Mark Payne Theocritus and The Invention of Fiction 2007

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THEOCRITUS
AND THE
INVENTION OF FICTION
The bucolic Idylls of Theocritus are the first literature to invent a

fully fictional world that is not an image of reality but an alternative
to it. They are thereby distinguished from the other Idylls and from
Hellenistic poetry as a whole. This book examines the bucolic poems in
the light of ancient and modern conceptions of fictionality. It explores
how access to this fictional world is mediated by form and how this
world appears as an object of desire for the characters within it. The
argument culminates in a new reading of Idyll 7, where Professor
Payne discusses the encounter between author and fictional creation
in the poem and its importance for the later pastoral tradition. Close
readings of Theocritus, Callimachus, Hermesianax, and the Lament
for Bion are supplemented with parallels from modern fiction and an
extended discussion of the heteronymic poetry of Fernando Pessoa.
m ark payn e is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of
Chicago.
THEOCRITUS
AND THE
INVENTION OF FICTION
MA R K PA Y N E
The University of Chicago
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo

Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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Mark Edward Payne 2006
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without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2007
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
page vii
viii
Introduction: In the realms of the unreal
1 The pleasures of the imaginary
24
2 The presence of the fictional world
49
3 Becoming bucolic
92
4 From fiction to metafiction
114
Conclusion: The future of a fiction

Bibliography
Index
146
170
181
Preface
I would like to thank all the people who have contributed to this book
in the various phases of its development. Special thanks are due to my
dissertation advisor Suzanne Sad, who guided me not just through the
dissertation itself, but through all the projects that led up to it, and to
the members of my dissertation committee, James Coulter, James Zetzel,
David Sider, and Lowell Edmunds, for their many helpful observations and
criticisms. I would also like to thank all my colleagues at the University of
Chicago for their advice and encouragement.
My fellow graduate students at Columbia University, Francisco
Barrenechea, Jackie Elliot, and Sarah Nooter, helped me tremendously as I
was getting started with this work, and the participants in my Theocritus
and Hellenistic poetry seminars at the University of Chicago contributed
just as much as I was nearing the end of it. Thomas Pavel was kind enough
to read an early version of the Introduction, and Marco Fantuzzi, in a
remarkable act of generosity, to read the entire work in about a week. I
am very grateful to them both, and to the two anonymous readers for this
Press, who also offered many invaluable suggestions.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife Laura, for everything, and for
reminding me why we read fiction in the first place.
vii
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as Ecphrasis and Song in

Theocritus Idyll 1, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 42 (2001): 26387.
An earlier version of part of Chapter 3 appeared as Narrative technique
in Theocrituss Idyll 12, Arethusa 36 (2003): 3748.
viii
No, shepherd, nothing doing.1
The studies of Theocritus bucolic poems in this book have grown out of
the mixture of puzzlement and curiosity that I felt when I first read them.
On the one hand, they seemed to me to lack the pointed vigor of expression
that I admired in Greek lyric and tragic poetry. On the other, they were
devoid of the attractions of plot and character that make rereading Homer
so rewarding. I tried to map the appeal that I nonetheless felt in them onto
that of the later pastoral tradition. But here again I found that, despite the
resonant names of the later literature Lycidas, Comatas, Damoetas
their allure did not reside in the kind of verbal magic that attracted me there.
In the plainness of their poetic language, they read more like William Carlos
Williams than the Eclogues, or Laprès-midi dun faune. What began to occur
to me as a result was that the appeal of the poems did not in fact consist
in any of the traditional resources of lyric and narrative poetry but in
something rather less concrete, and more difficult to place, which I here
call the world of the poems. By this I mean a complex of elements that
embraces the physical characteristics of the places the herdsmen inhabit,
their nature and behavior as fictional characters, and the positioning of
them and their fictional world in relation to the reality of the reader. In
each of these areas the bucolic poems manifest themselves as neither making
present the world of myth, nor offering an imitation of life. Their world is
the first fully fictional world in Western literature, and the pleasures of this
fiction are so great that the poems can do without most of what is a source
of delight in earlier poetry: vigorous and stimulating language, engaging
plots, absorbing characters. Their appeal lies instead in fictions ability to
reveal to us a world that we have not encountered or imagined before.
At this point then I want to distinguish between two kinds of fiction:
on the one hand, fictions that are a useful model for understanding the
1
William Carlos Williams translation of Idyll 1.15; Williams (198688) II.268.
Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction
reality that we ourselves inhabit, and, on the other, fictions that offer an
alternative to it. This does not map exactly onto the distinction between
realist and fantastic literature. The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars function
just as well as War and Peace, or the Iliad and Oedipus Rex (Aristotles preferred examples) in the first category, even though they feature non-human
characters in a world other than our own. Because their agents are recognizably motivated by factors that determine human action in the real world,
these narratives quite easily fulfil the function mimetic theory envisages for
fiction as a cognitive tool for understanding and reflecting upon real-world
behavior. On the other hand, works that contain human agents in realworld locations, such as the chivalric romance, may be useless as mimetic
fiction because of the kinds of character and behavior these agents exhibit,
or because they do not engage in activities that would allow us to recognize
patterns of real-world possibility and necessity. I have indicated my reasons
for not wanting to call such fictions fantastic, and I am also hesitant to
call them ideal, because of the moral or metaphysical baggage this would
saddle them with. I have opted therefore for the less loaded fully fictional
to describe them.
The distinction between mimetic and fully fictional fictions is a theoretical one. Most fictions offer the reader the opportunity to engage with a
world that is, for the duration of the reading, an alternative to reality, while
at the same time allowing this reader to reflect upon some aspect of his or
her real-world experience by comparing it with the fiction. Instantiations
of the extremes do exist, however, and there is a well-known mimetic literature that explores the consequences of preferring its fully fictional sibling.
Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, for example, tell of a self that falls under
the spell of such fictions, which do not elucidate reality, but rather dim its
allure in comparison with themselves. In Theocritus time too, this polarization of fiction into mimetic and fully fictional kinds is clearly visible, in
the contrast between, on the one hand, dramatic poems that offer smallscale vignettes of everyday life (mime and its literary derivatives) and, on
the other, Theocritus pastoral fiction, dramatic poems that offer an alternative to it. The visibility of this theoretical distinction in the period may
well be the result of crises in the status of literary representation brought
about by the birth of the Library at Alexandria and the systemization of
discursive knowledge this entailed. As well as the polarization of fictional
worlds, there is an emergent poetry of fact in the period, whose truth claims
rest upon objective witnesses and a marked change in the panegyrical use of
myth. Various responses to the suddenly urgent question What are poets
for? can be discerned, and I shall argue that the fully fictional world of the
bucolic poems is not the least of these. By demonstrating so clearly in these

poems that a fictional world may occasion our assent to its existence and
even our desire to belong to it, even though it manifestly lacks any true being
as the presence of myth, history, or even contemporary reality, Theocritus
rewrites the agenda for poetic invention, and so makes his bucolic poetry
visible as a new possibility for literature. Aligning the emergent genre with
the possibility of pure, or absolute, fiction, Theocritus invests its world with
the ontological prestige in respect to everyday human reality that had once
belonged to myth. Before looking more closely at this valorization of pure
fictionality in relation to Theocritus contemporaries, however, I want first
to look briefly at a modern fiction that will help to clarify what I mean by
a fully fictional world, and the kind of appeal that is inherent in it.
The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal,
of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion,
to give it its full title, is, at 15,145 single-spaced typewritten pages, almost
certainly the longest work of prose fiction ever created. It was written over
the course of several decades by Chicago janitor and dishwasher Henry
Darger (18921973), and illustrated by him both in the course of its creation and after the manuscript was complete and the author had moved
on to other projects.2 Dargers story is the chronicle of a war waged by
the Christian nations of Angelinia, Abbieannia, and Calverinia against the
rebel, slave-owning state of Glandelinia and its allies. The primary model
is clearly the American Civil War, with children taking the place of African
Americans as both the cause of the war and its most important protagonists,
but this real-world source in no sense inhibits our recognition that the resultant world is fully fictional in nature. So too, plot structures, objects, and
named characters from (among others) Mark Twain, Longfellow, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and the Oz stories of Frank Baum all find their way into the
Realms of the Unreal, where they become part of the new fictional world.3
This is not intertextuality appropriation is not intended to establish a
relationship between the new work and the old, any more than the book
is intended as a commentary on the Civil War. It is rather what theorists
of fiction have called transduction the process by which characters and
2
The best introductions to Dargers work are Bonesteel (2000) and MacGregor (2002). Both consider
Darger under the rubric of outsider artist, Bonesteel emphasizing the artist, MacGregor the outsider.
John Ashberys volume of narrative poetry, Girls on the Run (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999),
a free fantasy on the adventures of the Vivian Girls, did much to popularize Dargers work in poetry
circles, and Jessica Yus 2004 film, In the Realms of the Unreal, has brought it to the attention of a still
larger audience.
Bonesteel (2000) 34 gives details of Dargers library, and which parts of it ended up in his own work.
situations can be transported from preexisting fictional worlds into new

ones, where they are fully independent of their predecessor.4
What is true of Dargers use of literary and historical sources is no less
true of his appropriations of contemporary imagery to illustrate his work.
Since he never learned to draw, the thousands of figures who populate
his world the little girls, winged dragons, and winged little girls who
are the heroines of the story, as well as the adult armies who are their
adversaries, and the landscapes of gigantic flowers, trees, birds, and storms
where their battles are fought were not drawn freehand, but created by
techniques of collage, tracing, and photographic enlargement that Darger
evolved over the course of his life as a means of realizing ever more grand and
fantastic compositions. His sources were primarily newspapers and popular
magazines, with favorite images retraced time and again to make intricate
compositions in which dozens of figures are distributed over a picture
plane, at times carefully articulated to give an illusion of naturalistic depth,
at times treated as a pure visual surface.5 His own additions are limited to
details of hairstyle and dress in the case of his storys human protagonists,
and (male) genitalia when they appear unclothed.6 More dramatically, the
beings known as Blengins, who start out as winged serpents but later appear
in human form, have the bodies and faces of little girls, but are adorned with
rams horns and fantastically colored butterfly wings. While the material is
appropriated from the real world, its ontological transformation is absolute;
all connections to its source are severed, and this sampled material manifests
a new, fully fictional creation.
Darger seems to have responded to the presence of this invented world in
two ways. Detailed accounts of battles, with casualty lists that supplement
them, give the author the air of a journalist reporting on a world that is
ontologically independent of the writer even as he reflects on his efforts
as its creator: I have here written as far as I was able, in unusually long
details to make the scenes more striking, but even then even I have not
succeeded in accomplishing what should have been done, as it is impossible
to describe them as they really are.7 Here the author doubts his successful
realization of a world that is independent of him, yet, at other times,
his work manifests that world to him with such intensity that its very
presence appears proof of its independence. It is a remarkable feature of his
large-scale compositions that, of the dozens of figures they contain, almost
4
6
5 On the sources, see Bonesteel (2000) 29.

See Dolezel (1998) 199226.
Cf. MacGregor (2002) 52037 on the fantasy phallus in the artwork. Whatever its origins in Dargers
creative personality, its addition explicitly marks the independence of fictional image from real-world
source.
Citation from In the Realms of the Unreal in Bonesteel (2000) 44.
all are oriented towards the viewer, and many make eye contact with their
observer from within the fictional picture space they occupy.8 Their gaze
denies the ontological boundary that separates their world from ours, as if
we could simply walk out of our own world and into the fictional world of
In the Realms of the Unreal. In a scene that rivals the metafictional gusto of
the most daring postmodern novel, Dargers characters within the fiction
comment upon this aspect of the way they are portrayed in its illustrations.
At one point in the story its protagonists, the Vivian Girls, come across
some old books that contain a detailed history of the war in which they are
presently participating, and which are signed Henry J. Darger, author.
The girls become the first readers, and the first critics, of the book in which
their story is told:
Every picture seems to look you straight in the face as if you had some secret to
tell them, or as if you suspected them of knowing your thoughts. And probably
he had to use them as company, as he was childless. Maybe that is so, and he
wanted them all to look as if they were paying attention to him, said Jennie. He
must have been a very odd man. I wouldnt mind seeing him, said Violet.9
This is fictions version of creations primal scene. The invented world

appears so undeniably alive, it is only fit that it should acknowledge the
creator who made it. Since this is impossible in his own world, he inscribes
this desire for recognition within his invention. Parallels abound in religious
literature, where the first duty of created beings is to praise their creator,10
and in the postmodern novel the scene in which the author (impossibly)
confronts his own creations has become something of a cliche.11 Just like the
real world, fully fictional worlds provoke ontological wonder because they
cannot be reduced to, or contained within, our own. The more palpable
their presence as they stand over against the real world as something not
obviously derived from it, the more attention they draw to the threshold
that separates the two, and the more their illusory presence and uncanny
(in)existence seems like a call for mutual recognition directed at us, their
8
10
11
For example, At Jennie Richie, Bonesteel (2000) 15051, contains eighty figures, seventy in the
foreground, ten in the background, and of these all but two face forward, with about twenty breaking
the picture plane with their gaze.
Citation from In the Realms of the Unreal in MacGregor (2002) 2022, with good discussion. This
incident seems to have caught John Ashberys attention. In Girls on the Run, his versions of the
Vivian Girls speak to him directly, and instruct him to tell their story (p. 3): Write it now, Tidbit
said, before they get back. And, quivering, I took the pen.
The Mayan creation myth is remarkable in this respect in that the gods require several attempts to
make beings who are sufficiently intelligent to praise them correctly. See Tedlock (1985) 6986.
McHale (1987) 21314. Remarkably, this very scenario is the subject of a flight of fancy on the part
of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (9.7.34, 1167b341168a4): Every artist loves his own work
more than that work would love him if it were to come to life. And this is perhaps especially the
case with poets, for they dote upon their own poems and love them as if they were children.
observers. It is with this concern for fictional presence in mind that I want
to approach the bucolic world and its place in Hellenistic poetry.
The distinction between truth and deceptive semblance appears early
in Greek literature, in the mouth of Hesiods Muses, who, in the opening
lines of the Theogony, speak of their ability to tell many lies resembling
the truth, but also to give voice to true things when they wish. Pindar
gives a polemical edge to this distinction in his seventh Nemean, when he
blames Homer for creating a version of the Trojan War in which Odysseus
is just such a deceptive phantom. An august presence dwells in Homers
words, he claims, so that they have the power to induce mens assent to
palpable untruth, leading their minds aside from reality (Nem. 7.2023).
Plato, in his own way, echoes Pindars concerns about the truth status of
Homeric narrative, and it is not until Aristotle that we have a discussion of
fiction that endeavors to find a value for it that lies beyond the distinction
between truth and falsehood.12 For Aristotle, the value of poetic narrative
is unrelated to the question of whether or not it is a true account of past
events, and he gives the poet full freedom and full responsibility for the
creation of his stories. The poet invents these first, then assigns names to
the characters that enact them, which in the case of comedy he invents
along with the plot, while in tragedy, by custom, though not by necessity,
he uses those of the legendary families of the heroic age, the Homeric heroes
and Theban kings. In either case, the bearers of these names are fictions;
their function is not to refer to the mythical bearers of their names, but
to be the agents of actions that model universal behaviors in the world
of the fictions audience (Poetics 9).13 Because (ideally) chance has been
eliminated from the plot of poetic fictions, so that they unfold according
12
13
The transition from an archaic poetics of truth to a post-Aristotelian poetics of fiction is traced
in Finkelberg (1998). Various positions have been taken on the degree to which Aristotles account
may have been anticipated by sophistic discussions of deception, and its part in literary experience,
particularly that of Gorgias (on which see Gill [1993] 7475, who would minimize it, and, in the
same volume, Morgan [1993] 18081, who would give it a larger role). Cf. Ford (2002) 231, who
notes the use of plassein in reference to poetry by Xenophanes and Gorgias but concludes that in
neither case do the emotionally powerful and persuasive made-up things belong to a special realm of
literary discourse that is distinct from ordinary lying. What I would emphasize here is that Gorgias
account of deception is closely tied to the notion of imaginary presence created through speech,
and that this emphasis on speech as the most immediate form of imaginary presence is retained in
Aristotles discussion.
See the account of mimesis as fiction in Halliwell (2002) 16668, a thorough exposition of the
brief notes on this topic in Halliwell (1987) 7278, 172. Cf. Ford (2002) 231: The Greek word
that can be said to express a concept of fiction is Aristotles mimesis. As the excellent discussion of
Aristotle Poetics 9 and Antiphanes Poesis fr. 189 in Lowe (2000) 26061 makes clear, Old Comedys
contribution to the poetics of fiction (and here we see its continuity with the fictive speakers of
archaic iambic poetry) was made-up characters, not made-up worlds. Even the most fantastic comic
fiction takes place in a world that is recognizably a version of Athenian reality.
to strict rules of possibility and necessity, they allow us to recognize general

patterns of human life and behavior in them, and so provide a valuable
cognitive tool for understanding the world in which we actually live and
act. Aristotle, by contrast, would have had little time for the ancient novel,
in which contingent detail, chance events, and perfect heroes and heroines
who make no mistakes we could learn from are the primary sources of
interest,14 and still less for fictional worlds peopled by beings who are not
recognizably moral agents like ourselves, for such worlds would have no
efficacy in orienting our behavior in our own world. It follows from this
argument, then, that the more fictional the fictional world is, the more its
interest is intrinsic to it, and does not consist in its relation to our own
world, with regard to which it can only appear as an alternative, and not as
a model.
The question of degrees of fictionality is not broached in the Poetics,
where differences between mimetic genres are explained by reference to
the ethical character of the agents they portray tragedy and epic depict
superior people, comedy inferior, and so on; all are equally fictional (Poetics
25). Distinctions appear later, however, in literary scholarship derived from
the Poetics. A well-known example is the (bT) scholion to Iliad 14.34251, in
which the commentator remarks upon the scene in which Zeus wraps Hera
in a cloud of gold and makes love to her within it while golden raindrops
fall to the ground, and grass, lotus flowers, crocuses, and hyacinths spring
up beneath them:

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There are three rubrics under which all poetry may be considered. The first represents reality directly, for example when it portrays the man who loves his father,
the misogynist, the untrustworthy man, or the loudmouth. The second proceeds by way of fantasy upon reality, and one should not probe the details of this
type too closely, as when, for example, someone claims that because souls eat and
talk they must surely have a tongue and throat. The third exaggerates and goes
beyond reality, as is the case with the Cyclopes, the Lastrygonians, and these things
[Zeus and Heras lovemaking] that have to do with the gods.15
14
15
Argued with humor by Morgan (1993) 18283 and with a wealth of detail in what follows.
My interpretation follows Meijering (1987) 6869. The threefold division resembles the Latin forensic
distinction between the true, the fictive that resembles the true, and the fictive that does not resemble
the true; see Morgan (1993) 18891, who notes how well these categories map onto literary genres
history, New Comedy, tragedy and suggests an origin in Peripatetic literary theory.
Since The Misogynist and The Untrustworthy Man are known to be the titles
of plays by Menander (the latter is also the title of one of Theophrastus
Characters), it is evident that the scholiast has in mind New Comedy, with
its representation of universality through omnipresent human types, as his
example of poetry that represents reality directly. On this understanding,
the human characters and actions of the Iliad would constitute a mimetic
bedrock that epic poetry shares with more truthful kinds of poetic representation, to which various kinds of additions have been made by the fantasy
of the poet. Thus, his second kind of poetry is designed to accommodate
those moments in epic where beings from another world (such as the world
of the dead) are presented as a kind of fantastic double of actual human
beings; while anthropomorphic in general outline, their component parts
should not be examined too closely. His final category would explain the
monsters of epic, and the marvels that surround the gods, as pure products of the poets invention that are not modeled on reality at all, but are
conceived by a free fantasy that departs from them.
Myth is decaying before our very eyes here, as its once unitary world is
parceled out among the mutually exclusive categories of realism, fantastic
realism, and fantasy. The ontological status of literary representations is
essentially labile, and subject to revision as a result of pragmatic, non-literary
developments. If readers no longer believe in actual gods who make love in
golden clouds, then gods that do so in literature can only be understood as
fictions.16 From the perspective of the Poetics, the Iliad scholion is a facesaving strategy. By relegating certain aspects of the text to the category of
poetic invention, it allows the remainder to retain the cognitive value that
mimetic theory claims for literature as a tool for interpreting real-world
experience. Conversely, while the banishment of the gods is not a necessary
outcome of the adoption of a mimetic theory of literary value, it is a likely
one. Because the gods are not subject to the same laws of probability and
necessity that govern human beings, stories in which they are significant
agents in their own right are unlikely to offer much in the way of a model
of human life. While Aristotle focuses his discussion of poetic fiction on
Homer and tragedy, for the scholiast it is evidently New Comedy that
functions best as mimetic art, both because its agents are character types
who are easily recognizable as universals of real-world human behavior and
because these types are presented within a fictional world that has minimal
deviation from the real world. As Aristophanes of Byzantium so famously
put it, O Menander and Life, which of you imitated the other? Realistic
16
Pavel (1986) 3942; cf. Schmidt (1976) 16178 on how pragmatic considerations constrain readers
understanding of fictionality.
literature simply works better as mimetic fiction, because there is so much

