus.30 If we divide the attributable poems into categories, thirteen are bucolic (including in this category poems of a personal nature), three are mimes, four poems are based on legend and two are addresses to kings.31 Athenaeus in Scholars at Dinner preserves a fragment of a Berenice, probably a tribute to Ptolemy Philadelphus’ mother,32 but the passage that detains Athenaeus is not about Berenice or her locks but about the sacred white-fish:
And the fisherman prays, prays for a fortunate catch,
For full nets, since from the sea’s fields he draws his living,
His trailing nets are ploughs, at evening he pays the goddess
A sacrifice, the sacred white mullet, most sacred of all,
So his nets will be bursting when, straining, he reclaims them
Rich with the sea’s abundance.
At his most original, Theocritus is a poet of love in a similar spirit to Alcaeus or Sappho, but in a different key. His Idyll XXIX, “Drinking Song,” is written in Aeolic dialect as a kind of tribute to them. It envisages a traditional man-boy love, the kind that is usually sudden, passionate and brief, which might—the poem reflects—become a friendship and endure, without losing the ingredient of love. The foe to such relationships is inequality in love between the partners, and time. Theocritus starts with Alcaeus’ words “Wine, my dear young fellow, and the truth.”33 The poet counsels a young man to find a single nest and stay in it rather than play around.
No satisfaction? But it’s there to find
Where it went missing. Has pride made you blind?
Keep faith with me.
The original lover, referred to as a slight acquaintance while the young man cruises from mate to mate, from bough to bough, calls him back. Youth briskly passes, a man grows old apace. In Idyll XXX, “The Fever,” the poet is seriously overwhelmed by desire for a young man. He reminds himself that his hair is turning white, he counsels his very soul, and the soul replies: you cannot control love any more than an astronomer can count the stars. After all, even Zeus and Aphrodite succumbed to passion. The last three idylls are a suite for middle to old age.
Theocritus’ poems reconcile by example the positions that Callimachus and Apollonius are assumed to hold. They integrate epic narrative with the particularity of focus that Callimachus advocates. The introduction of mime elements multiplies the poet’s resources for irony, obliquity and indirection, without (as sometimes happens in Callimachus) obscuring the surface of the poem. The kinds of wholeness Theocritus achieves in his “little pictures” are satisfactory in ways that Callimachean aetiologies or protracted Apollonian narratives are not. They are tonally consistent in themselves, often wry or humorous, and when they have a satirical sub-text it is generally patent and unobscured. In prosody, narrative and allusive structure they have the strictly poetic wholeness we look for in vain in the other Alexandrians. And they are dramatic in cast, so that each poem balances voices, or makes consistent voices speak. Though we infer things about the poet from the poems, what matters at every stage is the staging, the poem itself.
The scale of such poetry is appealing; it also suggests that poets no longer dared—or this poet no longer dared—to tackle larger forms. He flatters and praises, wheedles and complains, but he will not climb Olympus or dive into the underworld; he will not wrestle with power but remains gentle; he will linger in imagined fields rather than throw up barricades and fight tyranny, or democracy, in the streets. When the people of Syracuse rose up in the aftermath of Agathocles’ populist tyranny, Theocritus was sailing as fast as he could to Italy. He is not a conservative spirit but a poet bent on survival. His heart may belong to Syracuse, but the rest of him belongs somewhere more prosperous and stable. For poets in the third century BC, the committed political “belonging” of Theognis and Solon is over; a poet goes where there is demand for writing, where there are patrons, or libraries, or simply peace in which to write. He gains in personal freedom but loses the authority to speak on certain themes. To write—which is what the Alexandrian poet does—can seem an indulgence, given the Homeric precedent.
Theocritus has no time for the cock that crows in competition with Homer.34 There is no rivalling, no emulation. Times have changed and poetry with them. It sings unaccompanied, it is written down on a sheet of papyrus or parchment, it addresses a creature who hardly existed in Homer’s day, the reader. Knowing, as the Alexandrian poets did, what had come before, they knew too their limitations, how far they could and could not go. For Homer anything in the world was possible. The world having been traced, all future poems were transactions which included the first poems and poets. For a poet, understanding history entails understanding literary history, or the parts of it that survive. Late in a tradition, transactions with that history, unstable as it now appears, are half the labour of the writer and half the pleasure of the reader.
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