less in it that is extraneous to this function and which has to be bracketed
out in its reception.17
Hellenistic poetry has been particularly well served by formalist criticism. From the early interest in its mixture of genres18 to more recent attention to allusion and intertextuality,19 classical scholarship has constructed
a minutely detailed picture of the Alexandrian poets response to their own
literary history. What is needed now is an equally detailed account of the
kinds of world-making that are the outcome of this activity how formal
innovations are related to fictionality and the mimetic function. Manifest
differences in content with regard to archaic and classical poetry may not
be indications of the authors agonistic relationship to his predecessors, but
extensions and developments of the repertory of fictional worlds available
to him. Bucolic poetry, for example, may be less about demonstrating an
oppositional response to epic by portraying low-class or marginal figures
in the meter (hexameter) that had been the preserve of their betters,20 and
17
18
19
20
Aristotelian critical terminology in the prologue to one of Menanders plays explicitly invites the
audience to acknowledge the validity of its theoretical concepts in the action of the drama itself.
The prologue to the Perikeiromene is spoken by Agnoia (Ignorance) who talks about her role in the
story; cf. Poetics 11, where Aristotle discusses recognition as a change from ignorance to knowledge
that contributes to a satisfying plot. For the metatheatrical effect, see Gutzwiller (2000) 11617.
For la confusion des genres in the Idylls, see Legrand (1898) 41336; for die Kreuzung der
Gattungen exemplified by bucolic, see Kroll (1924) 203207. For Rossi (1971a) 84, Theocritus
is an illustrious, perhaps the most illustrious, example of this new approach to poetry, and what
is most striking in his poetry is its mixture of genres. For Fantuzzi (1993a) 59, the Idylls remain the
most approved and most cited example of the contamination of genres. In a refinement of his earlier
position that uses a model of the literary system derived from the linguistics of Saussure, Rossi
(2000) 14954 claims that generic mixing is a functional expedient by which this system renews
itself under altered conditions of literary production. Much of the appearance of hybridization that
is supposed to prove generic mixing in fact comes from the hybrid vocabulary of the commentators.
Kroll (1924) 203207 mixes metrical, thematic, and formal observations with terms derived from
rhetorical handbooks, dramatic criticism, and ordinary language. Rossi (1971a), likewise, gives the
impression that Theocritus is deliberately experimenting with established genres. Wilamowitz (1924)
II.141 warned against the misperceptions that result when terminology from late imperial rhetorical handbooks is used to describe poetry, but his warning has largely gone unheeded. For a recent
overview of this question that emphasizes both the pragmatic and literary historical constraints upon
a purely ludic conception of the Hellenistic poets relationship to tradition, see Fantuzzi and Hunter
(2004) 3740.
For the demonstration of intertextual mastery as the organizing force of Hellenistic poetry, see Seiler
(1997). Hubbard (1998) is a history of pastoral poetry as revisionary intertextuality. Callimachus
acme as scholar poet is perhaps reached in Bing (1988). Notably dissenting voices are Fraser (1972)
i. 61874 and Cameron (1995), to which Bing (2000) acerbically responds.
So Halperin (1983) and Effe (1977, 1978), in their development of the work of Van Sickle (1976). As
other scholars have pointed out, this not only makes the category of bucolic so large as to be devoid
of descriptive value, but also ignores the reference to a particular represented world (the world of
herdsmen) that is inscribed in the category name. Cf. Alpers (1996) 14547, Gutzwiller (1991) 7 and
(1996) 121.
10
more, as the name suggests, about creating a new fictional genre whose
characters are herdsmen (boukoloi).21
Along with fictionality itself, the investigation of fictional presence the
mediation of the world of the poem by the formal structures that reveal
it will figure largely in the readings in this book. Formal structures are
most productively analyzed in close relationship to the fictional worlds
they transmit rather than as items in a catalogue of generic innovations.
In particular, while formalist criticism approaches the poem as an object
of study, I try here to give due attention to the ways in which our relation
to it seems, as we read it, to be intersubjective. I look at how its world
and the fictional beings who inhabit it present themselves to us, how the
poems create the illusion of a living presence.22 My aim is not therefore to
construct an empathetic reader who can (all too easily) be contrasted with
his formalist counterpart. For the presence of the bucolic characters is not
like our access to the interiority of characters in the modern novel. Just
as much as the Homeric characters, the characters of Hellenistic literary
drama present themselves rhetorically,23 through speeches, and we can
only guess at the inner life that lies behind these speeches, just as we can
only guess at the inner life of the writer that is exteriorized through the
invention of characters. It is not empathy, or identification with characters,
that I will be concerned with putting ourselves into them but rather
with how they come to presence before us, with the ways in which they
appear to us and seem to be before us as fictional beings. In this regard,
as I hope to show, Theocritus bucolic poetry differs in important ways
from other Hellenistic literary drama, and from the performed drama that
it took for its model.
21
22
23
Fantuzzi (2004) 14167 is a very thorough analysis of the stylization that creates the internal coherence
of the bucolic world. As a selective mixture of idealization and reality (148), bucolic poetry, like
other literary genres, has a particular synecdochic relationship to the real world by virtue of which
its fiction is recognizable as a possible version of the extraliterary reality it models. In particular, the
abundant reality effects in the fictional modeling of bucolic poetry allow its miniature dramas to
stand alongside the well-established image of the real in contemporary mime. Cf. the discussion of
genres as possible worlds in Edmunds (2001) 95107. See Chapter 4 of the present book for a detailed
discussion of the role of reality effects in the bucolic fiction of Idyll 7, where I argue that here, as
elsewhere, these effects help to manifest the blatant fictionality of a world that, like its characters, is
deliberately inconsistent from one poem to the next.
My approach is thus very much in keeping with Philip Hardies remarkable study of Ovids poetics
of illusion, in which, Hardie (2002) 6, the emphasis . . . is on presence and illusion rather than on
fictionality and authority, but these two areas are inextricably connected.
I borrow the term from Bulloch (1985) 6, where it denotes poems in dramatic form that were not, it
seems, intended for dramatic performance. Comparing the hymns of Callimachus that are spoken by
a dramatic character with the dramatic poems of Theocritus and Herodas, he calls them a distinct
class of Alexandrian experimental poetry.
11
Direct speech is central to the production of fictional presence in ancient

literary theory. In the Poetics there is considerable impetus in fact towards
equating the dramatic mode with fictionality. Dialogue between characters,
as opposed to narration by the poet, is the preferred method of advancing
the story, because a fictional narrative presented in this form is more clearly
understood as the poets invention, and not a true history.24 While there
is no necessary relationship between mode of presentation and fictionality (one can transcribe non-fictional dialogue, and tell a made-up story
without direct speech), there is, as Aristotle understands it, a felt one. The
additional presence that accrues to characters when given speech of their
own goes a long way towards giving them ontological independence of their
creator.
It will be useful, then, at this point to map the varieties of Hellenistic
literary drama against the formal mediation of subject matter in Hellenistic
poetry as a whole, which I will consider under the headings of myth, mime,
and non-fiction. As many writers have observed, myth provides a fertile
breeding ground for fiction; its open structure as a body of narratives allows
for embellishments, additions, and retellings that can serve many ends other
than supplying explanations of the way the world is.25 So it is, then, that
Hellenistic poets continue to produce mythical narratives alongside scientific ones even as myth itself becomes an object of systematic research and
study, and is codified in the body of knowledge we call mythology.26 Of
particular interest in this regard is the use of mythical narrative as a tool for
royal self-fashioning in the court poetry of the period.27 Theocritus Idyll
24, which describes the infant Heracles throttling of two gigantic snakes
sent to kill him by Hera, or Callimachus Hymn to Delos, in which the
unborn Apollo remarks upon Ptolemy IIs recent war against the Gauls,
draw attention to the lurid and fantastic elements in their stories by surrounding them with the kind of circumstantial detail that is not found in
archaic versions of the story. This embedding of the fabulous in the mundane has provoked various explanations of Callimachus attitude towards
the myths he treats, ranging from the aggressively ludic to the pious and
24
25
26
27
As Halliwell (1987) 172 argues, Aristotles wish to exclude the voice of the poet from his poetry,
and to turn the poetry into a stage onto which the poet brings his characters, goes hand in hand
with his desire to clear a distinctive space for poetry outside the sphere of directly affirmative and
truth-seeking discourses such as history, philosophy and science.
Pavel (1986) 8081, Hunter (2003) 23132.
On the transition from myth to mythology, see Detienne (1986).
Henrichs (1999) 226, 24748; cf. Stephens (2003), a systematic treatment of the court poetry of
Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius, and Cameron (1995) 63103 on the occasions of Hellenistic
poetry as a whole.
12
reverential.28 However, in court poetry that makes use of mythical material and in which a panegyrical function has been detected the exemplary
character of the plot (the defeat of monsters by an Olympian god, or the
emergence of order from chaos) allows for some hilarity in the details, without detracting from the overall seriousness of purpose. For in such poems
the allegorical quality of the tale is readily apparent (the audience knows
it is really hearing about Ptolemy, not Heracles), and the poet may in fact
be ironizing the signified (the myth) as a way of making its referent (the
eulogized patron) more apparent. Here, then, we have a propagandistic,
ideological use of myth that does not use its gods and heroes for the sake
of revealing human universals, as in the Aristotelian account of tragedy
(a democratic fiction), but rather treats historical particulars (kings and
tyrants) as if they were instantiations of mythical universals.29
While Hellenistic mythological narrative revels in the fantastic and the
monstrous, it often sets these opportunities for poetic invention within
frames that are humble, domestic, and ordinary. In Callimachus Hecale
Theseus stays with a poor old woman before fighting the Bull of Marathon,
in the Aetia Heracles has to hear about the invention of the mousetrap
from the pauper Molorchus before proceeding against more dangerous
foes, in Theocritus Idyll 24 Heras terrible serpents find their way into
an ordinary family house, where babies are asleep in their cribs. It would
be wrong to suppose that these poems entirely domesticate their mythical
protagonists. For while the fantastic episodes of the story may lie beyond
the narrative itself, the presence of ordinary mortals, with their ordinary
claims for recognition and respect, lends additional glamour to the mythical
beings whose eyes are set on higher things, and whose breasts contain no
ordinary spirit. In their settings, however, these mythological poems do have
affinities with another major concern of the period, the representation of
daily life, in all its humdrum detail. The model for this poetry is widely
28
29
For the ludic, see McKay (1962); for the reverential, see Fraser (1972) 66263, 76061; for the archaic
gods as frankly demonic from a civilized Hellenistic perspective, see Bulloch (1984) 228. Hunter
(1992b) is a characteristically judicious overview of the question.
This use of myth resembles the assimilation of the victorious athlete to heroic prototypes in epinician poetry, although the Hellenistic poets more or less overt jesting with the fictionality of their
encomiastic constructs points to the wide gulf that separates them from their archaic and classical
counterparts. More work needs to be done in this area, as it is not easy to see how poems like
Callimachus Hymn to Demeter, or Theocritus Idyll 26 (on the dismemberment of Pentheus), which
share many of the lurid features of the overtly panegyrical poems, would fit within the ambit of
court poetry. Likewise, the account of the Argonautica in Stephens (2003) 171238 as a calque of
Egyptian myth that figures as an allegory of Ptolemaic multicultural and colonialist ambitions needs
to be supplemented by a reading that would show how this allegory was legible to contemporary
audiences without a detailed knowledge of Egypt.
13
held to be the mimes of Theocritus fellow Syracusan Sophron, and ancient

commentators saw the reuse of characters from them in the Idylls that have
contemporary urban settings.30 In Idyll 2 a disappointed teenager tells of
her love affair with a local athlete; in Idyll 14 a disabused lover discusses his
prospects for employment as a mercenary in Egypt; in Idyll 15 Alexandrian
housewives visit the palace of the royal family. Sophrons Mimes, Herodas
Mimiambi, and Theocritus urban Idylls all make use of real-world locations
and allude to contemporary history. The intention seems to have been to
offer an imitation of everyday life without the full-scale dramatic plots and
character types of New Comedy. Gorgo and Praxinoa in Idyll 15, or Kynno
and Phile in Mimiambus 4, can hardly be identified, or distinguished from
one another, as types; as fictional particulars, they do not embody realworld universals, and the poems in which they appear offer genre scenes
rich in circumstantial detail rather than a representative range of characters
in the manner of Theophrastus Characters, or New Comedy.
These poems, then, that have affinities with the popular genre of mime
give their fictional characters the vivid presence imparted by the exclusive
use of direct speech, but the fictional world they inhabit has no features
that would disbar it from being understood as an image of contemporary
reality. The mythical, the divine, and the fantastic are all scrupulously
excluded, setting its representation of low-life characters apart from that of
Old Comedy, where lucky slaves may ascend to heaven on gigantic dung
beetles to present their claims to Zeus, or journey to the Land of the Birds.
By contrast, poems that have recourse to mythical stories the Aetia, the
Hecale, Idylls 16, 18, 24, and 26, the Argonautica use a frame narrator as
the means of access to this world. Rather than a guarantor of the truth of
the story, the narrator of these poems has become a kind of warning sign
about the world they represent, a persona that explicitly separates the poet
from the storyteller in the poem. Likewise, for Callimachus Hymns, it has
been shown that, in those poems that feature a speaker clearly fixed in a
fictional time and place (the mimetic Hymns), this potentially unreliable
narrator makes use of apparently omniscient sources to recount the sacred
narrative that is the centerpiece of all the Hymns, while, in the other poems,
the uncharacterized and seemingly transparent narrator tends to interfere
with the story he is telling.31 In both cases, formal mediation of the sacred
narrative signals a kind of ontological caution in the presentation of the
30
31
In the Introduction to his new edition of the fragments, Hordern (2004) 2629 gives a brief account
of their influence.
By Harder (1992).
14
fabulous world of myth, even as particularly fabulous episodes from that

world are selected for retelling.
A similar caution is apparent in the didactic poetry of the Hellenistic
period. Here we can see a radical restriction of the sphere within which a
poet may hope to make legitimate truth claims in his own voice. While
Hesiod may claim knowledge about the birth of the gods, or Pindar offer
prescriptive maxims for moral behavior, the Hellenistic poet instead offers
a poetry of fact, presented with the elegance proper to scientific knowledge
itself, but manifestly a poetry of non-fiction. The points of departure for
Aratus poetry on the movements of the stars, or Nicanders on the bites
of venomous animals, are prose treatises by scientific authorities (Eudoxus,
Apollodorus), with which their poems could easily have been compared.32
Their work is understudied by comparison with other Hellenistic poetry,
but it is to be hoped that future research will relocate its concern for
the relationship between truth, fiction, and the poets voice within the
mainstream of Hellenistic poetics.33
Against this background it is easy to appreciate the singularity of the
bucolic poems, and how their distinctive character would have made them
immediately identifiable and imitable as a new kind of poetry. They have
the form of literary drama, but their characters are manifestly not representations of contemporary life. It is not simply that the sole occupation of
the herdsmen within the poems is singing (rather than herding). These are
herdsmen that take part in musical competitions with Pan and the Muses.
They pretend to be Daphnis and Polyphemus in their songs, they elaborate
on the pleasure they have taken in contemplating works of art, or offer their
thoughts on Hellenistic literary theory. Their world is also characterized
negatively in reference to actuality in that its time and place cannot usually
be determined. Clearly these are not the rustic counterparts of the urban
slaves of ancient comedy and mime, whose stories unfold in the real cities
of the ancient world. Nor, on the other hand, do they belong to myth. The
nameless goatherd of Idyll 1 cannot, by his very anonymity, be found in
the mythical record. Anonymity is a marker of fiction where it is found in
earlier literature,34 and the presence of unnamed characters in the bucolic
poems seems to be programmatic: while fictional beings elsewhere people
32
33
34
As Gow and Scholfield (1953) 18 point out, the difference between the two poets is that whereas
the uninstructed reader may learn a good deal of astronomy from Aratus, the victim of snake-bite
or poison who turned to Nicander for first-aid would be in sorry plight.
Cf. Hunter (1995) 12: The versifying of prose treatises is not inherently an idle game, but is at base
a serious response to a crucial question of poetics.
Finkelberg (1998) 130.
15
the interstices of mythical narratives the shield of Achilles in the Iliad,

whose invented cities are filled with anonymous inhabitants, or the messengers and minor characters of tragedy here they alone occupy the stage.
Likewise, while the goatherds companion in Idyll 1, Thyrsis, impersonates
the mythical herdsman Daphnis, he is unknown to myth himself, and this
story is kept at one remove it is a matter for dramatic reenactment by
the poems characters, but is not retold by the poet himself. While much
Hellenistic poetry, through its exploration of aetia (the mythical causes of
present-day practices), seeks to connect the world of the myth with the
world of the present by constructing solid chronological links between
them, the bucolic poems are not anchored to either, and their world floats
free of both. The poems flaunt the absence of a single origin for their world,
which can be derived neither from myth alone nor from actuality alone.
While elements derived from each are present Daphnis and Polyphemus
on the one hand, ordinary rural workers on the other their copresence
prevents the reader from understanding any single bucolic poem as belonging to one or the other. The irreducibility of the bucolic worlds origins
once again enhances its ontological mystique; what is sourced from myth
and actuality has undergone a thorough fictionalization in its transduction
to its new home, and the bucolic characters belong to no world that we can
identify outside the poems in which they appear. The poet, however, does
not hedge this world within embedded narration but lets it manifest itself
directly to the reader through the speeches of its inhabitants; the illusory
presence of its fictional beings is made immediately palpable to us.
The poems thus identify literary pleasure with the discovery of a fictional
world, and, in the four chapters of my book, I investigate some of the
consequences of this move. In the first, The pleasures of the imaginary,
I focus on Idyll 1, which according to the ancient commentators is the
most delightful and well-constructed poem in the collection, and is, for
this reason, suitably placed at the beginning as its gleaming front.35 The
poem opens with a dialogue between two herdsmen who compare the
landscape they inhabit to the music they are accustomed to make for one
another. One of them then goes on to describe the pleasure he has found in
contemplating the carvings on a wooden bowl, and he offers this bowl to his
companion if he will sing for him a song called The Sorrows of Daphnis,
which he does. All three elements of the poem landscape, ecphrasis, and
song exhibit a harmonious adjustment to one another and may be seen as
equivalents. As trees and streams repeat the herdsmens music, so a work of
35
Id. 1 arg., Wendel (1914) 23.
16
visual art is offered in exchange for song. All three offer the same stimulus
to the imagination, and the world in which the poem is set is a source
of the same pleasure as the nameless goatherd discovers in contemplating
his decorated bowl and listening to his companions song. His enthusiasm
for them dramatizes the appeal of imaginary experience and so guides our
response to the fictional world of the poem.
Here, then, I embrace the suggestion of Ross Chambers in his Story
and Situation that certain kinds of fiction thematize their own powers of
seduction through representations of the act of storytelling, and control
their impact on their audience by dramatizing the reactions of a listener
within the story.36 I also consider how the fictionality of this exemplary
bucolic poem is related to the question of its performance. Scholars since
Wilamowitz have noted that the herdsmens songs are not metrically distinguished from the surrounding dialogue, given that both are written in
hexameters. Fictionality is thus inscribed in their very texture: Thyrsis
supremely enchanting vocal performance, which receives so much acclaim
from his audience within the poem, cannot be produced outside the poem
by a performer of Idyll 1, it can only be imagined by a reader. Moreover,
even as we are asked to hear The Sorrows of Daphnis as the acme of oral
song, it reveals itself to the eye of a reader as a collage of textual sources. The
poem undoes the fiction of oral performance it so persuasively presents,
unmaking its own illusion as imaginary experience.
In the second chapter, The presence of the fictional world, I investigate the relationship between fictional presence and mode of presentation. I argue, with reference to the discussions of literary form in Platos
Republic and Aristotles Poetics, that differences in the mode of storytelling
(in particular, the dramatic versus the narrative mode) are not merely a useful tool for categorizing genres, but, for the Hellenistic poets who embraced
the possibilities of literary drama, continue to represent an important difference in the degree of vividness and felt presence imparted to the story
world. I begin with a brief discussion of how fictional space is mapped onto
the real-world space of the audience in archaic and classical dramatic poetry,
then compare the construction of fictional space by the poems dramatic
speaker in Callimachus Hymn to Apollo and Theocritus Idyll 3. In both
poems an unapproachable location within the fictional world functions as
a focalizing device for our desire to enter the world of the poem in which
it is contained (the temple of Apollo in the Hymn, the cave of Amaryllis in Idyll 3). This motif reappears in Idyll 11 and Idyll 13, where a lover
36
Chambers (1984) 211, cf. 23.
17
(Polyphemus, Heracles) longs for a sight of his absent love, concealed within
an underwater world to which he cannot gain access. Readerly interest is
once again mapped onto the characters gaze into a secondary space within
the world of the poem that is off limits to its protagonist. The mediation of this world by the poet is more complex than in Hymn 2 and Idyll
3, however. The poems begin with a framing device in which the poet
addresses the poem to a person who is apparently a real-world addressee,
and presents his story as the illustration of gnomic reflection on the nature
of love. However, this structural similarity only draws out the difference in
the felt presence of the fictional world that is created by having the writerly
frame enclose in one case a literary drama (the monologue of Polyphemus
in Idyll 11), in the other a poem narrated entirely by the poet and containing only a single line of direct speech, and that, very unusually, within a
simile.
While the bucolic characters, as I have suggested, cannot easily be understood as imitations of anything outside the bucolic poems themselves, they
are frequently imitations of one another. In my third chapter, Becoming
bucolic, I suggest that a defining characteristic of the herdsmen is that
they take other imagined herdsmen as models for their own self-invention.
The nameless goatherd of Idyll 3 matches his own situation against a list
of pastoral figures from epic myth, and Thyrsis in Idyll 1 plays the role of
Daphnis in the song he performs. Likewise, in Idyll 7 Lycidas, the goatherd
who is, for the poems narrator, the archetypal herdsman singer, looks forward to hearing of his mythical predecessors from another singer, Tityrus,
and wishes that he could have been the audience of Comatas. The most
revealing poem in this regard, however, is Idyll 6: here Daphnis adopts the
role of a friend of Polyphemus to advise his friend Damoetas, and Damoetas
replies in the persona of the Cyclops. To hear bucolic song is to be filled
with a desire to enter the world it presents, and dramatic impersonation is
one way in which this desire manifests itself. By imagining themselves as
Daphnis or Polyphemus, the herdsmen strive to become equivalents of one
another, minimizing their differences and staging their imaginative involvement with the fictional world of which (from the readers perspective) they
are already a part. Being bucolic means becoming bucolic: merging the
self with an imagined counterpart is one of the attractions of this world.
Mostly the two selves blend easily, so that, by singing of their counterparts, the herdsmen come to resemble them: Thyrsis in Idyll 1 becomes
like Daphnis by impersonating him, Comatas in Idyll 5 resembles Daphnis
in his mastery of the song contest in which he competes, Lycidas in Idyll
7 embodies the archetypal herdsman singer for Simichidas, Daphnis and
18
Damoetas become Polyphemus and his advisor. The selves that are fully
fictional when viewed from outside the bucolic world are mimetic within it:
they model themselves on others and are in turn used as models by others.
Exploring this aspect of the bucolic fiction, I draw on the early work of
Rene Girard, which theorized mimetic desire as the attempt to replicate in
ones own life a self discovered in a work of the imagination.37
The progress of the pastoral self is thus a kind of replacement therapy. In
the face of intense erotic desire, the herdsmen sing to alleviate its pain, but
they do not seek its causes in themselves, nor do they attempt to mitigate its
pain by discovering that physical relations with the object of their desire are
unworthy of the highest aspiration. Lycidas, who longs for the boy Ageanax
in Idyll 7, Polyphemus, who would sacrifice his single eye for Galateia, the
herdsman of Idyll 3, who craves an inaccessible nymph, try to gain relief
from their love by replacing their desire for erotic satisfaction with the desire
for the world of pastoral song. In each case it is by contemplating a version
of the pastoral world that they themselves inhabit that they are able to gain
some measure of respite. Self-knowledge has no role in the process; rather
the self temporarily conceals its longings from itself. Substituting one desire
for another through song, the singer is able to stand outside himself for a
time, and, because the wound of desire is no longer aggravated by repeated
contemplation of the love object, some kind of healing is able to occur.
As an illustration of the therapeutic value of imaginary experience for a
self conceived along these lines, I will conclude this chapter with a reading
of the understudied Idyll 12, an erotic monologue by a male speaker who
resembles the herdsmen of the pastoral poems in a number of ways, but
especially insofar as he frees himself from his erotic yearning by projecting
a series of imagined worlds to himself. In this case the objects of his imagination are the historical worlds of the distant past and the distant future,
which here appear, like the pastoral world, as saving realms of imaginary
experience.
The staging of mimetic desire in the bucolic poems reveals the power
of fictional worlds to transform lives in their own image. As we saw with
Henry Darger, and as Girard showed with Proust, the desire to belong
to the world of a literary work may be felt by its creator as well as by
its inhabitants.38 It is the poets own play with a fictional identity, then,
37
38
I refer therefore to Girard (1966) and the refinement of the idea in Girard (1978) rather than to the
generalized model of all human desire as in some sense mimetic that Girard developed from it.
Girard (1966) 38: Novelistic genius begins with the collapse of the autonomous self . . . when what
is true about Others becomes true of the hero, in fact true about the novelist himself.
19
and the possibility of encountering his own fictional creation, that are the
subjects of my fourth chapter, From fiction to metafiction. In Idyll 7
the poems narrator, Simichidas, tells how he made a journey from the
city of Cos to a harvest festival at the country estate of some friends. On
the way he met a goatherd named Lycidas, and they exchanged songs and
poetic theory before going their separate ways. When he eventually arrives
at his friends estate, Simichidas describes how he is enraptured by the
rustic setting, and ends the poem wishing that he might be allowed to
repeat the experience in the future. While the narrator does not have the
same name as the poet, the poem is full of reality effects that set it apart
from the other bucolic poems; it is localized in a real-world geographical
location, and, rather than the present tense of dramatic fiction, it gives a
retrospective, past-tense account of the speakers experience. Theocritus, in
other words, seems to have done his best to give the poem the feel of a poets
autobiography, and ancient commentators read it as his own. However,
while the character of Simichidas points in the direction of actuality, the
character of Lycidas points towards fiction. Lycidas appears suddenly to
Simichidas like the epiphany of a Homeric god. He is dressed in rags and
smells foul, yet theorizes eloquently about poetic technique, and he sings
a song that, in its wistful evocation of past bucolic singers, is perhaps the
supreme example of its kind. If Simichidas looks like Theocritus, Lycidas
looks very much like one of his fictional herdsmen. Likewise, Simichidas
rapturous pastoral experience at the festival resembles the rustic symposium
that Lycidas predicts for himself in the song he sings to Simichidas earlier in
the poem, and the longing to repeat the experience with which Simichidas
ends the poem echoes the wish expressed by Lycidas that he could have
belonged to the pastoral world of his predecessor Comatas. What we seem
to see here is fiction imitating life imitating fiction, an interpretation that
the poem encourages by having Lycidas describe Simichidas as fabricated
for the sake of truth.
In my effort to make sense of this puzzling, beguiling poem, which
has drawn more scholarly attention in the modern period than the rest of
the bucolic poems together, I will once again turn to a modern parallel
for illumination. The poets of the early twentieth century offer numerous examples of the creation of semi-fictional alter egos through which
to explore questions of poetics in narrative rather than theoretical form.
Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Rilkes Malte Laurids Brigge, Valerys
Monsieur Teste all allowed their inventors to reflect upon critical moments
in their own poetic development with the intellectual distance of maturity
20
figured as the authors critical distance from a fictional double.39 One poet,
however, stands out for his elaboration of the project of fictionalized autobiography, and that is Fernando Pessoa. Pessoas achievement was to divide
his own poetic work among a number of invented poets Alberto Caeiro,
Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos whom he called heteronyms.
These heteronyms not only comment upon each others work, they are
even credited with inspiring poems signed Fernando Pessoa. Thus Pessoa
has Campos record a meeting between himself and Caeiro in which Caeiro
appears as the master of his inventor: Pessoa, completely shaken upon
hearing Caeiro read poems from his The Keeper of Sheep, immediately
went home to write verses of a kind he never could have produced otherwise.40 The heteronym is a richer concept than the pseudonym. While the
latter functions merely as a disguise of the authors identity, the heteronym
confers independent life upon aspects of his creative personality. The heteronym, I will argue, is a useful way of thinking about the interaction
between Simichidas and Lycidas in Idyll 7 because it allows us to understand the poem as an encounter between a version of the poet and one of
his own fictional creations. Reading the poem in this way preserves the gesture towards autobiographical authenticity in the retrospective first-person
narration and non-fictional geographical setting, and accounts for the fact
that, within the poem, Lycidas appears as the poetic master of Simichidas.
The poem dramatizes the invention of pastoral as the encounter between a
version of its creator and a fictional character from that world who inspires
it, much as Pessoas encounter with Caeiro imagines the poet inspired by
his own creation. By having a fictional character who embodies a poetic
world of their own invention appear in a narrative that looks like autobiography as the inspiration for that world, the poets not only assert that
what came into being through their own creative fiat is now independent of them, they even suggest that it precedes its creator. It is as if they
were the discoverers of that world rather than its inventors. It is because,
not in spite, of the fact that Idyll 7 contains manifestly fictional elements
39
40
The work of J. M. Coetzee, whose Foe (1986) will be discussed in Chapter 2, offers interesting
parallels. His Youth (2003), like Rilkes The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel, explores the
coming of age of a youthful writer in exile, while Elizabeth Costello (2003) addresses (among other
things) issues of moral responsibility in fictional representation in the person of an aging author
on the literary prize circuit, who, in spite of her gender, bears more than a passing resemblance
to Coetzee himself. Elizabeth Costello reappears in Coetzees most recent novel, Slow Man (2005),
where she arrives inexplicably at the house of the protagonist, recites the books opening paragraph
to him, and berates him for his failure to be an interesting fictional character.
See Pessoa (1998) 6, 41 and Guillen (1971) 242.
21
alongside its reality effects that it is true creative autobiography (Pessoas

term is autopsychography),41 and I will endeavor to find a place for it as
such within the categories of writing about the self that have been elaborated
by autobiographical theory.42
I adopt the term metafiction to refer to the triangulation of the relationship between author, narrator, and fictional character that is staged in
this poem. The term has been used to describe a range of contemporary
fiction that asks its readers to participate imaginatively in the creation of
a world even as they are simultaneously made aware that this world is an
invention.43 The scene in which the author enters his own writing and
appears there alongside his characters figures largely in such fiction, where
it bridges (in the fiction) the ontological difference that ought to keep them
safely grounded in the worlds to which each of them rightfully belongs.44
Mimetic desire is a similar attempt to bridge this gap; by endeavoring to
become a fictional subject, the impersonator attempts to make present in
his own life what is properly located in a fictional world. The songs of the
herdsmen manifest this desire clearly, and Idyll 7 can therefore usefully be
thought of as metafiction because in it the youthful version of the poems
narrator (who is also, within the poem, a bucolic poet) acts just like the
fictional herdsmen. In this way we can distinguish pastoral fiction from
comic fantasy. There is no possibility that the fantasies of the comic poets
underworld rivers of soup, preroasted birds that fall into the mouths of the
hungry, dung beetles that fly to the throne of Zeus will ever become a
reality. Pastoral, however, lies just across the border from reality. When we
aspire to it, we seem to inhabit its world for a while, and, when we have
done so, we will, like Simichidas, long to return there.
My conclusion, The future of a fiction, looks at the responses to this
possibility in the ancient scholia on Theocritus and in the poem in which
the authors presence in his own fiction becomes an established feature of
the genre, the anonymous Lament for Bion. The approach favored by the
scholia is to try to fit the poems to the account of mimesis in the Poetics.
However, they report one strand of interpretation that is more insightful in
its view of how the bucolic characters unsettle the boundary between fiction
and reality. This voice belongs to the critic Munatius, who sees Theocritus
himself in the nameless goatherd of Idyll 3, as well as in Simichidas of
Idyll 7 (this view is shared by all the scholiasts). While Munatius is roundly
41
43
42 In particular, Lejeune (1989) and the essays collected in Olney (1980).

Pessoa (1998) 2.
44 McHale (1987) 213, cf. 7172.
Hutcheon (1980) 17.
22
abused by the scholiasts, his ideas are in keeping with the later Greek bucolic
of the Lament for Bion and the Latin pastoral of Virgils Eclogues, which
embrace the possibility that the poet can appear in his own fiction. The
Lament for Bion expresses a bucolic poets grief for his own master, who
has predeceased him. It presents a series of lamentation scenes in which
a variety of beings mourn the dead poet, the last of whom are his own
bucolic characters (verses 5863): Galateia too weeps for your song, whom
you used to delight as she sat beside you on the shore. For you did not play
like the Cyclops. The lovely Galateia shunned him, but you she looked
upon with more delight than the sea, and now, having forgotten about
its waves, she sits upon the lonely sands, and tends your flocks till this
hour. This poem, for the first time, calls a historical poet a herdsman,45
but this assertion follows, and depends upon, the far more remarkable
fact that it posits a world in which the historical poet is known to, and
lamented by, his own fiction. He can be called a herdsman because he
inhabits the same world the herdsmen do. Likewise, the Eclogues at moments
collapse the fictional world of the shepherds into the world of the poet
and his readers,46 a possibility that will be decisive for the later history of
pastoral.
Not all of the Idylls that feature herdsmen are discussed in detail in this
book; Idylls 4 and 5 are mentioned only in passing. Conversely, Idylls 12
and 13, which do not feature herdsmen, are read closely. My interest here
is in those poems of Theocritus that do feature herdsmen that stand out
from other kinds of literary drama because they foreground the question
of fictionality and fictional presence in particularly interesting ways. While
one strand of imitation leads towards pastoral mannerism and a weak form
of literary drama in the spurious Idyll 8 and Idyll 9,47 another leads to the
continuing exploration of mimetic desire, and the relationship between
absolute fictions and the reality of the reader in the Eclogues. Some of the
bucolic Idylls are clearly more important for this line of development, and
these will be the center of attention here. Likewise, some poems that do
not feature herdsmen are discussed as a way of bringing into sharper focus
the issues that concern me in those that do. While the Eclogues consist of
both specific acts of emulation and an organized, book-length imagination
that is not reducible to such emulation, there are a cluster of elements in
the bucolic Idylls shepherds, the dramatic mode and its framing, song,
full fictionality, the presence of the poet in the poem that allow us to
recognize the Virgilian development in the Theocritean model. Some of
45
Van Sickle (1976) 27, Alpers (1996) 153.
46
Hardie (2002) 21.
47
See Rossi (1971b).
23
these elements are thematic, some formal, some ontological, and in no

one Idyll are they configured in quite the same way. My goal is not to
impose a spurious closure on a group of poems that clearly have many
points of contact with the collection as a whole but to consider what it was
in them that allowed a distinctive genre to emerge that took them as its
origin.
chapter 1
The pleasures of the imaginary
The ancient scholia on Theocritus consider Idyll 1 the poem most worthy
of standing at the head of the collection. It is, they claim, composed with
greater skill and charm than the others, and they cite Pindar on the appropriateness of its coming first as a consequence: At the beginning of a work
one ought to place a gleaming front.1 They note next that the poem has the
form of a dramatic exchange by its characters in which the poet himself does
not feature.2 It is a dialogue between Thyrsis, a shepherd and singer, and an
unnamed goatherd who is also a syrinx player. An introductory conversation
between the two (114) sets the scene of their encounter and is followed by a
long speech by the goatherd (1563), in which he describes a decorated bowl
or kissubion (2760) that he promises to give to Thyrsis if the latter will sing
The Sorrows of Daphnis for him. Thyrsis responds by performing the
song (64145), and the goatherd greets his performance with enthusiastic
admiration when it is over (14652).3 For the scholia, then, part of the poems
appeal, its charm, or charis, is the skill with which these diverse components are interwoven; they speak of the poem as being particularly well put
together, even though the poets own voice does not appear in it as a unifying
force. This chapter hopes to demonstrate some ways in which the scholiasts claim is justified, especially insofar as the poems component parts
dialogue, ecphrasis, and song work together as a unified exploration of
fictionality.
1
2
Id. 1 arg. b, Wendel (1914) 23.

In the Platonic schema employed by the scholia it is
, dramatic, rather than

, narrative, or
, mixed. See Prolegomena D, Wendel (1914) 45.
While Thyrsis performance is the major event in the poem (81 of its 152 lines), the ecphrasis is a
secondary focal point that balances it (thirty-three lines); cf. Legrand (1898) 407, Friedlander (1912)
13, Lawall (1967) 30, Nicosia (1968) 36, Ott (1969) 13233.
24
25
the dialogue
The poem begins with Thyrsis praise of the goatherds piping (1.16):

! "
# $ %&

'
()*.
+ )
,*
-
. ! )*#
+ / . -0* )
1 2 "
3# 3-4 "
1 5 / (16*.
Sweetly somehow that pine tree by the springs sings its whispering song, goatherd,
and sweetly too you pipe. After Pan you will carry off the second prize. If he chooses
the horned goat, you will take the female. And if he takes the female, the kid will
come to you. And kids meat is good until you milk them.
The repetition of , sweet, gives a clear structure to Thyrsis thought:

the sound of the pine tree is sweet, and so is Thyrsis syrinx playing. Yet the
first clause already contains an identification of human and natural music:
the pine tree is the subject of a verb of human song, , sings,
and the noise it produces, whispering, is reminiscent of the human voice.
The effect is emphasized by the subsequent echo of the sound it makes,
, in the word for human music, , you pipe.4 Yet
the pine tree does not simply sing its whispering song sweetly, it sings it
sweetly somehow.5 The modified adverb in the first phrase contrasts with
its unaccompanied use to describe the goatherds piping, sweetly too you
pipe. Rather than a simple description of the sound, sweetly somehow,
fronted not just in its own clause but as the first words of the poem,
dramatizes Thyrsis hesitation as he attempts to translate what he hears
into words. The object that he points to that pine tree, the one by the
springs invites a simple pictorial response from the reader, but the verb
and adverb that accompany it ask us already, at the very outset of the poem,
to think about the transformation of landscape into imaginary object that
takes place in Thyrsis attentive listening.
4
5
Donnet (1988) 160.

For adverbial (here parallel to ! " | ), cf. 5.8889, 7 | . . .
-; [Theocr.] Epigr. 5.12, ( | ; Call. Hymn 2.4, 21

8 9 :
;
6. Gow (1952) ad loc. 1.1ff. compares Terentianus Maurus 2129, dulce tibi pinus summurmurat.
Dover (1971) ad loc. 1.1f. understands as an appositional phrase: Lit., something pleasant the
whispering that pine-tree . . . makes music, i.e. sweet is the whispered music which that pine-tree
makes. Similarly Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.13: Something sweet, goatherd, the whispering [which]
that pine-tree by the springs sings.
26
Pans potential participation in the herdsmens musical exchanges marks

off the world of the poem from the world of ordinary human experience. In
contrast to the references to the landscape, by which the herdsmen point to
objects they can see, there is no actual deixis here; the goats are introduced
without articles (3), and the demonstrative pronouns that refer to the god
(4, 5) are anaphoric rather than deictic: they refer back to his earlier mention
in the speech, rather than pointing out his actual presence. Pan is made
an element of the poems imaginary world, which tells us what kind of
world we are dealing with (one in which divinities may take an active
part in the musical contests of herdsmen), without his having to appear
in it. This is a world in which gods have face-to-face relationships with
mortals, though for now they remain somewhere just out of sight, which
distinguishes this world at once from the secular reality of mime, even
though we are not dealing with figures from myth; Thyrsis, just as much
as the anonymous goatherd, is unknown in that domain.6 Moreover, by
rendering the two possible outcomes to the song contests with the gods in
syntactically matching if-clauses (+ . . . + ), Thyrsis suggests that there
is little to choose between the music of the goatherd and Pan. While the
herdsman is second to his god, their music is nonetheless complementary,
like the natural and human music of the opening verses.
The goatherds reply is an equally elaborate praise of Thyrsis singing
(1.711):
<
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Your song falls more sweetly, o shepherd, than that echoing water falls from the
rock above. If the Muses lead away the sheep as a gift, you will take the penned
lamb as prize. But if they are content to take the lamb, you will lead away the sheep
afterwards.
Thyrsis assimilated the sounds of the pine to human speech in his praise of
the goatherds music. The goatherd turns the compliment around: Thyrsis
song is like the sound of falling water, but sweeter still. His speech also begins
by pointing to features of the landscape that echoing water . . . the rock
6
Cf. Martinez-Bonati (1981) 106107: All singular judgments carry universal implications. The thetic
projection of a mimetic sentence establishes not only a singular fact of the imagined world . . . but,
at the same time, inevitably, a general axiom for that world . . . If a fictional character were to tell us
that the Kings daughter kept a unicorn in her garden, one of the general implications would be that
such creatures are materially possible in that world.
27
above then matches Thyrsis vision of harmonious musical rivalry with

the gods. Of the poems first eleven verses, seven are taken up with imagining
the outcome of this hypothetical song contest. Moreover, Thyrsis you
pipe (1.3), and the goatherds your song falls (1.78), do not denote what
they are doing at that moment. They are generalizing present tenses, as the
speaker recollects his previous impressions of the others music. The first
two speeches are entirely occupied with imaginary experience; the reader
listens to the herdsmen as they describe a remembered music to one another,
and in doing so locate themselves in a landscape with its familiar gods.
In reply, Thyrsis points to the place where he would like the goatherd to
play for him (1.1214):
)* &
E;&
)* 6
F -
G H;
I

; $ / . 2J
2
BK
B.
Will you, for the sake of the Nymphs, will you, goatherd, sit over there, where
there is that sloping mound and the tamarisks, and play? I myself will look after
your goats in the meantime.
As in the first two speeches, deixis locates the speaker and his interlocutor
in the center of a landscape the elements of which lie neither immediately
at hand nor very far away. As Thyrsis points to that pine tree by the
springs (1.2), and the goatherd compares his song with that echoing
water, so Thyrsis here invites him to sit over there, where there is that
sloping mound and the tamarisks. The herdsmen create a mood of calm
by pointing to the objects that lie around them, as immobile and restful as
they are. After the goatherd has alerted Thyrsis to the danger of irritating
Pan with noonday piping, he extends his own invitation (1.2123):
G/ ? $
1
LH B %4
&

4

M* 8 B
)
8
.
Let us sit over here under the elm opposite Priapus and the springs, where there is
that shepherds seat and the oaks.
Thyrsis has given one half of the scene, now the goatherd supplies the other:
his over here matches Thyrsis over there, so that the landscape appears
as the expression of their complementary desires.7
The herdsmen do not indicate how each element in the landscape is
related to the others. They simply point to that sloping mound and the
7
Cf. Id. 5.4552, 101103, where Comatas and Lacon create a similar picture through antagonistic
comparison.
28
tamarisks, and that shepherds seat and the oaks, and let the reader
imagine how they are situated in relation to one another: are the tamarisks
on the mound? Is the seat under the oaks?8 Perhaps the strangely inexact
way in which the herdsmen point out their surroundings can be explained
as a reality effect. Because they have the landscape before their eyes, they
need only gesture towards it in order to make themselves understood; they
do not dwell on the scene more than people in their situation would in fact
need to, and what they say about it fits their occupation as herdsmen. For
them it is a workplace in which they also take their leisure, but they do not
set it before themselves as an object of contemplation.9 It is simply at hand
for them as a place in which to conduct their business and to rest. Yet, for
the reader, their cursory references to their surroundings have a different
function. The lack of descriptive precision on the part of the characters
invites us to go further with the game of world-building that they initiate.
If the poem does not tell us how to arrange the shepherds seat and the oaks
in relation to the elm, Priapus, and the springs, we may nonetheless work
out these details for ourselves.10 While the deictic gestures never amount
to a sustained description and, considered individually, do not introduce
any large vistas,11 the accumulation of individual details soon has the reader
putting together the pieces of the picture, constructing a scene that extends
beyond the immediate foreground. While the herdsmen may not know
they are in a landscape, the audience surely does.
the ecphrasis
After his invitation to Thyrsis to sit beneath the trees the goatherd reminds
him again of his preeminence as a singer and offers him a two-part reward
for his song (1.2528):
.- 1 4B
2 (16
N / 53 / 2;4 1 2 1
0! 0
1

1 BK,
(;B
31 5 ;-

.
I will give you a goat that has borne twins to milk three times, which, despite
having two kids, fills two pails with milk, and a deep bowl sealed with sweet wax,
two-handled, newly made, still smelling of the knife.
8
9
10
11
As Elliger (1975) 326 n. 27 notes, die Landschaft wird durch punktuelle Angaben, nicht durch
Bezuge und Abhangigkeiten der einzelnen Teile evoziert.
Arland (1937) 13, cf. Schmidt (1987) 125 n. 38.
Gow (1952) ad loc. 1.22: Since the remoter demonstrative )
is opposed to G, and to
1
, it seems that the rustic seat and the oaks are by the springs and the figure of Priapus, and
opposite to the elm under which Thyrsis is invited to sing. Cf. Elliger (1975) 326.
Legrand (1898) 197.
29
However, while the goatherd offers to give Thyrsis the bowl, he does not
invite him to look at it right away, or at any point during his description of
it.12 It is only when the song is over that he produces the object itself and
with a flourish invites Thyrsis to see if it matches up to his earlier description
(1.149): Behold the bowl; see, my friend, how sweetly it smells.13
If the bowl only makes its entrance at the end of the poem, this should
remind us that the ecphrasis is more a response to a work of art than
a description of one.14 It is the goatherds impressions that we hear as he
encourages Thyrsis to imagine the object for himself. He describes its shape
and plant motifs briefly (1.2731); the figures portrayed on it form the bulk
of his description (1.3254). The first figure that he describes is a woman
(1.3233):
5

"
- B
1
($ 14* C#
Within a woman, some ornamental work of the gods, is fashioned, adorned with
a robe and headband.
Since this is the first extant occurrence of the word , we may
wonder what he means by it. The stem might lead one to suppose that the
word is simply a metrical alternative to
, a piece of ornamental
work. However, when the scholia comment upon these lines they suggest
that the men portrayed are laboring in vain, because, they ask, how could
anyone persuade a statue?15 The scholia, in other words, look to the suffix
- and deduce that means not merely a piece of ornamental
work but, like C, a statue. In context, the word presents us with a
choice: is the woman carved on the bowl something made by the gods, or
is she, more concretely, a statue of one of them?
The scholia appear to have been influenced by the following line:
(-, adorned with, belongs to the language of the decorative arts,
and in the sense curiously wrought is used elsewhere of manufactured
objects (LSJ s.v. ( 1.1). Yet there are several levels at which the epithet might function. A statue on which robe and headband are curiously
wrought may be portrayed on the bowl. A flesh-and-blood woman may
12
13
14
15
In the mimeticdramatic type of ecphrasis to which Gutzwiller (1991) 90 refers, joint inspection
of an object is always accompanied by invitations to look: C
, Theocritus Id. 15.78; O P)*
D, Herodas 4.23, 27, 35; , C
1 , Euripides Ion 190, 201, 206, 209.
Cf. Dover (1971) ad loc. 1.144f.: Thyrsis does not get the bowl until 149. Q
and & are just
the kinds of invitation that are missing from the ecphrasis.
Cf. Miles (1977) 147: We are not actually shown the bowl. We are presented a version of it as seen
through the eyes of an inhabitant of the bucolic world.
R 1.38e, Wendel (1914) 42.
30
be depicted adorned with robe and headband.16 The image of a woman

may be curiously wrought with robe and headband on the surface of the
bowl. Not only is there a choice to be made about who the woman is, the
epithet that accompanies her may describe how she looks within the scene
in which she is portrayed, or the skill with which she has been rendered by
the artist who portrayed her.
The scholiasts question seems to reflect a rather crude attempt to get a
definite picture from the goatherds indefinite words. In later usage
, like its parent
, does not designate a particular object but
conveys the wonder that objects of surpassing craftsmanship inspire.17 Yet
perhaps we should ask what impelled this leap on the commentators part.
If other scholia on poetic texts explain
as , why do they
gloss with C here? Does it point to something unusual
in the goatherds use of the word? Richard Hunter compares at
Iliad 18.482 (the images on the Shield of Achilles), Argonautica 1.729 (on
the Cloak of Jason), and Europa 43 (on the Basket of Europa), and suggests
that belongs to the standard language of ekphrasis.18 In these
passages, however, there are always -, many images. The
phrase occurs at the beginning of the ecphrasis and summarizes the pictures
that will then be described individually. In Idyll 1, by contrast,
is used without an adjective to mark out a single figure on the bowl. It separates the woman from her companions and suggests that she is somehow
more artificial than the other images around her.
Moreover, the woman is not simply a , she is a B

, an ornamental work of the gods. Does this mean that she was
made by the gods, that she looks like the gods, or that her representation
16
17
18
Gow (1952) ad loc. 1.33: (- is used elsewhere of the garment (e.g. 24.140) or the wool (18.32
n.) rather than the wearer except in what seems a reminiscence of this passage by Antipater at A.P.
6.219, but T.s use arises naturally from that of the verb at, e.g., Aesch. Pers. 182 1 %
Q1
.
The TLG gives twenty-six occurrences in addition to our present passage and its scholia. The only
one earlier than Idyll 1, Pindar Paian 8 fr. 52i.81, proves insecure; see Morris (1992) 46: The crucial
word is incomplete beyond the restored fourth letter and its syntactical function is unclear. The
remainder are considerably later than Theocritus. The word is used for statues (Lucian Amores 13;
Eusebius De laudibus Constantini 11.8; Himerius Oration 28.41) and objects of divine manufacture
like the walls of Troy (Colluthus Rape of Helen 310), ornamentation on a shield made by Hephaestus
(Nonnus Dionysiaca 37.127), and the visible adornments of the entire universe (Eusebius De
laudibus Constantini 11.11). The scholia to Pindar Pythian 5.46 write - B

4
,
where Pindars text has
4
(), and Eustathius has - where Iliad 18.483 (the
Shield of Achilles) has ; cf. his commentary on Odysseus brooch at Od. 19.226:
" "

2 G -
. Cf. Morris (1992) 4: a survey of epic
in terms of metrical, syntactical, and thematic distribution reveals far greater powers of
connotation than specific denotation.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.32.
31
on the bowl resembles the gods handiwork? The scholia are tempted by
the first explanation, and report that some say she is Pandora.19 The -
suffix suggests manufacture, manufacture implies a maker, and so she is
a woman made by the gods. Hence, Pandora.20 If the scholia hesitate, it
may be because this solution overlooks the goatherds , some, which,
they note, belongs with , and makes the statement less definite.
But how exactly? Some editors understand B
as simply
in apposition to
-: Within a woman, some ornamental work of the
gods, is fashioned. The texts of Ahrens, Gow, and Hunter accordingly
all have a comma after
-, woman. Not punctuating after
- does
not of course preclude understanding the phrase as appositional, and some
editors who print the line without punctuation (Meineke, Wilamowitz,
Gallavotti) may intend it to be read in that way. Dover, however, rejects
this interpretation and understands the phrase as predicate: Lit., a woman
is depicted <as> a-sort-of . . ..21 Both constructions point to reflective or
interpretive activity on the part of the goatherd. If we accept the majority
view, the goatherd is emphasizing the quality of the bowls craftsmanship.
The image of the woman is the kind of thing the gods might make. If we
accept Dovers view, the emphasis is on the womans appearance. She is a
human woman, who has nonetheless been depicted in such a way that she
looks god-like, as the other figures around her do not (and this difference
from her companions is the point of departure for the scholiasts interpretation). Perhaps the also reflects the fact that the goatherd does not have
the bowl in front of him, and dramatizes a momentary engagement with
the figure in his imagination, much as Thyrsis , sweetly somehow,
in the poems opening line dramatizes his effort to express the sounds of
nature in language.22 However we interpret the phrase, imaginative effort
is required to translate the goatherds description back into image.
19
20
21
22
R 1.32, Wendel (1914) 40.

A more obvious choice than the deceitful image of Helen fashioned by the gods, a statue of cloud,
;1 C, in Euripides Helen 1219 (cf. 26263). The scholia may also have in mind Hesiods
description of the creation of Pandora at Theogony 57881, where there is also a conjunction of
( and : And about her head she [Athena] set a golden band, which the glorious
Lame One made himself, fashioning it (() with his hands, gratifying Zeus his father. And on
it were fashioned many devices ( -), a wonder to behold. Pandora herself, however,
is not described as a daidalon, or as the object of daidalic manufacture. The daidal- words are used
of her crown, as above, and of the
I
, the weaving with many images, which
Athena is to teach her how to make at Works and Days 64.
Dover (1971) ad loc. 1.32: Punctuation before the postpositive , making B
a phrase
in apposition, is to be avoided.
Cf. Gorgo at Idyll 15.79, who, when describing the tapestries at the palace of Ptolemy Philadelphus
in Alexandria that are right before her eyes, shows no such hesitation: you would say they were
garments of the gods.
32
After describing the woman the goatherd fills in the scene around her
(1.3338):
$ 1 S C

2-T
(0 C
C
/ 21# $ / O ;

< O&#
( / U "
)

1 C
1
C / V
W

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.
And beside her men with beautiful hair alternately from either side contend with
words; yet these do not touch her mind. But at one time she looks at one man
smiling and at another she turns her mind to the other. And they, for a long time
hollow-eyed from love, labor in vain.
He describes appearances the men have beautiful hair, they contend

with words but also the inner experience he imagines these appearances
reflect: these things do not touch her mind. Like the men, he is drawn
to the god-like woman, and translates her indifference into action: at one
time she looks at one man smiling and at another she turns her mind to
the other. The goatherd is making a story out of a picture;23 he introduces
time into the visual representation and constructs a back story to explain
what he has seen: the men are hollow-eyed from love, and have been so
for a long time. Finally, his description also hints at the likely outcome
of the scene: they labor in vain.
While the goatherds narrative integrates the images of the carved figures
by attaching the feelings and motivations that have suggested themselves to
his imagination, this very reconstruction bequeaths further reconstruction
to the imagination of the reader. His use of pronouns is sparing in the
extreme. While the two men are long hollow-eyed from love, he does not
spell out that they are in love with the woman.24 Similarly, these things do
not touch her mind suggests a more than human unconcern; her laughter
combines the unfathomable mirth of Aphrodite, who will later visit Daphnis smiling (1, 9596), with the unresponsiveness of an artwork.25
Perhaps it is not so surprising that the scholia see Pandora, or a statue,
here.26 The mens behavior is also hard to read. Hunter notes that the scene
23
24
25
26
A narrative response to pictorial stasis, as Heffernan (1993) 45 calls ecphrastic storytelling.

Cf. Homeric desire at Iliad 3.43846 (Paris and Helen) and 14.31328 (Zeus and Hera). The abundance
of pronouns leaves no doubt about who is feeling what for whom.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.3637.
On erotic infatuation with statuary, see Steiner (2001) 185207 and Hardie (2002) 193, for whom the
Pygmalion story thematizes the close connection between erotic desire and the response to works of
33
rewrites the legal dispute on the Shield of Achilles (Il. 18.497508).27 But
as what exactly? When the men contend with words,
/ 21,
this sounds like a formulaic Homeric phrase, but in the Homeric formula
verb and noun are accompanied by an adjective that makes clear exactly
how the speaker is addressing his interlocutor: his words are reproachful,
shameful, angry, gentle, harsh, or shocking, as the case may be.28
Without qualification it is unclear whether the men are chiding, quarreling, or competing, just as the absence of pronouns means that we cannot
tell whether their words are directed at each other or the woman. It has
been suggested that contend in words might refer to rivalry in hexameter
verses as well as in simple speech, and that the use of (0, from
either side, looks forward to the convention of amoebean song which
was destined to become a hallmark of the bucolic poetry of Theocritus
and his imitators.29 On the other hand, while at Id. 7.48 labor in vain
is used of unsuccessful poets, in other poems lovers do not . . .contest
before their rivals.30 Once again the goatherd is more certain than we can
be about what he is describing.
The goatherds description of the scene supplies more than is actually
there (the thoughts and emotions of the figures for example).31 Yet this
excess is puzzling; it is an interpretive response that we cannot compare with
the object itself. The goatherds interpretations invite interpretations of our
own. The scholia disambiguate at the level of individual words: by deciding
that the woman is a statue, or Pandora, they see something specific on the
bowl. Their approach seems crude, a violation of the poems suggestive
vagueness. Yet the desire for clarity can hardly be separated from the act of
reading; even Hunters inconspicuous summary is quite a bit clearer than
the goatherd himself: The woman laughs while the men suffer from the
eros for which she is responsible.32
27
28
29
30
31
32
art, insofar as both map the viewing subjects desire for an imagined presence onto an irremediably
unresponsive object. Cf. Ott (1969) 105 n. 296: Auerdem soll der Vergleich einem Standbild die
Ungeruhrtheit der Frau bezeichnen.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.3435.
P
Il. 2.277, 21.480; 3 Il. 3.38, 6.325; 34
, Il. 4.241, 15.210, Od. 22.26, 225;
3, , Il. 12.267; 2-, Od. 8.77, where the verb
is preceded by
(75).
Halperin (1983) 178, cf. 24243.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.3435 also compares Longus Daphnis and Chloe 1.15.417.1; yet surely this is
more interpretation than imitation of Idyll 1?
Hunter (1999) p. 63.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.3637 Cf. Friedlander (1912) 14 on the bowls layout. He notes that it has
undergone a twofold reduction compared with the Shield of Achilles. Firstly, far fewer scenes are
34

The next scene is easier to picture (1.3944):
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Next to them is fashioned an old fisherman and a steep rock, on which the old man
eagerly drags a large net for a cast, looking like a man who is laboring hard. You
would say that he is fishing with all the strength of his limbs, the tendons bulge
so all over his neck, even though he is grey-haired. But his strength is worthy of
youth.
Here there is no conflict between visual representation and narration; the

present tense of drags is not combined with temporal markers like at
one time and another, or for a long time, as in the previous scene.
Similarly, the goatherds inferences are more obviously derived from the
visual information: if the fisherman resembles a man who is laboring
hard, and you would say that he is fishing with all the strength of his
limbs, this is because the tendons bulge so all over his neck. Only in
the final verse does he add something to the image: his strength is worthy
of youth. Here, as in the conclusion to the previous scene, he seems to
anticipate how events will turn out.
He also anticipates his audiences response: you would say that he is
fishing with all the strength of his limbs. But who is he talking to with his
you would say? Kathryn Gutzwiller thinks that the words are intended
for Thyrsis alone: To remove any doubt that ; in 42 is addressed to
Thyrsis rather than an anonymous you, we need only compare Gorgos
remarks on the tapestries in Idyll 15.79, you would say (;) they are
garments fit for the gods. Even Gorgos B

- recalls the
goatherds B
(32), both conveying the speakers subjective
impression of an art object.33 Yet the scene does not unfold dramatically like Idyll 15, or Herodas 4, to which Gutzwiller also refers. In these
poems, when one character invites another to respond to an image, we are
given the companions response. In Idyll 15, after Gorgos initial reaction
33
portrayed, and, secondly, there are far fewer figures within those scenes. This facilitates synoptic
perception and induces a sense of symmetry in the insets: Denn liegt es freilich nicht allzu fern, den
Fischer in ein emblemartiges Mittelfeld zu setzen und die beiden Dreifigurenszenen antithetisch an
den Rand. Aber gesagt wird davon nichts, und der Dichter hat wohl ein ganz scharfes Bild weder gehabt
noch geben wollen. (My emphasis.)
Gutzwiller (1991) 92.
35
(7879) Praxinoa, look at the tapestries first, how fine and delightful they
are, you would say they were garments of the gods we hear Praxinoas
reply (8083): Lady Athena, what sort of weavers worked on them. What
sort of artists drew their precise shapes. How true they stand and how true
they move, living, not woven. People are so clever! Similarly, in Herodas 4,
after Philes first reaction (2022) What beautiful statues, dear Kynno:
what craftsman fashioned this stone and who set it up? we hear, after the
names of the artist and dedicator, further commentary by Kynno: Look at
that girl looking up at the apple; wouldnt you say she will faint soon if she
cant get the apple? (2829).34 Moreover, their responses are brief; in Idyll
15 the description of the tapestries lasts nine verses (7886), and in Herodas
4 the women respond succinctly to a succession of objects. Both poems ask
us to focus on the characters, as by question and answer they formulate a
shared response to what they are viewing; the object itself is less important
than their reaction to it.35
The dramatic interaction between object, first viewer, and respondent
in these poems is quite different from Idyll 1. The goatherd describes a
single object in great detail, yet that detail creates a conflict between his
description and the object it represents. After the first scene there are two
bowls in the audiences mind: the one the goatherd describes, and the one
we picture on the basis of his description. The two are bound to be different, since the second cannot incorporate all the information included
in the first. Yet in the second scene the goatherds interpretation is less
intrusive; the image seems to offer itself to us more directly. Similarly,
while you would say is apparently addressed to Thyrsis, it is not intended
to elicit a response from his companion like Gorgos question to Praxinoa, for he goes on with his description without a pause. The assertion
looks beyond the poems dramatic illusion, and finesses the kissubion in
the audiences mind. The first scene gives us the goatherds interpretive
narration of whatever clues he has picked up from the images on the
bowl. The second gives us just the images, and so lets us find clues of our
own.36
34
35
36
The ecphrastic scene at the temple in Euripides Ion (184218) is also a series of questions and answers
between the chorus members.
Gutzwiller (1991) 90. How we should react to their reaction is another question. Recent work on
Idyll 15 has distanced itself from ironic treatment of Gorgo and Praxinoa. Goldhill (1994) 21722 and
Burton (1995) 103104 analyze the womens use of Hellenistic art theory. For a judicious overview of
the issues, see Hunter (1996b) 14969. On Hellenistic ecphrasis and its relationship to contemporary
art and its audiences, see Zanker (2004).
Cf. Ott (1969) 103 n. 290: Die Momentaufnahme des Fischers zeigt nur seine Anstrengung, die
Frage, ob ihm Erfolg oder Mierfolg beschieden ist, mu der Leser fur sich selbst beantworten. M. E.
36

The final scene is the longest of the three (1.4554):

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And a little way off from the sea-worn old man a vineyard is nicely laden with dark
clusters which a little boy is guarding as he sits on a dry-stone wall. And about him
are two foxes; one roams among the vine rows, damaging what is ready to be eaten,
the other, fashioning every possible scheme against his wallet, thinks that she <will
not let the boy go until she has sat down having feasted upon dry food>.37 But he
is weaving a lovely cage for crickets, fitting together asphodels and reeds. And he
has no concern at all for his wallet or the plants, his pleasure in the weaving is so
great.
The description begins with a still image (4548). The two foxes are more
animated: one roams among the vine rows, the other makes plans on the
boys wallet. The figures come to life because the goatherd imagines their
inner life on the basis of their appearance:
1
, damaging, suggests deliberate mischief,38 fashioning every possible scheme, and ;,
thinks, (if this is correct) are overtly humanizing. There is no conflict
between visual representation and narration as there is in the first scene;
the grapes and the wallet are easily pictured as objectives of the foxes
actions. Similarly, the description of the cricket cage gives the materials of
its construction and a clear sense of how they are being used, and it is from
this picture that the goatherd projects the boys inner experience (5354):
And he has no concern at all for his wallet or the plants, his pleasure in the
weaving is so great. In contrast to the second scene, we are aware that the
goatherd is imagining more than what he sees, yet his imagination seems
to harmonize with the visual information; it does not create the puzzles of
the first scene.
37
38
gibt jedoch die in beiden andern Szenen thematisierte Erfolglosigkeit den entscheidenen Hinweis:
auch der Fischer muht sich vergebens, das volle Netz ist zu schwer. Aber diese Meinung ist subjectiv.
My own subjective opinion would be that his strength is worthy of youth points to success.
Verse 51 is almost certainly corrupt. I have supplied the stop-gap translation of Hunter (1999) ad loc.
1.5051, based on the minimum necessary change of (-
to (-.
LSJ s.v.
I gives pirates, Cyclopes, Scylla, and marauding armies as subjects of this verb.
37
Having considered the content of the individual scenes, let us now consider how they relate to one another. The bowl, we are told, has ivy decoration around its lip (2931), and within (5

, 32) is the first of the
figures the goatherd describes, that of the woman. Beside this woman (-,
33) stand the two men, and contend in words from either side (C
C, 34). By (or with) these ( " -, 19) is the fisherman. A
little way off from him (
/ U
C4
, 45) is the vineyard and
the boy, and about him ((; 1

, 48) are the foxes. Finally, acanthus
spreads in every way around the bowl (55).
The ivy and acanthus belong exclusively to the bowls visual surface,
and do not participate in the scenes that they surround. While 5

,
within, may indicate either that the two men and the woman are inside the
bowl, or that they are inside an ivy frame, it clearly separates the decorative
plant motif from the human figures. But how are we to understand the
bowls other spatial markers? Do by (or with) these ( " -, 19)
and a little way off (
/ U
C4
, 45) mark divisions within
a single scene, or is each scene a world of its own? And how should we
understand beside (-, 33) and from either side (C
C, 34)?
Do we picture the two men standing beside the woman within a pictorial
space that they share, or does she, the ornamental work of the gods, occupy
a different visual field? Does the goatherd see the men as in love with an
image that lies between them, but in another plane of representation, and
is this why their words can never touch her mind? Is this what the scholia
mean by their question, Who could persuade a statue? Any attempt to
reconstruct the bowl as a physical object must decide questions which the
goatherds language leaves open, just as all attempts to do so necessarily share
one fundamental assumption: that the goatherd has told us everything there
is to see.39
Rather than guides to turning an imaginary object into an actual one,
it would perhaps be better to understand the frequent spatial markers as
a reminder that what we are listening to is a fiction; within, beside,
from either side, a little way off, and about him never let us forget
that the characters we are hearing about are figures on the surface of a
bowl. This is what J. A. Heffernan calls representational friction in the
39
See Gow (1952) ad loc. 1.2756, Gallavotti (1966) 42136, Nicosia (1968) 36, Ott (1969) 13233, and
Manakidou (1993) 1547. The difficulties that lie in wait for the attempt were already well appreciated
by Friedlander (1912) 14: Betrachten wir nun die Einlage selbst genauer, so zeigt sich, da der Dichter
eine Vorstellung vom Ganzen besitzt und dem Leser u bermittelt. Allein diese Vorstellung ist alles
andere als exakt. Das Gefa heit zweihenklig, aber es wird mit einem homerischen Kunstwort
(0
) benannt, das keine bestimmte Form vor das Auge stellt.
38
Shield of Achilles: By explicitly noting the difference between the medium

of visual representation (gold) and its referent (cattle), Homer implicitly
draws our attention to the friction between the fixed forms of visual art
and the narrative thrust of his words.40 Yet Heffernan also suggests that,
because of the length of the narrative sequences in the description of the
Shield, the conversion of image to narrative is at times so thorough that
we can hardly see a picture through Homers words.41 The scenes on
the bowl, by contrast, are of much smaller scope: seven, six, and ten lines
apiece. Concentration emphasizes the power of the fiction; we assent to the
narrative illusion even as we are reminded that what we are hearing about
is a two-dimensional surface.
One might also approach the question of voice in the passage as a deliberate, even ostentatious, fiction. A goatherd describes an object that belongs
to his rustic world, and yet what Theocritus has placed in his mouth is
epic ecphrasis that has its place beside Apollonius description of Jasons
cloak, and Moschus description of Europas basket. Gorgo and Praxinoa
describe the palace tapestries briefly and in character, but what the goatherd
speaks is an emulation of Homers Shield of Achilles and Hesiods Shield
of Heracles. While Idyll 1 is in the dramatic mode, the ecphrasis can hardly
be construed as a reality effect; it rather strongly marks the poem as fiction.
Even the word kissubion belongs to literature, not life.42
The ecphrasis, then, is a manifest fiction, and what it offers the reader
is a concentrated experience of fictional involvement and a paradigm of
the way in which this involvement can further fictionalize fictional facts
by providing them with all kind of imaginary motivations and contexts. In
twenty-three verses we enter and leave three microcosmic scenes in succession, with new settings, new characters, and new stories to imagine each
time. Moreover, the goatherds narration leaves us in no doubt that what we
are listening to is in part invention. The ecphrasis is a fictional characters
imaginative engagement with a work of visual fiction. To participate in it
fully, he creates a world from the hints its still images offer. In this sense the
goatherds response to the bowl can be seen as a mise en abyme of the readers
40
41
42
Heffernan (1993) 4.
Heffernan (1993) 13. Cf. Iliad 18.491515, 52349, 579606, which, as Heffernan (20) observes, close
with, or are followed by, reminders that the Shield is a physical object.
Friedlander (1912) 14, Halperin (1983) 16777. Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.41 compares 2H with
Hesiod Aspis 215, Aratus Phaenomena 6367, and Argonautica 1.739, and notes, ad loc. 1.42, that this
verse is Theocritus only use of the Homerism ;
: Here the form plays against the precious
poeticisms 4
and 2
: would anyone say such a thing?
39
response to the poem itself.43 The quick succession of scenes, and our effort
to correct the goatherds interpretive decisions regarding them, surely make
us aware that our own willingness to participate in these fictional worlds
rivals his own.44 We may feel that a desire for meaning differentiates our
response from his.45 The goatherd interprets the bowl insofar as he endows
its two-dimensional figures, human and animal, with thoughts and feelings appropriate to the stories in which he thinks they are participating. He
does not, however, reflect on their significance, either individually or as a
whole, whereas a sense that the kissubion is in some way symbolic has been
a staple of modern critical reception.46 Yet if our hermeneutics are enabled
or even invited by the limitations in his, then our response to the ecphrasis
looks very much like his response to the kissubion. As he reads narrative and
psychology into the figures on the bowl, so we read symbolism into his narration. By seeking to go beyond his response we in fact resemble it most. For
it is in the nature of verbal accounts of visual art to imagine the explanations
the image does not supply. As Alain Robbe-Grillet has observed, writing
rarely imitates the pictures refusal to explain, where everything is given as
43
44
45
46
Dallenbach (1989) 94106 and passim is the most complete treatment of ecphrasis as a mise en
abyme of the text in which it occurs. Thomas (1983) and Fowler (1991) are good introductions to
the extensive literature on this figure in Aeneid 1, where it points to the limits of fiction as a tool for
self-understanding.
Cf. Iser (1978) 13334, an analysis of readers self-conscious involvement in a text as they correct false
impressions formed earlier in their reading: It is at this point that the discrepancies produced by
the reader during the gestalt-forming process take on their true significance. They have the effect of
enabling the reader actually to become aware of the inadequacy of the gestalten he has produced, so
that he may detach himself from his own participation in the text and see himself being guided from
without. The ability to perceive oneself during the process of participation is an essential quality of
the aesthetic experience; the observer finds himself in a strange, halfway position: he is involved, and
he watches himself being involved. However, this position is not entirely nonpragmatic, for it can
only come about when existing codes are transcended or invalidated. The resultant restructuring of
stored experiences makes the reader aware not only of the experience but also of the means whereby
it develops.
Miles (1977) 156: Thyrsis and his friend fail to appreciate the significance of the content of their
art . . . The effect of Idyll 1 is . . . to reveal how alien the herdsmens way of looking at things is
from ours and how unbridgeable is the gulf that separates them from us. Fowler (1991) 33 and Boyd
(1995) 74 discuss the relationship between characters and readers points of view in the ecphrastic
scene of Aeneid 1.
I can only give a selection here. For Lawall (1967) 30, the three scenes represent not merely the three
ages of man but their essential psychological condition; for Edquist (1975) 106, they show the
totality of significant human experience from childhood to old age. For Miles (1977) 14649, the
bowl depicts grim scenes of Hesiodic realism that are systematically misread by the goatherd; for
Halperin (1983) 186, these scenes represent the themes of bucolic poetry itself. For Cairns (1984)
102104, the final scene is a climactic symbol of poetic composition within an object that has (101)
literary programmatic significance. Cf. Gutzwiller (1991) 92: analogical readings, which seek to
find meanings insinuated by the author and unintended by the character, have predominated over
mimetic ones.
40
in movement, but frozen in the middle of that movement, immobilized by

the representation which leaves in suspense all gestures, falls, conclusions,
etc., eternalizing them in the imminence of their end and severing them
from their meaning.47
the song
The goatherds offer of the bowl is intended to elicit a song from his companion. Frequent references to Thyrsis skilful singing (78, 1920, 6162),
including a previous victory in a song contest against Chromis from Libya
(2324), anticipate his performance. The sphragis, or seal of ownership, with
which he begins his song (65) I am Thyrsis of Etna, and the voice of
Thyrsis is sweet praises his own singing, and, as he sings, the refrain is a
constant reminder that we are listening to a song. After its first appearance
at verse 63, variations on bucolic . . . song recur at verses 70, 73, 76, 79,
84, 89, 94, 99, 104, 108, 111, 114, 122, 127, 131, 137, and 142: eighteen times
in eighty-one lines. When Thyrsis has finished singing, the goatherd greets
his performance with lavish praise and the promised gift of the kissubion
(14650); the song has evidently lived up to his expectations. The Sorrows
of Daphnis, then, is a supreme display of pastoral singing, and the poem
strongly marks the fiction that its hexameters a spoken meter are here to
be heard as if they were a song.48 So how are we to imagine the performance
that the goatherd so admires?
After the sphragis Thyrsis continues with questions addressed to the
Nymphs (1.6669):
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Where were you then, when Daphnis was dying, where were you, Nymphs? In the
lovely valleys of Peneius or Pindus? For surely you did not keep to the great stream
of the river Anapus, or the peak of Etna, or the holy water of Acis.
47
48
Robbe-Grillet (1989) 86. His own interest in the ecphrastic mise en abyme is well known. The novel
In the Labyrinth, for example, contains a detailed description of a print, The Defeat of Reichenfels,
which portrays scenes from the story in which it is found. As they are described, these representations
merge insensibly with the world of the primary narrative.
Wilamowitz (1906) 137: ein Reflex des Liedes in einer anderen poetischen Gattung; Gow (1952)
ad loc. 1.64142: the songs which T. puts in the mouth of his characters can do no more
than suggest in another medium the verses which they actually sang; Rosenmeyer (1969) 147:
Theocritus suggests the music instead of putting it on the boards. This suggestion is, however,
insistent.
41
His tone is passionate; the interjection C/, as Hunter observes, marks an

urgent question,49 and the effect is heightened by the repeated Where
were you? Similarly O -, for surely, with which Thyrsis responds
to his own question, is not so much an answer as a show of indignation,
surprise, or even contempt.50 At the same time the sonorous geography
Peneius, Pindus, Anapus, Etna, Acis is a counterpoint to the emotional
display; each name invites us to imagine a pleasant haunt of the divinities
far away from the scene of Daphnis death.
In the verses that follow Thyrsis shifts from direct address to narrative,
evoking the animals response to Daphnis death through their various cries:
jackals and wolves howled (71), the lion lamented (72), cattle wept
(75). Having suggested these inhuman voices, Thyrsis introduces a series of
articulate visitors. Hermes, the first to arrive, does not grieve like the animals
but speaks (., 77) to Daphnis as one sensible fellow remonstrating with
another (7778): Daphnis, who is wearing you out? Who are you so
enamored of, my good friend? The words of the cowherds, shepherds, and
goatherds who arrive next are reported indirectly everyone asked him
what was the matter (81) and are followed by the appearance of Priapus.
Priapus speaks directly, like Hermes, but appears more sympathetic (82):
Poor Daphnis, why are you wasting away? The scholia call his words a
speech of consolation,51 but his rhetoric appears to miss its mark. Daphnis
is not reconciled to his fate, and does not reply (92).
His silence is theatrical.52 Yet, if Daphnis unwillingness to respond is a
kind of acting, will this not be reflected in Thyrsis performance? Should we
not imagine some kind of pause for effect here, to communicate this silence
to the goatherd? For there are other signs of communication between the
performer and his audience. Hunter notes that the goatherds approval of
the song is not impaired by Priapus satirical portrait of his profession in
verses 8688:53
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Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.66.
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G
; O
.
Lawall (1967) 2021 compares Daphnis to Aeschylus Prometheus. Walsh (1985) 9 cites Aristophanes
Frogs 83234, 91220: Even [Daphnis] silence seems theatrical, a way of miming significance, the
trick for which Aeschylus was famous. For Gutzwiller (1991) 241 n. 61, Daphnis resembles Phaedra
in Euripides Hippolytus, because it is love that compels both of them to their fate.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.8691.
42
You used to be called a cowherd, but now you resemble a goatherd. For the
goatherd, when he sees how the females are mounted, cries because he himself was
not born a goat.
Hunter concludes that the framing context never completely disappears;

the world portrayed in The Sorrows of Daphnis reflects the world of
Idyll 1, in which the song is performed. But Thyrsis repetition of ,
goatherd, is emphatic; it appears to be a deliberate jest incorporating his
audience into the song.54 The verses are a fiction of oral composition and
dramatize the singers adaptation of his song to fit its performance context.55
Thyrsis portrayal of Aphrodite is also conditioned by his audience.
Unlike the previous visitors, whose attitude towards Daphnis is expressed
through their speech alone, Aphrodites feelings are narrated by Thyrsis
(1.9596):
]
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And yes, Cypris came too, smiling sweetly, smiling secretly, but bearing heavy anger
in her heart.
These verses, and their relationship to verses 13839, are famously difficult to interpret, for we do not know why Aphrodite is smiling, or if she
played a part in Daphnis death in a now unknown myth that preceded the
poems composition. Yet, if we examine the lines in light of the interaction
between Thyrsis and the goatherd, perhaps their difficulty will seem less
oppressive. As Hunter observes, -
marks the climactic point of an
enumeration;56 Aphrodite is the last of Daphnis visitors, and the effect
is heightened by : Cypris came too. Thyrsis is increasing the tension as the most important arrival approaches. Yet his creation of suspense
surely plays upon the goatherds knowledge that Aphrodite has a crucial
role in Daphnis death. As we might guess from his request to hear The
Sorrows of Daphnis specifically (19), he already knows the story; verse
54
55
56
Gow (1952) ad loc. 1.86 draws the opposite conclusion: T. has probably forgotten that the sole
audience of Thyrsis song is himself a goatherd.
Cf. Pretagostini (1992) 71: La performance di Tirsi sulla morte di Dafni . . . mostra come un componimento . . . poteva essere adattato dallautore-esecutore alle mutate necessità e circostanze della nuova
esecuzione: il riferimento finale alla libagione in onore delle Muse con il latte appena munto e` un
esempio molto interessante di unaggiunta estemporanea, dettata dal contesto situazionale relativo al
momento dellesecuzione. While the end of the song is the clearest indication of Thyrsis adaptation
of The Sorrows of Daphnis to its performance context, it is not the only one. Incorporation of the
audience into the song is most fully dramatized in the song contest of Idyll 5, where mockery of the
other singer is an essential ingredient of the performance. Cf. Finnegan (1977), especially Chapter
3, Composition, 5287, for this feature of oral poetry in a range of cultures.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.9596.
43
95 is addressed to a listener who (unlike us) understands what lies behind

Aphrodites behavior.
The words that Thyrsis has Aphrodite address to Daphnis also presuppose his audiences knowledge of this back story (1.9798):57
.

d e4 3 9-;
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And she said, Daphnis, did you not indeed assert that you would bind Love, and
have you not now been bound by fierce Love yourself?
This speech finally provokes a response. Daphnis reproaches Aphrodite for

her cruelty and, promising that, even in the underworld, he will remain hostile to desire (100103), hints at her illicit sexual relations with Anchises by
aposiopesis, breaking off suddenly in the middle of speaking (105): Dont
they say about Cypris that the cowherd . . . ? The figure is theatrical,
and we should no doubt imagine another pause here. Daphnis then orders
Aphrodite to begone to Ida, begone to Anchises and ironically sketches
the pastoral scene she can expect to find upon arrival (106107). He reminds
her that Adonis too is in season (109) and tells her, in language reminiscent of comedy (112),58 V U4 )* 9 '
, go
and stand next to Diomedes again. He even puts into her mouth the
words with which she is to greet him (113).
From here on Daphnis addresses his mute companions. He bids farewell
to the wild animals (11516), then to the spring Arethusa and the rivers of
Thybris (11617). After his colloquial abuse of Aphrodite he now sounds
like a tragic hero saying goodbye to his world.59 Envisioning his death, he
composes an epitaph for himself (1.12021):
9-;
2J
U )
8 $ 0 Y
4

9-;
8 J 4 Y 4
. /
I am that Daphnis who herded his cows here, Daphnis who watered his bulls and
calves here.
57
58
59
Ogilvie (1962) 106: [the song] is throughout allusive, seeming to assume from the listener familiarity
with the story. (Although Ogilvie means the poems audience rather than the goatherd, on which
see below.) Cf. Ott (1969) 112: Die Vorgeschichte bleibt auerhalb des erzahlten Geschehens.
Aristophanes Clouds 824, 1177, Frogs 378, 627, Birds 131, Peace 77, etc. Cf. Gow (1952) ad loc. 1.112:
The proposal to regard U4 )* as a final clause dependent on , in 106, and to treat what
intervenes as parenthesis, gives unsatisfactory sense, and its gross clumsiness is accentuated by the
imperative in 113.
Ott (1969) 126 n. 365 compares Sophocles Ajax 85665, Philoctetes 93640. Cf. Walsh (1985) 9: What
Thyrsis uncovers as he tries to reach the hidden parts of Daphnis tragic consciousness is a public
performance, a substitute for the inner man.
44
Its form recalls the sphragis, and so associates Daphnis with Thyrsis himself.60 The resemblance becomes closer in the invocation of Pan that follows
(1.12326):
= %$
%-
+/ 2 / f $ g4
+ / (; 1 A

5
/ 2
&
$
R-
he " W
&
)
g
-
(
. /
O Pan, Pan, whether you are on the high mountains of Lycaeus, or whether you
wander great Mainolus, come to the island of Sicily, and leave the peak of Helice,
and that steep tomb of the son of Lycaeon, which is a wonder even to immortals.
The list of locations in which a god might be found is a standard feature of

kletic hymns, which call on them to appear, but here the blend of heightened
emotion and geography recalls the address to the Nymphs with which the
song began: the Daphnis created by Thyrsis performance resembles the
performer who created him.
The prayer continues with Daphnis offering his syrinx to the god (1.128
30):
5
/, =
6 -
;1

2 B
3 L-
#
] $ 2J
? / d e4 2 i
, j. /
Come, lord, and carry off this pipe, honey-scented from the pressed wax, well
bound around its lip. For I myself am now being dragged off to Hades by love.61
The pathos of the appeal to the absent pastoral divinity is emphasized by

the repeated 5
/, come (124, 128), the verb which marks the arrival of
Daphnis unsolicited visitors (77, 80, 81, 95). Moreover, the demonstrative
in -
. . . , this pipe, suggests that a gesture from Daphnis
accompanies the offer. We know from the opening of the poem that the
syrinx is the goatherds instrument (13); Thyrsis asked him to play it for
him (1214), and the goatherd refused because it might anger Pan (1516).
Thyrsis, then, has Daphnis point to the goatherds pipe as he offers his own
to Pan. By indicating that they are both syrinx players, Thyrsis suggests
that Daphnis resembles the goatherd as well as himself. It is an adaptation
of his song in performance that celebrates his listeners skill even as it
acknowledges his refusal to play.
60
61
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.12021.

My translation follows Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.129:
is adverbial, . . . L-
in tmesis,
and 3 accusative of respect.
45
Yet why does Thyrsis spend two verses describing the pipes look and
smell as he approaches the songs emotional climax? Does this not risk
spoiling the impact of its most sublime moment?62 The verses seem to be
a miniature ecphrasis echoing the goatherds description of the bowl: the
syrinx is

| 2 B, honey-scented from the pressed
wax, just as the kissubion is 1

1 B*, sealed with sweet
wax, and 5 ;-

, still fragrant from the carving (27
28); it is
3 L-
, well bound around its lip, just
as on the bowl 3 ? , ivy curls above the lip
(29).63 While it is natural for the goatherd to dwell on the kissubions decoration rather than its function, since this is what makes it remarkable,
Thyrsis emphasis upon the pipes appearance rather than its music seems
best explained as a response to the goatherds description. By referring to it
in this way, he makes a point about the superiority of his own art. While
visual representations may be able to elicit fascination, drawing the viewer
into their world, the verbal arts can reach out to their audience, actively
intervening in their lives as they attend to the performance. The point is
similar to Pindars in the opening of Nemean 5, where he contrasts the
immobility of statues doomed to remain where they stand with the mobility of the poem that speeds in all directions bringing news of the athletes
victory. The point of the contrast here, however, is not the capacity of a
text for unlimited dissemination, but rather the fiction of a live performance in which the singer can respond directly to the living presence of
his audience. Face to face with his listener, he confronts him with the illusion of a fictional world that maps itself actively onto his own real space
and time, just as (as we shall see in the next chapter) the deixis of performed drama maps the fictional space of the play onto the real space of its
audience.
Daphnis ends his speech by inviting the world to change because he
is dying (13236). The last disorder he invokes is an unprecedented song
contest (136): let owls sing against nightingales from the mountains.64
The image reminds us that the herdsmen look to nature for paradigms of
their music (cf. 13, 78).65 As the nightingale is more melodious than the
owl, so the quality of the singing is all important when they judge their
62
63
64
65
Demetrius On Style 119: the use of an elevated style on small matters is a source of frigidity.
The resemblance is noted by Cairns (1984) 101102, who sees both objects as symbols of bucolic
poetry.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 1.136: cry in competition with . . ., i.e. rival.
For Miles (1977) 154, the herdsmens delight in inarticulate sound here and in the opening of the
poem emphasizes the superficiality of their response to the very art which they value so highly.
46
own songs.66 Thyrsis begins by celebrating his sweet voice (65), and in
conclusion promises the Muses not that he will remember another song,
but that he will sing to them more sweetly on another occasion (145). The
singing is also what the goatherd admires in his performance (1.14648):
)1 1
k 1

) " 3
4
( / a4 3- H

1 2 ;1
C*.
May your lovely mouth be filled with honey, Thyrsis, and filled with honeycomb,
and may you eat the sweet figs of Aegilus, since you sing better than a cicada.
We might guess as much from the form of the song. Thyrsis declamatory opening gives his own voice center stage as one half of a supposed
dialogue with the Nymphs. After this there are several kinds of vocal
representation: narrative for animals, indirect speech for human beings,
dramatic impersonation for the gods and Daphnis. Each new speakers
entrance is marked, though no exits are reported.67 Unlike drama, the
characters are only present as long as Thyrsis is singing their part, and the
most important part is Daphnis. This is the centerpiece of the performance,
the means by which the celebrated pastoral singer stages his resemblance
to his legendary predecessor: of the eighty-one verses of the song, eighteen
are refrain, twenty-nine impersonation of Daphnis.68
This song, however, is a stylistic medley. It incorporates tragedy, comedy,
epitaph, and hymn in a rhetorical bricolage held together by the performance
itself. The poem deconstructs its own illusion of primitive, oral song even
as it produces it. The verbal spell that (within the poem) makes Daphnis
and Aphrodite present to the goatherd with the immediacy of a quasimagical enactment is, to the reader, a collage of textual sources.69 The more
the goatherd insists upon his pleasure, the greater the cognitive dissonance
grows. For to understand his enthusiasm, we have to imagine an experience
of the song that is quite different from our own. His grasp of the story is
clearly superior to our own, since the identity of the anonymous maiden at
verse 82, the role of Aphrodite (9598, 13839), and the nature of Daphnis
death (13941) are not obstacles to his enjoyment as they are to ours. Even
66
67
68
69
Cf. Id. 5.13637, where Comatas appears to win the song contest because he is a better singer than
Lacon: it is not right for jays to compete with a nightingale, Lacon, nor hoopoes with swans. Note
also how he taunts Lacon at 5.29 as a wasp buzzing against a cicada.
]
/ he&, 77; ]

0G 1
F
K
]

80; ]
/ 8 %, 81; ]
. . .
7, 95.
Cf. Lycidas in Idyll 7, where the archetypal goatherd sings of Daphnis and Comatas. Here too the
voice is emphasized (7.82, 88).
Cf. Hardie (2002) 1323 on the creation and unmasking of such presence effects in Ovid.
47
if we accept that the poems original audience would have enjoyed piecing
the myth together from allusions in the song,70 this pleasure is hardly that
of the goatherd himself.71 Finally, since the entire poem, and not just The
Sorrows of Daphnis, is in hexameters, the pleasure the goatherd finds in
the latter can only be guessed at; it requires imagining for ourselves a
difference between the sound of the poems various parts that we do not
experience in reading them and which would not fully manifest itself in
performance either. The representation of the human voice within the
poem could only ever contrast with the reproduction of that voice in a
staging of the poem. In its representation of oral performance, the poem
playfully stages its own distance from orality.72 Its impossibly melodious
shepherd is the product of a poet who knows that he can depend on the
imagination of readers to bring his world to life.73
Homer, by contrast, avoids drawing attention to the difference between
speech and song within his poems by reporting the content of the songs
that occur within them indirectly. Thus, in Book 8 of the Odyssey, when
Odysseus reaches the land of the Phaeaecians, and he and the court are
entertained by the songs of their resident bard, Demodocus, we are told
what Demodocus sang about, but his actual singing is not staged for us
in the poem. Moreover, there is no mention of the quality of Demodocus
voice, so that the rhapsode who performs the Odyssey is not obliged to
emulate a superb display of singing in his performance of the poem. The
text of the poem, in other words, anticipates a performance that is dramatic
(in Demodocus longer song, the story of Ares and Aphrodite, there is a
good deal of dialogue between the characters once the frame of indirect
reporting has been established), but which does not feature vocal display as
a primary attraction. Conversely, the alternation of meters in tragedy allows
the choruses to be performed as the songs they claim to be, and differentiates them from the dialogue between characters. These texts, then, ensure
that the difference between speech and song does not become problematic
70
71
72
73
For Ogilvie (1962) 110, the song contains clues no doubt intentionally difficult clues to lead
[Theocritus] well-read and educated readers to fill in the gaps for themselves and to admire his
ingenuity of allusion. Cf., however, Gow (1952) II.1: T.s story was no more intelligible to his
scholiasts than to us. For modern responses, see Arnott (1996) 63, mysterious and elusive; Fantuzzi
(2000) 146, obscure presentation.
Cf. Miles (1977) 56.
Cf. Zumthor (1987) 37, for whom everything within a text that nous renseigne sur lintervention
de la voix humaine dans sa publication is an index of orality.
I would therefore disagree with the suggestion of Henderson (1999) 145 that pastoral poetry is in fact
not past-oral but merely post-oral, still haunted, in other words, by its distance from its origins
in the improvisational singing that must contain its true, real essence.
48
in performance; if this difference cannot be materially instantiated, the

representation of it circumvents the need for its production.74
In Idyll 1 the non-performativity of the text thus becomes another
marker of its fully fictional character. While face-to-face storytelling (as
the poem portrays it) responds directly to its audiences desires, the text
must seduce its readers with the promise of an experience they cannot
have outside it.75 In the gap that opens up between representation and
performance Theocritus places the reader, whose representative within the
poem is the nameless goatherd. It is he who shows us the work of the
imagination in his description of the bowl, so that we see how we are to
bridge this gap in our reading of the song, when he, in direct contact with
its immediacy, can no longer be our guide.
74
75
Likewise, when traditional operas wish to mark certain moments within them as song, not speech
(as is often the case when the fictional characters are singers, as in Monteverdis Orfeo and Wagners
Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg), the shift from recitative to aria allows this difference to manifest
itself.
Chambers (1984) 1112. Finkelberg (1998) 9193 makes a similar claim.
chapter 2
The presence of the fictional world
This chapter looks at the fictionality of the bucolic world from the perspective of narrative mode; that is to say, whether that world is brought
into being through the dramatic speech of its fictional characters, through
narration by the poet, or through some combination of the two. By way
of introduction to the discussion of this question in Theocritus, I consider
the relationship between fictional presence and dramatic enactment in preHellenistic poetry, in Hellenistic poetry other than the Idylls, and in ancient
literary theory.
In an important discussion of the mimetic poetic of Greek hymns,
Jan Maarten Bremer and William Furley have emphasized that the function of dramatic imitation in early cult hymns was to foster a sense of
identity between the participants in the cult and the mythical beings their
performance instantiated. Thus, for example, in the Cretan Palaikastro
Hymn to Zeus armed warriors known as Kouretes reenact the rescue of the
infant Zeus from his infanticidal father. Amid the clashing of cymbals (to
drown out the cries of the baby), they address him as the greatest Kouros,
describe the performance of their own hymn around his altar, and invite
him to leap into (or for) their homes and fields.1 For the young Cretan
men who perform the hymn, the reenactment of their ancestors through
dramatic performance is a way to identify themselves with them, and so
replicate in themselves the ideal of young manhood these ancestors represent. For the audience who observes them, their performance is both a
demonstration of their success in this regard and a way to make these absent
ancestors present as a reminder of their continuing value as role models.
One can likewise speak of the rhapsodes performance of Homer as a
presentification to his audience of the model heroes of epic. Socrates
calls Ion rhapsode and actor, just as he calls his audience spectators
(Ion 535ab), and he emphasizes the audiences complete absorption as it
1
Bremer and Furley (2001) II.618.
49
50
contemplates the heroes staged by his performance.2 While the rhapsode

is simultaneously aware of the imaginary world produced by his performance and the real world of his audience, whom he eyes with the care of
a professional performer, the latter lose all self-possession in the presence
of the characters he stages. For the duration of the performance, the world
it manifests usurps the reality of the world in which it appears, and, as in
the Hymn, the performers body and voice are the medium by which the
absent world of the past becomes visible and tangible in the present world
of the audience.3
The classical and Hellenistic stage work similarly in their production of
the worlds of tragedy and New Comedy. David Wiles has described how
the fictional space enacted on the stage projects beyond the dramatic space
itself, and imposes itself on the space occupied by the audience.4 Euripides
Ion offers a striking example. In this play the protagonist is, unknown to
himself, the offspring of his mothers rape by the god Apollo. Having been
abandoned by her at birth, he was brought to his fathers temple at Delphi
by Hermes, where he now serves as an attendant. One of his custodial duties
is to drive away from the temples roof the flocks of birds that threaten to
land there (15363):

.
!"
#
$ %.
&'(
) *+, - ./
0+, 1( !"
2
3 .
4 / 5 6 #5

7. 68 0
* $
;
Ah! Ah! The winged ones are coming now and leaving their nests on Parnassus.
Dont you dare land on the roof or in the golden house. Ill get you too with my
bow, herald of Zeus, who surpass the strength of birds with your beak. Here comes
another one winging its way towards the precincts, a swan! Will you not take your
purple foot elsewhere?5
2
3
On the rhapsode as actor, see Herington (1985) 51.

See Vernant (1991) 15163 for a discussion of the power of the archaic cult image to make the invisible
visible, to assign a place in our world to entities from the other world. Gumbrecht (2004) 3031
likewise discusses the manifestation of the divine in medieval drama as a production of presence
mediated through the materiality of the actors bodies.
5 My translation of the text of Diggle (1994).
Wiles (1991) 37.
51
Just as in the opening of the play Hermes announces that the stage on
which he stands is this land of Delphi, so here Ion points to what the
audience can see the stage building and the slopes behind the theater
as a way to get it to imagine what it cannot see: nests on the cliffs of
Parnassus, an eagle, a swan with purple feet. The poet exploits a wide range
of deictic expressions vocatives, imperatives, demonstratives, and verbs
of motion so that his audience will reimagine the here and now of its
actual physical location through his characters eyes.6 The impossibility of
staging everything that Ion points to is, as Demetrius On Style 195 observes,
a chance for the performer to show his skill: The rush for the bow provides
many movements for the actor, as does looking up into the air as he speaks
to the swan, and all the rest of the stage business which is fashioned for the
actor. As Demetrius observations make clear, imaginary deixis is a risky
business, and its effectiveness depends upon the charisma of the performer.
It is, however, anchored in the transformation of the dramatic space that
has already taken place in the audiences mind, and in the body of the
performer, by whose gestures it continues to be realized. Its function is not
metatheatrical; it rather extends the fictional world of the drama so that it
embraces the space that surrounds the theater.
It is interesting to compare the Euripidean stage with the stage of New
Comedy in this respect. In the prologue to Menanders Dyskolos a character
(who in due course will reveal himself to be the god Pan) appears from the
central door of the stage and speaks to the audience (17):
0 90 : ; / *,
<$, / " 4 5
<
( 5( = 5
#& !(!", >/ #? &.
/ @!/ ? / [#] + 2"
A$(, @&(* 6(
*
7
/ B ( C(8.
Imagine that this place is Phyle in Attica, and that the shrine from which I appear
belongs to those who live here and are capable of cultivating these rocks. Its a
famous holy place. The farm here on the right is the home of Knemon, your
typical recluse, a bad-tempered man who shuns the crowd.7
As many scholars have suggested, the informative prologue of New Comedy

has its origins in the prologues of Euripides, where a god who knows the
full story gives the prehistory to the dramatic action that is about to unfold.
6
7
Cf. Wiles (1997), especially Chapter 5, The chorus: Its transformation of space, 11432.
My translation of the text of Handley (1965).
52
So in the Ion, for example, it is Hermes who appears on stage first, and
informs the audience that the character we are about to see is, unknown
to himself, the love child of Creusa and Apollo. He does not, however,
address them directly, or in any way acknowledge that he is in the presence
of observers, and it is here that a distinctive difference of New Comedy
can be noted.8 While the prologue speech of Euripides contains an implied
imperative to the audience to imagine the world of the fiction (I have
come to this land of Delphi, says Hermes), in Menander this has become
an explicit compact between playwright and audience expressed through
the prologue speaker who is in a liminal position with regard to the play as
such, neither quite inside, nor entirely outside it.9 The presence of the god
on stage as an agent or explicator of the plot occurs before, or at least apart
from, the main dramatic business transacted by its human agents, so that
he figures as a stand-in for the poet himself.10 Menanders mediation of
fictional space by means of this stand-in is bold yet subtle. He does not ask
his audience to map an unfamiliar location onto the visible geography, as
Euripides asks his audience to see the site of the theater as Delphi. Rather, he
asks for something that may in fact be more difficult to accomplish, namely
that they conform their knowledge of a real, local shrine the temple of
the Nymphs at Phyle to the needs of stage presentation. The distinctive
cliffside cave that is the real-world site of the sanctuary becomes, in the play,
a typical wayside shrine, with houses and farms around it.11 The spatial
transformation of real particular into fictional universal is immediately
echoed in the definition of the plays leading character. After identifying the
stages central door as that of the shrine Pan points to the farm here on the
right as that of Knemon, your typical recluse (the subtle universalizing
force of @&(* 6( is hard to capture in translation),
and a bad-tempered man, the generalizing adjective that gives the play
its title. Having given the back story of the plot that is about to unfold,
Pan reminds the audience that it is set amid familiar local places. The badtempered man, he tells us, hates everyone, from his wife and neighbors
here all the way to Cholargos way down there. From his location in
8
9
10
11
Bain (1975) 22. For the ongoing debate as to whether or not Old Comedy presents a consistent
dramatic illusion comparable to those of tragedy and New Comedy, which it occasionally breaks
through parabases and other such metatheatrical moments, or should rather be considered essentially
non-illusionistic, see Slater (1995) 2930, who takes the view that the presentation of a consistent
dramatic illusion is in fact one of the characteristic developments of New Comedy.
Bain (1977) 186; Gutzwiller (2000) 115.
In the Aspis Menander delays the prologue some one hundred lines, offering a beginning in medias
res, which is then supplemented by the overview of the goddess Tyche (Chance).
See Handley (1965) 2025.
53
Phyle, Pan looks down the road to Athens, extending Knemons loathing
as far as the village of Cholargos, and so stopping just short of the city itself
in which the audience is now watching the play. As in Euripides, imaginary
deixis extends the plays fictional geography from the stage out into the
world of the audience, superimposing itself upon it. Menander, however,
uses this technique as a way to have his audience reimagine this world as
the site of universal stories, like the one he is about to tell them.
Callimachus use of the dramatic mode to create fictional space is best
exemplified by the Hymns. These are usually divided into mimetic (Hymns 2,
4, 5) and non-mimetic poems (Hymns 1, 3, 6), with the former being spoken
by a dramatic character who is localized in a fictional time and space and
responds dramatically to people and events within it, and the latter being
spoken by a narrator, who, like the speaker of the Homeric Hymns, shows
relatively little sign of individualization.12 The mimetic Hymns make use of
the present tense of drama, and an abundance of deictic words, to dramatize
their speakers response to events occurring within the world of the poem.
So Hymn 2 begins:
DE F G*( #

& 4+,
E 4 / 5 H=, H= 4
@*.
$ = 7 I <"J @&

F&8; #5
F K$ L 7 "+
#+, F ? 7 # M5 / @ .
0 @
&(,
? " F != / 5 &
> ? 5 $ # / #7
.
N* . . .
How the shoot of Apollos laurel shakes! How the whole temple shakes! Stand back,
stand back, whoever is polluted. It must be that Apollo is now striking the doors
with his lovely foot. Do you not see? The Delian palm suddenly nods sweetly, and
the swan in the air is singing beautifully. You, bars, now draw back from the gates
yourselves, and you bolts too! For the god is no longer far away. And the youths
there, get ready for song and dance. Apollo does not appear to everyone . . .13
12
13
Cf. Harder (1992), who argues that Callimachus is playing with mimetic and diegetic modes of
storytelling in these poems, just as he does in his other works. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo the
rhapsode apparently performs the poem as a dramatic character, in the persona of Homer, the blind
man [who] lives in rocky Chios (172); see Zanetto (1996) 37, Nagy (1996) 62. This is in keeping
with the poems praise of mimesis, the lines addressed to the Delian women, who, in their own song,
know how to imitate the voices . . . of all men (16263). Even here, however, very little attention
to this impersonation is apparent in the text of the Hymn; if it was Callimachus model for the
dramatic speakers of his mimetic Hymns, he has expanded this aspect of the poem to the point that
his imitation constitutes, for all practical purposes, a new kind of poem.
My translation of the text of Williams (1978). I follow his interpretation of 4+ (16), and the
structure of the doors (18, 21).
54
The speaker begins with an expression of amazement at an event unfolding

before his eyes. As the urgency of Ions speech before the temple at Delphi
encourages the audience to imagine the invisible birds that threaten its roof,
so here the speakers dramatic reaction asks the reader or listener to imagine
a presence that lies just outside the fictional space in which he himself is
located, the god who is just about to burst into it. However, to communicate
these effects, Callimachus uses the fiction of questions addressed to a (/
*
(, or mute companion, a feature of both choral lyric and mime.14
Callimachus exploits a silent presence in the speakers foreground in order
to point to rather than simply describe events taking place somewhat
further away: Do you not see? The Delian palm suddenly nods sweetly,
and the swan in the air is singing beautifully. Rather than the assumed
compact between dramatist and audience in Euripides, or the explicit one
in Menander, Callimachus uses an I/thou structure to mediate the poems
fictional world to a reader or listener who will adopt the thou position
relative to the poems speaker. In the case of choral lyric or mime, the
speakers address a figure who, though silent, is physically present to them
in the performance space, a chorus member or fellow actor, who is therefore
also present to them within the imaginary world their performance enacts.
By adopting this device for the Hymns, Callimachus creates an addressee for
the poems speaker who is fictionally present within the world of the poem,
yet not instantiated as the poem is enacted, whether this enactment takes
the form of reading, or solo recitation.15 For if no one shares the stage with
14
15
Fantuzzi (1993b) 934, 945. Depew (1993) likewise derives the mimesis of the Hymns from the resources
of choral lyric. As Danielewicz (1990) and Felson (1999) have shown, fictional deixis (Deixis am
Phantasma) is a feature of choral lyric, where it contrasts with a real deixis (demonstratio ad oculos)
that refers to the here and now of the audience and choral celebrant. From this perspective, the
innovation of the Hymns is to fictionalize the primary deixis directed at the real world the chorus
shares with its audience. For the silent addressee in mime, see Wiemken (1972) 22, Albert (1988)
8083.
For the continuing debates about the performance of the Hymns, see Falivene (1990) and the response
to Cameron (1995) in Bing (2000). Various arguments have been advanced about the performance of
other Hellenistic literary drama. Legrand (1898) 41418 argued that the multiple parts and changes of
place in Idyll 15 made performance inconceivable. Mastromarco (1984) 2163 claimed that ambiguities
of space, persons, exits, and entrances in the poems of Herodas could only be clarified through a
full staging with more than one actor. Puchner (1993) 19, 30, by contrast, argued that clarification
of textual ambiguity through performance reverses the known procedures of ancient dramaturgy, in
which stage directions are written into the text. The poems contain no objective playable space,
and their world is experienced as a narrative that unfolds through the eyes of the principal speaker.
Hunter (1993) 3940, on the other hand, notes that every poem (except 8) contains more than one
speaking character, and that in every poem one character predominates, a form that seems well
suited to performance by a small troupe dominated by the leading mime. Noting, however, that
other scholars have charged Mastromarco with underestimating a solo performers ability to project
more than one role, he concludes: General agreement on these questions may be hardly possible,
because they depend upon subjective assessments of what is and is not possible in performance.
55
the performer as the poem is recited, his speech positions the live audience
as a fictional addressee just as it would a reader.
It is possible, then, to see the role of deixis in the poem along the lines laid
out by theorists of deixis in modern fiction, that is, as effecting a vicarious
transport from the readers real time and place to the fictional here and
now in which the imagined action takes place, a process usually referred
to as deictic shift.16 While the Hymns surely achieve this, however, an
account of the dramatic mode in the Hellenistic poets that saw its function
solely in effecting the same kind of transport to a fictional location that
could be effected by a non-dramatic narrator would miss an important
aspect of its handling by them. For these poems begin with the speaking
voice of the character, without preamble or introductory setting by the
poet. The reader is not transported gradually to a fictional world located
within the pages of a book but confronted by a voice that accosts him face
to face, from the written page. The mimetic Hymns, in particular, preserve
the frontality of actual drama; by using the device of the fictional addressee,
they project their world outward, into the world of the reader, just as the
world of the dramatists pushes out into the world of the audience. It is
in this that their uncanny effect resides, and it makes reading them quite
unlike reading a work of narrative fiction.17
This unsettling quality is the difference between entering a fictional
world as its unseen observer and having that world present itself to you. It is
in these terms, then, that I want to briefly reconsider the difference between
showing and telling, mimesis and diegesis, as it appears in the theoretical
discussions of narrative form in Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus. In Book 3
of the Republic Socrates, having settled what kinds of things poets ought
and ought not to tell in their stories, moves on to the question of how they
ought to tell them. He explains that everything that is said by storytellers
or poets is a narrative ( $!
) of past, present, or future things. Poets
accomplish this diegesis either by narrative alone (O08 !$
), or by
a diegesis that comes about through imitation ( = $
( !!58),
or by a diegesis that comes about through both narrative and imitation (
@5() (392cd). Thus, in the opening of the Iliad, when Homer tells
the story speaking in his own voice, this is narrative alone, whereas, when
he tells the story through the direct speech of Chryses, this is narrative that
16
17
For deictic shift in modern fiction, see Galbraith (1995) 1959. Vicarious transport is the title
of Felson (1999), where it refers to the imaginary journey undertaken by the audience of Pindars
Pythian 4.
Hunter (1992b) 13 captures this aspect of the poems well: Do you (sing.) not see? asks the poetic
voice (H. 2.4), and we are compelled to answer Well, no.
56
comes about through imitation. Because the Iliad and the Odyssey consist
of the poet speaking in his own voice and in the voice of his characters, they
belong to the third kind of diegesis, that which comes about through both
narrative and imitation. Drama, on the other hand, because the poets own
voice is excluded, belongs to the second kind of diegesis, that which comes
about through imitation, whereas the first kind, that which consists of
narrative alone, without direct speech, is best exemplified by the dithyramb
(392e394c). The importance of these distinctions becomes apparent in the
ensuing discussion. For Plato, the agency of poetic speech is not confined
to the poetic world in which it is spoken. Expressions of feeling on the part
of poetic characters not only affect their interlocutors in the poem, but
compel an involuntary accommodation of the listeners soul to the world
the poem enacts. The effects of exposure to such speech are long-lasting;
the powerful emotions voiced in epic and drama leave traces in the soul
of the listener that may induce him to replicate the behavior of the poetic
character if suitable real-world triggers are present (Book 3, 395cd, 401bc;
cf. Book 10, 605c606b).
For Plato, the border between poetic worlds and the real world is an
open one; the illusory presence that emanates from poetic speech and
insinuates itself into the soul of the listener accords well with what we
have seen of dramatic enactment in archaic and classical performance
the presentification of an absent world in the Palaikastro Hymn, and the
usurpation of real-world geography by fictional geography in Euripides
and Menander. In Aristotle, by contrast, there is a strict separation of
these domains. Narrative poetry offers a model of the real world that is
more useful in understanding that world than historical narrative because
contingent details that obscure the perception of universal behaviors have
(ideally) been eliminated from it (Poetics 9). The value of poetry is in
its plots, a point on which Aristotle is abundantly clear, and the kind
of cognitive processing of them that he envisages allows for little direct
influence of fiction upon reality what is evidently a model will hardly
have the same ontological conviction as the thing it models. Likewise,
while tragedy is usefully affective, it is so because the catharsis that occurs
in response to it gets something inessential out of the soul, rather than
introducing some alien element into it.
As Stephen Halliwell has pointed out, it is a little difficult to grasp
why, on this understanding of the function of narrative literature, Aristotle
should attach so much importance to the dramatic mode of presentation.18
18
Halliwell (2002) 168.
57
He retains Platos distinction between three modes of literary diegesis

narrative, dramatic, and mixed though in the Poetics (Chapter 3) they
are called modes of mimesis.19 However, while Plato rejects narrative that
makes abundant use of direct speech because of the threat it poses to
the soul of the listener, Aristotle praises Homers poems because, in their
extensive use of it, they approach so nearly to the condition of drama
(Chapter 24). How, then, to explain Aristotles pro-mimetic prejudice,20
which seems unrelated to the larger cognitive goals that he proposes for
literary representation? For plot can surely be grasped as well, if not better,
in narrative as in dramatic form. The teleological progress he envisages
towards the ideally dramatic status of poetic fictions21 is not simply a
reflection of the literary historical developments of his own time. While
dithyramb (Platos example of poetic narrative without direct speech) may
no longer have been available as an example, since it was no longer purely
narrative in form,22 epic poetry in catalogue form continued to enjoy great
success throughout the fourth and third centuries: the Lyde of Antimachus
is a collection of unhappy love stories in the tradition of Hesiods Catalogue
of Women, a catalogue of heterosexual loves appears in the Leontion of
Hermesianax, and of homosexual loves in the Erotes of Phanocles.23 From
such fragments as remain, it would appear that these poems contained
as little direct speech as the works of Hesiod that they imitate. Indeed,
rather than being a thing of the past, poetry in the form of pure narrative
seems, like its opposite, literary drama, to have been rather in vogue in
the early Hellenistic period, perhaps as a result of the regard for Hesiod
over Homer on the part of some Hellenistic poets. Aristotles preference
for direct speech as the form in which exemplary plots should be enacted
is neither an accommodation to historical developments nor a necessary
outcome of his own account of poetic value. It can only be explained by
supposing that, for Aristotle, the dramatic mode made the fictional events
of which such plots consist more immediately present, and so made these
plots more concrete and graspable.24
While Aristotles ideas about the value of narrative fiction for life require
firm boundaries between the two domains in order to maintain the useful, but subordinate, position of the former as model, his valuation of the
19
20
22
23
24
See Lucas (1968) ad loc. 1448a2024 on the close resemblance to the Republic.
21 Halliwell (1989) 66.
Genette (1992) 22.
Lucas (1968) ad loc. 1447a13; cf. Hordern (2002) 18.
The fragments are collected in Powell (1925). Cameron (1995) 38086 considers the importance of
catalogue poetry in the Hellenistic period. Cf. Fantuzzi (1995) 29, with n. 86.
Halliwell (2002) 168.
58
dramatic over the narrative mode can be seen to be continuous with the
experiments on the part of fourth- and third-century poets with the kinds
of presence effects that can be achieved by one mode or another. While
the Poetics privileges the dramatic over the narrative and mixed modes,
the poets continue to be interested in the varied possibilities offered by
all three. In addition to these macrostructural possibilities available at the
outset, the Hellenistic poets also show a keen awareness of the effects that
can be produced by different kinds of transition from narrative to speech
within a poem. Callimachus, for example, in the Hymn to Zeus, ends almost
one third of the passages of direct speech without any formula to indicate
that the speech has come to an end and narrative by the poet has been
resumed.25 The occasional difficulty in ascertaining whether the voice that
is present to us in reading is that of the poet or one of his characters is
in keeping with the tendency in the non-mimetic Hymns for the narrator to become a palpable presence in the telling of the sacred narrative.26
Apollonius practice is more conservative in this regard; he carefully varies
the formulas with which direct speech is introduced and concluded, but
not so noticeably as for his narrator to intrude as a factor in the shaping of
the story in this way.27 Here Theocritus offers the most striking innovation.
His Idyll 22, a hymn to Castor and Pollux, begins, like a Homeric Hymn,
with the voice of the poet stating his intention to praise his subjects, and
then going on to tell their story in the manner of an epic narrator. However,
as he recounts the scene in which Pollux, in the course of his voyage as one
of the Argonauts, encounters the monstrous Amycus and engages him in
a boxing match, he eschews the he said/she said tags with which speech
is conventionally framed in epic narration, and presents the dialogue as an
exchange of single lines of direct speech that resembles such exchanges in
tragedy.28
The discussion of this device that is most revealing for an understanding
of its effect upon a contemporary reader is in Longinus. In Chapter 27 of
On the Sublime he considers unexpected transitions to direct speech as a
source of sublimity. He calls such shifts an outburst of feeling, in which
the writer, exchanging places, suddenly turns himself into his character,
and cites Iliad 15.34649 as an example: Hector shouted aloud, calling on
25
27
28
26 Harder (1992) 394.

McLennan (1977) 147.
For a detailed study of such formulas in Book 1 of the Argonautica, see Fantuzzi (1988) 6581.
Thomas (1996) 236 sees the passage as internal intertextuality, recalling the agonistic passages
of Idylls 4 and 5. This, however, misses the surprise in the unexpected change in the mode of
presentation: the Idylls to which he refers employ the dramatic mode from the outset. Idyll 25, most
likely not by Theocritus but a gifted imitator, apparently goes even further in this regard; in the
form in which it has been transmitted, it opens with a character replying to a question that has been
put to him before the poem begins. For a sympathetic account of the poem, see Hunter (1998).
59
the Trojans to return to the ships and to leave the bloody spoils. Whomever
I see apart from the ships of his own free will, for him I will there plan
death.29 In this passage, he imagines, the poet took up the narrative as
belonging to himself, then suddenly, without any kind of advanced notice,
transferred the abrupt threat to the angry prince. It would be anticlimactic, he adds, if the poet were to add a verb of speaking, and, as it stands, the
change of construction (L *! &J
) has suddenly overtaken
him as he is changing into his character (/ J). Longinus
cites a similar use of the figure in Hecataeus, and compares its emotional
effect to the sudden change of addressee within a speech, examples of which
he provides from pseudo-Demosthenes Oration 25, and Odyssey 4.68189,
where Penelope shifts suddenly from criticizing the herald who has led
the suitors to her hall to censuring the suitors themselves. For Longinus,
then, the omission of a verb of speaking, and the unexpected shift in the
mode of presentation this enacts, have an effect far more powerful than
we readers of modern fiction, long accustomed to this narrative shorthand,
can easily imagine. For in this moment of transition the presence of the
poet as the shaping force behind his own poem is suddenly revealed, as he
morphs before our eyes into the characters that are the externalizations of
his own imaginative energies. Critical attention to this matter can likewise
be found in the scholia to Homer and the dramatic poets.30 Moreover, the
Prolegomena to the scholia to Theocritus note as remarkable the fact that,
in his bucolic poetry, he made use of all three of the modes of presentation
outlined in the narrative theory of Plato and Aristotle, and they follow
up this observation in the introductions to the individual Idylls by noting
how each poem exemplifies this theory by either including or omitting the
voice of the poet.31 Modistics, as Gerard Genette christened this branch
29
30
31
As Russell (1964) ad loc. 27.1 notes, Longinus punctuates the passage differently from modern
editors, who understand #
7
and #P as imperatival and part of the direct speech rather
than dependent on #5 in 347.
Fantuzzi (1988) 5254.
Prolegomena D, Wendel (1914) 45: All poetry has three characters, narrative, dramatic and mixed.
Bucolic poetry is a mixture of every kind, simply mingled together. For which reason it is in fact
more appealing because of the diversity of the mixture, consisting at one time of the narrative kind,
at another of the dramatic, at another of the mixed, that is to say, the narrative and the dramatic.
Cf. Prolegomena E [d.], Wendel (1914) 5. For the introductions to the individual Idylls, see, for
example, Id. 1 arg., Wendel (1914) 23, Id. 5 arg., Wendel (1914) 154. Contra Van Sickle (1976) 31,
then, the use of these Hypotheses to introduce dramatic and non-dramatic poems does not indicate
that the dramatic Idylls dominated the generic conception of the collection formed by the person
who composed them, and who then extended this conception illegitimately to other poems. For
the Hypotheses are in fact used to note variations in the mode of presentation. For Platos tripartite
scheme as standard throughout antiquity, see Halliwell (2002) 168 n. 44. The scholia to Theocritus
originate in the work of Theon, who was active in Alexandria between 50 bce and 20 ce, though
his work was likely a synthesis of numerous predecessors. See Guhl (1969) fr. 1, cf. p. 3, Cameron
(1995) 191.
60
of literary theory,32 is clearly more than a means of categorization for both

Hellenistic poets and critics, and retained its vitality as an area for creative
experiment and critical analysis long after the particular conditions of textual production and performance in which the Platonic theory originated
had passed. Generally speaking, the choice of the dramatic over the narrative mode privileges the presence of the characters over the presence of the
poet. However, particular uses of this mode allow for subtle mediations of
their presence. As we shall see in Idyll 3, the use of a quasi-dramatic prologue encourages a quite specific, corporeal imagining of the poems main
character, while the use of writerly framing devices in Idyll 11 and Idyll 13
underscores the particular kinds of imaginative presence that belong to
beings of pure narrative (in Idyll 13) and beings who have the more intimate presence of fictional speakers (in Idyll 11).
i d y l l 3: the herdsman as actor

The speaker of Callimachus Hymn 2 is the leader of a public rite; his monologue has a function within the events to which he responds. Conversely,
his address to fellow participants identifies him for the poems audience;
we know who he is because of the instructions he gives to others, and these
have their place within an event that is underway as the poem begins. The
speaker has a reason to speak, and the poems narrative premise allows its
fictional world to be revealed naturalistically. Likewise, while the nature of
the dialogue in Idyll 1 emphasizes the fictionality of the world in which it
is produced, there is narrative motivation for the dialogue itself. Thyrsis
and the goatherd have occasion to refer to the particulars of the world in
which they are located, though that world may not resemble any that we
know. The situation in Idyll 3 is quite different, for the speaker reveals, by
his opening words, that he is alone. He is not speaking to anyone, and so,
by the standards of the real world, has no reason to be talking in the first
place (3.15):
A(&
( = 9 , 5 ;!
J*
C, F Q = #7.
Q , # / / 5, J*
= ;!,
= & 6!, Q / #*,
/ RJ/ &(, &
$ 7'S.
I go to serenade Amaryllis, my goats graze on the hill, and Tityrus herds them.
Tityrus, my dearly beloved, graze the goats, and lead them to the spring, Tityrus.
And watch out for the male, the yellowish one, in case he butts you.
32
Genette (1992) 83.
61
The goatherd has, it seems, already left his goats behind, and his reference
to the hill where he has left them is not deictic (there is no article or
demonstrative adjective); he is rather recalling to himself what has just
happened. If the poem had begun with the imperatives addressed to Tityrus
in verses 35, it would have resembled other literary drama, where the first
words are addressed in a natural way to characters within the dramatic
setting, and so invite the reader to imagine the fictional location in which
the poems action is taking place. Instead, because the goatherd begins by
referring to Tityrus in the third person, as if he were not present, when
he does refer to him in the second person in what follows, the effect is to
suggest not his presence within a fictional space he shares with the speaker
but an imaginary address in which the speaker continues to talk aloud, but
to himself.
The effect is disorienting. At the outset, the goatherd appears to address
the reader directly. We will not, it seems, have to imagine the world of the
poem by positioning ourselves as the speakers addressee within it, as in
the Callimachus hymn. Rather, that world will be revealed to us without
mediation, as the divine speakers of dramatic prologues tell the audience
what they need to imagine without the presence of a second party as stage
addressee.33 The goatherd, however, breaks off this communication as soon
as it is begun, and turns instead to apostrophizing his absent friend. Because
we have first accepted the fiction that we are being addressed directly by
the character from within his world, it is disconcerting to then have to trade
places, and imagine the world of the poem through the eyes of someone
within it. In addition, the goatherd is not in the same place as Tityrus, and
so we cannot imagine his surroundings through deictic references to a place
shared by the two of them. Instead, he occupies a transitional space that is
no longer the hillside where he has left his flocks, nor yet the cave to which
he has announced his intention of proceeding. The theatrical illusion is
empty; it is as if the speaker emerged from an entrance marked Hill,
pointed to an exit marked Cave, and now lingered on a stage devoid
of all fictional characteristics. Theocritus employs a recognizably theatrical
technique, but suspends its illusionary purpose; the voice speaks from the
page in a place we are not given to imagine.
It is possible to read the goatherds emergence ironically. The theatricality that surrounds it points ahead to the deliberately staged performance
that he will give before the cave of Amaryllis. Caves, after all, are not only
the home of real Nymphs and their shrines, but also a standard stage set in
33
Thus Hunter (1985) 25 argues that Euripides prologues, while not explicitly audience addresses, are
functionally identical with those of Menander in this respect.
62
Athenian drama.34 Tityrus, moreover, plays no further part in the poem.35

In Idyll 2 Simaethas unspeaking servant Thestylis, who is introduced in
the poems opening lines, remains on hand for further instructions until
she is dispatched to the house of her mistresss ex-lover, and, even after her
departure, Simaetha refers to her in the story that she tells. Her presence
situates her mistress, and her mistresss speech, within a network of social
relationships to which they both belong. Here, by contrast, the goatherd
will perform his song outside the social setting created by his opening
words; he hands off his animals to a friend, and approaches Amaryllis in
the role of singer. No sooner does he introduce himself as a herdsman
than he sets this part aside for that of lover. His character is less an identity than a role, and what we are being asked to imagine is not so much
a fictional character within a fictional world, but rather the enactment
of a fictional character by a gifted performer.36 On this reading, then,
the poems opening would ironize the song that follows; we cannot take
it entirely seriously because we cannot help but see it as a performance
(3.614):
-
9, 5 6

7
", / #(7; T U&
";
T U& !5
/ #!!7 T,
7, !5; @&!+

".
M 5 P 5( "
V #5 " 7 W 6 2
.
P
&. !? # 6. % !
O JJ
5
# / 6 >,

/
/ 3 = 5 B &

.
Lovely Amaryllis, why do you no longer peep out from this cave and call me,
your sweetheart? Do you hate me? Do I look snub-nosed to you up close, my
nymph, with a chin that sticks out? You will make me hang myself. See, I
bring you ten apples. I picked them from the place you told me. And tomorrow Ill bring others. Look then. Im in terrible pain. If only I could become that
buzzing bee and go into your cave, flying through the ivy and ferns that conceal
you.
What is striking about this performance, however, is that it deliberately, and

surprisingly, reconnects its scene with the time and place of the opening
verses. While we had seemed to leave the world of Tityrus and rural labor
34
35
36
As in Sophocles Philoctetes and Menanders Dyskolos. See Handley (1965) 2122.

Gow (1952) ad loc. 3.2: the elaborate address here to a (/ *
( inessential to the subject
of the Idyll is somewhat odd.
Hunter (1999) 109.
63
behind, it is clear that the scene we are witnessing is a repeated one: today
the goatherd brings apples, as he has been told to on a previous visit,
and tomorrow he will bring more. Similarly, as the song continues, and
he begins to despair at Amaryllis absence, he threatens to leap from the
rock where Olpis the fisherman watches for tuna (3.26), recalls the sieve
divination of Agroeo, who was recently my companion while cutting grass
(3.3132), and promises to give the goat and kids intended for Amaryllis
to the dark-skinned day-laborer of Mermnon instead (3.3436). Olpis,
Agroeo, and dark-skinned day-laborers belong to the same world as the
cave-dwelling Nymph who torments her goatherd admirer with demands
for apples, and the goatherds behavior is evidently unexceptional within
the fictional world of this poem. Just as in Idyll 1 the fact that Pan and the
Muses compete in singing competitions with the herdsman establishes that
world as neither mythical nor an imitation of life, so here the copresence
of theatrical performance and unromantic agricultural labor establishes the
world of the poem as manifestly fictional.
The goatherd disarms the irony with which we had been prepared to
approach his song by showing that it is a repeated element in an internally
consistent fictional world; this is a performance he gives on a daily basis.
So too, the role play that is apparent in it encourages us to imagine his
textual existence with the solidity and corporeal presence of an actors
body. Drama makes imaginary beings present by instantiating them in
the body of a performer. Idyll 3 reverses this procedure; by inviting us to
conceive not just the possibility of its being acted, but also the possibility
that it is being acted, the poem invites us to imagine its protagonist and
his world with the physical presence of a dramatic enactment. While Idyll
1 asks us to contemplate the impossibility of instantiating its song in actual
performance, Idyll 3 asks us to imagine that its song already is one, and it
is in this peculiar act of the imagination that much of this slight poems
unsettling effect resides.
A similar tension between irony and imaginative involvement complicates our response to the poems fictional space. The goatherds seeming
inability to enter the cave where the Nymph lives, though no physical barrier prevents him from doing so, appears to ironize his use of the song of
an excluded lover. This type of song is meant to be performed in front
of a city house, where real doors keep the lover out. By using it here, the
goatherd apparently demonstrates his ignorance of its conventions, not to
mention a lack of awareness of his real situation.37 Yet it is clear that he has
37
On the form, see Copley (1956), Hunter (1999) 108.
64
been to this place before, and believes he has received instructions from the
Nymph to return, with apples. The apples, fictionally real, from a place
whose existence can be asserted by an emphatic deictic gesture ( ),
grounds the reality of the Nymph in the fictional world he himself inhabits,
in his own mind at least. Rather than proving his naivety, his song identifies
a space within the poem that he cannot enter with the promise of a divine
female body that the reader is not permitted to see. As in Idyll 11, where this
space is the ocean that withholds the body of Galateia from Polyphemus
view, the poem creates a double of its own fictional world that is off limits
for its protagonist and for us. The cave is a canceled mise en abyme of the
poem itself; it figures the allure of fictional experience as the desire to enter
a world available only through that experience.38
Excluded from the cave itself, then, the goatherd takes new heart from
a twitching in his eye that seems to presage the Nymphs appearance. He
steps beneath a pine tree and begins his song again, in a new vein (3.4051):
X Y5, 4 = 5 !P,
P #
HZ * 6 O 9&
N % , [ #&, [ # J3 B (.
= @!5 G & @ \ D ]! ^&
# 7 O ? _ # @!
#
& O
9
J.
= ? = A5 # `
0 7(
a( b c ( # 5 6!! 7
,
d
? * 6 :" e
:(/ ? # F / 6 a 27(
f ( : 5, !7, Y
(,
g *
( #7
, 4

"
, J5J.
Hippomenes, when he wanted to marry the maiden, took apples in his hand
and completed the race; and Atalanta, as soon as she saw them, was immediately
infatuated, and plunged into deep desire. And Melampus the seer led the herd from
Othrys to Pylus, and in the arms of Bias the lovely mother of wise Alphesiboea
reclined. And did not Adonis as he tended his sheep in the mountains bring
the lovely Cytherian to such a degree of madness that even when he is wasting
away she never puts him out of her breast? Envied by me is Endymion, sleeping
the unturning sleep; I envy, dear lady, Iasion, who is allotted such things as you
profane ones will not learn.
38
For the limen, or threshold, in Latin erotic elegy as the barrier that both forbids and invites the
readers access to the body of the beloved, see Pucci (1978). Hardie (2002) 3 develops the image of
the locked door as a screen that separates the reader from the world of the text; cf. his observations
at 14548 on Ovids Narcissus, whose ardent wish to enter the pool in which he beholds his own
reflection figures the desire of the viewer of illusionist art to believe in the reality of the images he
encounters in it.
65
The goatherds choice of mythological examples has caused much debate

among the poems commentators. Gow notes that, in alluding to the story
of Hippomenes, the dropping of the apples in the race is . . . inapposite
to the goatherds purpose, and that the reference to Endymion is not
altogether happy, since Endymion profited little from the infatuation
of the goddess.39 Dover similarly proposes that the goatherds citation
of mortals whose enjoyment of the love of goddesses was so brief and
tragic . . . suggests . . . a comically insensitive and ignorant choice of
exempla.40 Whitaker, on the other hand, sees a smooth transition from
hope to despair in the examples selected,41 and Stanzel detects a therapeutic
function in their progression: the goatherd concludes by recognizing that
Amaryllis love is not worth the risk.42
Certainly the examples are compact and well organized. The stories of
Hippomenes, Melampus, and Adonis are three-line narratives; the first two
offer the simplest possible expression of desire and its fulfilment striving occupies the first clause, accomplishment the second while the third
reworks this bipartite structure as a result clause expressed as a rhetorical
question: And did not Adonis as he tended his sheep in the mountains
bring the lovely Cytherian to such a degree of madness that even when he
is wasting away she never puts him out of her breast? The final triplet
is even simpler; by expressing only the fulfilment of desire, it is able to
compress an entire story into each half of its three lines: Envied by me is
Endymion, sleeping the unturning sleep; I envy, dear lady, Iasion, who is
allotted such things as you profane ones will not learn. While the organization of the material, then, hardly suggests a clumsy or stupid speaker, its
use in this particular discursive situation is somewhat puzzling. Aristotle,
in the Rhetoric, calls example (& !) and enthymeme two kinds
of proof (
), the function of which is to persuade (2.20.13). While
he is speaking here of prose oratory, he cites the poet Stesichorus use of
invented, rather than historical, examples, one form of which he calls fables
(*!), like those of Aesop. Similar observations have been made by modern scholars about examples in Homer. Mythical examples are introduced
when one character wishes to influence the actions of another, and these
persuade because of the parallelism between the mythological story and
the immediate situation.43 Thus Phoenix in Book 9 of the Iliad endeavors
to persuade Achilles to fight by demonstrating his supposed resemblance
39
40
41
Gow (1952) ad loc. 3.40, 3.50.

Dover (1971) ad loc. 3.4051, cf. Lawall (1967) 40, Rosenmeyer (1969) 174. For Fantuzzi (1995) 1635,
the passage is typical of the collapse of exemplarity in the bucolic poems as a whole.
42 Stanzel (1995) 137, 202.
43 Willcock (1964) 147.
Whitaker (1983) 52.
66
to Meleager, and Achilles in Book 24 persuades Priam to eat by showing his

resemblance to Niobe. In both cases the person attempting to persuade tells
a tale in which the person to be persuaded ought to recognize his similarity
to the central figure in the story.
The protagonists of the goatherds tales, however, are Hippomenes,
Melampus, Adonis, Endymion, and Iasion, figures from myth who in his
mind have some sort of bucolic associations. The person who has to be
persuaded, Amaryllis, figures only obliquely, as the object of their quests. If
the goatherd is trying to persuade anyone with these examples, it can only
be himself. This becomes clear in the story of Iasion, in which he asserts
that Amaryllis will never experience what is imagined in his narrative: I
envy, dear lady, Iasion, who is allotted such things as you profane ones
will not learn. He excludes her, in other words, from seeing herself as a
participant in the kind of love story that he imagines for himself. Rather
than attempting to persuade his listener, the series of mythical lovers he
imagines in his song diverts his attention, for a time, from his own present
suffering. The straightforward syntax of their stories contrasts with the
hesitant, self-referential song he sings about himself (3.623), even as their
protagonists accomplishments contrast with his own lack of success. The
dissociation of these myths from the goatherds world is shown not only
by the stylistic pretension with which they imitate epic language,44 but
also by the fact that what he sees in each of them is an identical narrative
of desire and its accomplishment that is at odds with his own lack of success. Their similarities to one another only emphasize the different ethos
of myth, where, as the goatherd sees it, herdsmen simply go out and get
what they want, rather than being paralyzed in the presence of the object
of their desire, and consoling themselves for their failure with song. The
world of myth and the world of pastoral are quite dissimilar, even though
herdsmen inhabit them both.
It is only when his song is over, and he realizes that he has a headache,
that the goatherd returns to the here and now (3.5254):
@!5( = &, 5. 5 @ (,

?
h, 7 V 5 .
N 5 !3 = J* !5.
My head hurts, but you dont care. I wont sing any longer, but Ill lie where I have
fallen, and the wolves will eat me here. May it be sweet as honey in your throat.
44
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 3.4051.
67
The poem ends with the goatherd encouraging his unseen addressee to
picture his body collapsed in front of her cave. The invitation to Amaryllis,
offstage, is also an invitation to the reader to once again imagine the poems
fictional space as a stage, on which the goatherds body continues to rest
for a few moments now that the drama is over. By calling attention to the
theatrical aspect of his performance at the end of his song, however, the
goatherd only makes us aware of the degree to which his performance has
fallen short of a genuine dramatic reenactment. Like Idyll 1, the poem is
a literary drama that contains a performance within it. Thyrsis, however,
in Idyll 1, is able to make his desired identification with Daphnis present
to his audience, the poems anonymous goatherd, through impersonation;
his performance suggests the possibility of reenacting archetypes in lived
experience. In Idyll 3, the goatherds ability to imagine and present himself
to his listener as the enactment of such an archetype is more limited; he
can only narrate the lives of such characters, but not instantiate them
in performance. While his performance is theatrical, it does not actually
make present in his own world a being from another one; the poem stages
a narration, not an act of presentification. We are left with the curious
experience of watching a character whose inner life clamors for dramatic
performance unable to enact the roles to which he aspires. However, his
failure to achieve the kind of persuasive dramatic impersonation that gives
Thyrsis his power over his listener gives the goatherd of Idyll 3, as a body
to be imagined in the performance of theatrical gestures unseen by his
audience within the poem, a distinctive imaginary presence to the reader
outside it. The literary drama becomes not merely the means to create
a fictional world with the added vividness that comes from eliminating
authorial narration, but a way to explore the intangible boundary that
separates the world of fiction form the world of the reader. The more vividly
we imagine the goatherd with the corporeal presence of an actors body, the
more unsettling his imagined presence as a textual being becomes. Idyll 3
explores this uncanny presence while remaining (just) within the resources
of a fictional world that manifests itself in a way that resembles drama. The
remainder of this chapter will explore Theocritus use of framing devices
that are specific to written, non-performative literature, and embed their
fictional world within an explicitly written communication.
i d y l l 11: the cyclops as singer

The experience of reading Idyll 3 can rightly be described as an uncanny one;
so palpable is the corporeal presence of its speaker that a kind of ontological
68
doubt lingers around him even as we reflect on the conditions of his textual
production.45 In Idyll 11, Theocritus experiments even more radically with
the boundary that separates fictional character from real-world reader. In
this poem we overhear the Cyclops Polyphemus, as he sings a song for the
sea Nymph Galateia. As with the goatherd and Amaryllis, here too there
is little chance that she is listening to him, since she is somewhere beneath
the ocean, and he is sitting on its shore. Moreover, Theocritus makes it
clear that the song is really intended for the friend that he addresses in its
opening lines, for he tells him that he is presenting the Cyclops song to
him as a demonstration of the idea that poetry is the only cure for love. The
presence of a framing address to a real-world reader makes the strangeness
of our assent to a textually produced fictional world more evident still. We
give our imaginative assent to it even as we are made aware that it has been
shaped to produce an effect upon a reader who is outside it. Framing makes
explicit what is implicit in the form of Idyll 3, and in the ecphrastic scenes of
Idyll 1, that it is the movement into and out of fictional worlds that makes
the reader aware of their powers of seduction.
The poem begins with a gnomic proposition about love (11.14):
? / ( 7 & 6,
i, W !
, # ", W #
,
j 5 O 7
! # @h, k" U&S * #
.
There is no other medicine for love, Nicias, it seems to me, either rubbed or
sprinkled, than the Pierides. This one is easy and pleasant for men, and yet not
easy to find.
Song is a treatment (pharmakon) for love, although we do not know how

it works yet; while other medicines are applied to the surface of the body,
this one is not like them: it is easy and pleasant, although difficult to
discover. The image is that of a rare magical herb, like the one Hermes
gives to Odysseus as a remedy against the charms of Circe, or Helens
Egyptian drug that brings forgetfulness of all pain.46 Like Odysseus and
Telemachus, Nicias has apparently not been able to discover it for himself.
Yet, since he is a doctor, and also particularly dear to the Muses, he will
recognize that what Theocritus is proposing is the treatment indicated in an
45
46
While I do not wish to pursue the uncanny as a psychoanalytic concept, Freuds account of it in
literary experience as the rational minds lingering conflict of judgment as to whether or not what
it has just read is really possible seems apposite here; see Freud (2003) 156.
Odyssey 10.281320, 4.219234.
69
illness of this kind (11.56). At this point the poet introduces Polyphemus
for comparative study (11.79):
a( ! U&
P! F A7(' F @",
N" 7, 4 P l,
6 !&
( /
* Z &( .
So at any rate our Cyclops fared well, the Polyphemus of old, when he loved
Galateia, as he was just getting a beard around his mouth and temples.
Theocritus lets Nicias, the doctor, examine the Cyclops he sets before him.
For at first we might not recognize this Polyphemus who is just getting
a beard around his mouth and temples. He is our Cyclops, or, more
literally, the one by us (F @"), a Cyclops who, like Theocritus
and Nicias, lives in Sicily: my countryman, as Gows translation puts it.47
This local hero is also the Polyphemus of old (N" 7),
presumably Homers Cyclops, and the one who loved Galateia. It is at
this point that we are likely to recall that there is no such Cyclops. If the
Polyphemus of old is Homers Cyclops, this Polyphemus did not love
Galateia at all, nor did he live in Sicily.
Ancient storytelling knows very well that the proper name is a rigid designator, that it refers to an individual whether or not the individual named
bears all the characteristics usually associated with him, so that it is possible,
for example, to write about a Napoleon who won the Battle of Waterloo,
or a Richard Nixon who is not responsible for the events of Watergate but
whom we nonetheless still identify with the historical person who bore that
name.48 Without the ability to relocate the bearer of a name within a different possible version of his own history, ancient storytelling would hardly
be possible. Yet, if Theocritus Cyclops is manifestly fictional with respect
to his Homeric antecedent, it remains to see how the fictional world he
occupies is positioned with respect to that of the Odyssey. For redescription
of a story world from the perspective of a marginal character within it has
the potential to change our understanding of the protoworld by allowing
us to see that its construction was not in fact neutral and objective, but
conditioned by the needs of the storytelling situation in which this first
version was produced.
Redescription of the world of a previous fiction from the perspective
of a marginalized character within it is a familiar subgenre of the postmodern novel. Notable examples include J. M. Coetzees Foe, a retelling
47
48
Gow (1952) ad loc. 11.7.

These are the conventional examples in the theoretical literature. See especially Ronen (1994) 13236.
The term rigid designator originates with Kripke (1980) 48.
70
of Robinson Crusoe, and Christa Wolfs Cassandra, a retelling of the fall

of Troy, though the closest parallel to Idyll 11 is perhaps John Gardners
Grendel, which retells the Beowulf story as the encroachment of culture
upon nature from the perspective of its vanquished monsters. Typical of
the postmodern novel has been an interrogative or even antagonistic stance
towards the version of events in the predecessor, so that the rewrite endeavors to bring to light what was deliberately suppressed in the first fiction.
By its disavowal of the version of events given in the model, the rewrite
claims the fictional world found in it as ontologically independent of the
writing by which it was transmitted. It endeavors to correct or restore our
understanding of a world that it imagines to have been subjected to various kinds of distortion in the first fiction. By going behind the words of
this fiction to its world, truths about it that were lost in the telling can
be reclaimed. While many postmodern fictions undertake quite specific
ideological revisions of their protoworlds, one influential account of such
rewrites has argued that their effect is to supplement, rather than invalidate, the canonical protoworld, enriching, rather than deleting, the world
of the previous fiction by redescribing it.49 This seems, on the whole, to be
closer to the practice of ancient poets. While gestures towards large-scale
polemical revision certainly exist (Euripides Trojan Women and Pindars
scathing comments in Nemean 7 on Homers untruthful presentation of
Odysseus spring to mind), ancient poetry perpetuates itself by inventing a
theoretically endless number of Odysseuses, Heracleses, and Medeas who
originate in a preexisting literary world but migrate unproblematically to
new ones that accommodate contemporary needs more easily.
How, then, to situate Theocritus Cyclops with regard to Homers, and
those of comedy and dithyramb that came between them? Idyll 11 certainly
exploits the possibility of inventing a Polyphemus who is as dissimilar as
possible to these predecessors. When ancient comedy and satyr play reinvented Polyphemus, they reinvented him as a bearer of contemporary vices.
In Euripides Cyclops he is a fussy eater who talks like a sophist on a variety of fashionable intellectual issues. Similarly, in the comic tradition he
seems to have been represented as a gastronome, with ridiculously pretentious tastes.50 While myth provides material for comic appropriation in
these genres, contemporary reality provides the point of view from which
it is reused.51 Likewise, as far as we can tell from the scraps of Philoxenus
dithyramb, the Cylops featured in it as a cipher for the tyrant Dionysius of
49
51
Dolezel (1998) 220, cf. McHale (1987) 1013, 9091.

Bakhtin (1981) 23.
50
Seaford (1984) 5159.
71
Syracuse, on whom the poet was avenging himself by means of this representation, and his portrayal of Polyphemus was likely, as a consequence, to
have been as unflattering and unsympathetic as it is in the comic tradition.52
The Polyphemus of Idyll 11, however, is neither the representative of all that
is opposed to civilization, as he is in the Odyssey, nor the monstrous manifestation of all the excesses of civilization, as he is in the comic tradition.
He is instead a young lover, a herdsman, and a singer. While he has shed all
the traits of the Homeric Cyclops other than his one eye and his flock, the
new ones that he has acquired do not make him a vehicle for contemporary
satire, but identify him with the herdsman of the other bucolic poems. His
relationship to his predecessors is not one of mere intertextual affiliation,
for Theocritus has maximized the dissonance between his Cyclops and his
epic (and comic) models. Yet neither is it that of a revisionist rewrite; if his
Polyphemus is non-compossible with his predecessors, the effect is not to
suggest a deletion of these models but rather to emphasize the uniqueness of
his own fiction relative to them, and its allegiance with the bucolic fiction of
other Idylls.53 A radical, if playful, fictionality is the defining characteristic
of Theocritus Cyclops, a fictionality that extends to the suggestion implied
by the poems status as prequel to the Odyssey, that, if we want to get from
Idyll 11 to Homers poem, the way to do so is by imagining a fiction of our
own, in which the disappointed lover turned to savagery as a consequence
of his erotic rejection.
Moreover, if we pay close attention to the way in which Polyphemus uses
song in response to his love, fashioning a pastoral vision of his own as an
escape from the pain of desire, we will be able to find a new approach to the
much discussed question of whether or not he is cured by his singing. For,
I shall argue, his invocation of the pastoral world in his own imagination
is entirely in keeping with that of other bucolic characters, who imagine
a more perfect version of the world they themselves inhabit as a relief
from their present affliction. Polyphemus, then, suffered from the internal
wound of love, yet he found the pharmakon with which to alleviate it.
Ring composition reminds us that the pharmakon of song that Polyphemus
applies to his wound is the very pharmakon that Nicias has not been able
to discover (11.1). Moreover, this pharmakon is the song that Nicias is now
52
53
See Hordern (1999).

Cf. Gow (1952) I.xxvii: I do not doubt that the bucolic Idylls (1, 37, 10, 11) form a unity and
cannot be widely separate in date . . . Two of the poems commonly classed as bucolic are however
less conspicuously so than the rest. Id. 11 contains no human rustics, though the flouted Cyclops
is a shepherd and has much in common with the lovesick peasants of Idd. 3 and 10. Wilamowitz
regarded Id. 11 as the earliest of Theocrituss poems, and I agree that it is early and may well be first.
72
about to hear (11.1718): sitting on a high rock, looking out to the sea, he
used to sing thus, :* # 5 | k'P # * F
6 . After beginning as a paradigmatic anecdote addressed to
someone in the same world as its writer,54 the poem morphs into dramatic
fiction before our very eyes. With the transition to direct speech, the world
of the poem, an example kept at arms length until this point, comes alive,
and calls for our attention as a living presence. Now we are right beside the
Cyclops, overhearing his song. Theocritus maps his own creative fiat onto
the change in narrative mode the appearance of Polyphemus voice marks
the moment at which the poems fictional world presents itself before us so
that this transition signals a change in the kind of speech act that the poem
is. The discursive handling of Polyphemus as a topic to be discussed between
friends cedes to the illocutionary force of the poets let it be that brings
a fictional world into full dramatic presence.55 Homers Tell me Muse
grounds the world of his poems in his communication with the unseen
goddesses who are his explicit addressees. What we hear is what they know to
have been. The world of Idyll 11 manifests itself without any such ontological
guarantees. Despite the reference to the Polyphemus of old, this is not
an act of represencing, and the mention of the Muses in the opening lines
(they are the cure for desire, and all nine of them care for Nicias) only draws
attention to the fact that Theocritus does not call upon them for his own
poem, and that his invention does not originate with them. Rather, the
transition to direct speech points to the act of world creation characteristic
of fiction, an extreme case of world-change, a change from nonexistence
into (fictional) existence.56 Enacting this change with the author manifestly
present as his real-world self (the poem begins by addressing someone who is
positioned, with regard to its fictional world, as a real-world addressee)
is very bold. Pointing to the authors creative fiat reveals the world that is
its outcome as mere invention, and so risks becoming an obstacle to the
imaginative assent required to enter that world. One of the peculiarities of
the fictionalizing speech act is that the felicity conditions upon which it
54
55
56
Fantuzzi (2004) 17071 suggests that the exchange of maxims between friends is a fictionalized
version of such exchanges in the performative contexts of archaic lyric, iambic, and elegiac poetry.
The framing would thus be analogous to the inclusion of a fictionalized performance context in the
mimetic Hymns of Callimachus. This seems to me more convincing than the earlier suggestion by
Rossi (1972) 27993 that the poem is contamination of the bucolic genre with the poetic epistle (a
form unattested at this time).
For two rather different accounts of the illocutionary force of the fictionalizing speech act, see Levin
(1976) and Levin (1977). The former imagines the higher sentence which is understood to precede
such speech acts, and so give them their illocutionary power, the latter discusses in more detail the
transport to a fictional domain in which this illocutionary power consists.
Dolezel (1988) 48991.
73
depends for its success are not vested in external circumstance as they are
for other kinds of speech (the institutional authority to name a ship, or
pronounce a couple man and wife), but reside, very largely, in the readers
willingness to assent to the implied invitation to partake of what is being
offered. For this reason, it has been argued, an unobtrusive third-person
narrator is easier to believe than a narrator who is visibly the author, or a
character.57 The less said about the source of the story the better, unless the
poet has the Muse to back him up, or documentary sources of the kind
favored by the narrators of Hellenistic poems.58
As we shall see, Theocritus saves the really jarring possibilities present in
an unexpected change of narrative mode for the end of the poem. Given
the build-up, in which we look back on Polyphemus from the perspective
of the present, the transition to his own world is, in film terms, more like a
dissolve than a cut. Nonetheless, if song is what offers relief from real-world
ills (the pains of love), and if what Theocritus is offering his friend in the
way of song is manifestly a fiction, Theocritus would seem to be associating
poetrys healing power with its status as imaginary experience. Interestingly,
then, what we find when we get to the world of the poem is a character
who is himself absorbed in his own imaginary experience, as Polyphemus
is rapt in picturing to himself the beauties of his beloved, the sea Nymph
Galateia (11.1921):
- = l&, / 5 @J&I,
5 P ", O(5 @*,
*
( !5, (5 C GP;
O white Galateia, why do you spurn one who loves you, whiter than cream cheese
to look upon, softer than a lamb, friskier than a calf, sleeker than an unripe grape?
His words endeavor to conjure, if not the actual presence of the nymph,
then at least the image of that presence. He imagines objects from his own
world (dairy products, lambs, calves, grapes) that simulate the tangible,
physical presence of her body (its whiteness, softness, and sleek, youthful
luster). Yet these qualities in her so far transcend the object to which they are
compared that they suggest the limitations of comparison itself. Galateia
is softer than the softest thing Polyphemus can imagine, sleeker than the
sleekest, and even his initial epithet white is felt to be inadequate, and in
need of supplementation.
57
58
Dolezel (1988) 490, Dolezel (1998) 149.

Callimachus counterpointing of his own romantic tale of Acontius and Cydippe with Xenomedes
dusty history of the island of Ceos in which he found it is exemplary in this regard (Aetia, fragments
6775).
74
Demetrius On Style 125 observes that such hyperbolic comparisons are

generally unpersuasive because of their impossibility: Every hyperbole is
impossible; for it is not possible to be whiter than snow, or to run as fast
as the wind . . . Every hyperbole therefore seems especially frigid because
it resembles the impossible. He notes the fondness of the comic poets
for such comparisons (126, cf. 161), since out of the impossible they draw
the ridiculous. However, he observes that they are also employed by Sappho, who brings off the risky and intractable figure of hyperbole delightfully, #( (127), and cites an example from her work which is
strikingly similar to Polyphemus praise of Galateia (162): more sweetly
singing than the lyre, golder than gold, 3 O
5,

5. Here Sapphos golder than gold avoids the frigidity of hyperbole because it incorporates the poets own self-consciousness
about the limits of comparison into the comparison itself. We sense the
poet not failing in her power to find a suitable object for comparison, but
rather testifying to a beauty that simply exceeds the possibilities of direct
expression. Beauty is, of course, notoriously difficult to present directly.
Lessing famously praised Homer for showing the effects of Helens beauty
upon the old men of Troy rather than attempting to describe it himself.59
In Theocritus such descriptions are found in the mouths of characters
rather than that of the poet. In Idyll 10 the infatuated Bucaeus, lagging
behind in his reaping, is confronted by the more prosaic Milon, and asked
to give an account of his troubles. Having explained his problem as love,
Milon encourages him to sing a little to help his work, and Bucaeus begins
(10.2431):
^"
,

= U &
" V !& B'
, , = & ".
_J7
, m7 5 &,

2
&, O*
, #!Z ? * (.
/ % 5 #
, O != k&
@ # "
& = P 5!.
O n+ = 7
, F 7 = ;! h,
O !5 ` #!Z # &.
Pierian Muses, sing with me the slender youth; for whatever you handle you make
beautiful. Lovely Bombyca, everyone calls you Syrian, skinny, sunburnt, but I alone
honey-colored. Both the violet and the lettered hyacinth are black, but nevertheless
59
Lessing (1962) 111. Cf. 104105, where he cites Constantinus Manasses description of Helen (too
long to reproduce here) to show how foolish it is to attempt something which Homer himself
so wisely left untried. The spurious Idyll 20.2127 likewise illustrates the pitfalls of attempting to
answer the question, Am I not beautiful?
75
these are gathered first in garlands. The goat chases clover, the wolf the goat, the
crane the plow, but I am mad for you.
Bucaeus epithets are more pictorial than those of Polyphemus; his song has
been called a description,60 which one could hardly say of the Cyclops
verses. Similarly, the comparison of the beloved to elements of the rustic
world has an obvious point: violets and hyacinths are dark yet highly
sought after, just as Bombyca herself is, and her admirer pursues her as the
animals named pursue their various objects of desire. This much is only by
way of a prelude, however; as I am mad for you signals, Bucaeus is not
content with such faint praise, and continues (10.3237):
% T 4
A"
* P

7
@* @ PI 9 8,
Z Z ?
j U* j 7! P,
0 #!Z = # @5

@7.
_J7
, > ? * @
&! ,
O (= ? 7 / = * ( 2".
If only I possessed as much as they say Croesus once did. We would both be golden
statues to Aphrodite, you having your pipes and either a rose or an apple, and I
new clothes and shoes of Amyclae on both feet.61 Lovely Bombyca, your feet are
dice, your voice nightshade; your ways I truly cannot speak of.
In no bucolic poem does the love object of one of the herdsmen appear in
person.62 Rather, we see how the beloved is figured in their lovers imagination. The dramatic mode of presentation allows a more intimate portrayal
of the lovers mind than narration by the poet, since the character can communicate his desire in language that (as Demetrius argues) would be risky
and inappropriate for the poet himself. The final two compliments, in fact,
the comparison of Bombycas feet to dice made of knuckle bones, and her
voice to a plant, are so subjective that they defy interpretation.63 As Bucaeus
60
61
62
63
Cairns (1970) 42.

I have adopted the interpretation of
0 proposed by Gow (1952) ad loc. 10.35: it is clear that the
word means not, as m say,
0 1
, but clothes, and that the adj. & is @/ with
the two nouns. Not without some misgivings, however, and I therefore cite m 10.34/35a, Wendel
(1914) 233, in full, since it avoids having to take the adjective as Gow suggests:
3 ? 6,
,
3 j U* j 0 ;, #!Z ? / ; N o
0 JZ 1
k
@5 "
k $. The sequence pipes . . . dance step . . . feet is a coherent
series of images, and the hasty expression as Bucaeus approaches the climax of his song seems natural
enough. For
0 (alone) as dance step, cf. Aristophanes Wasps 1485:
$ @$.
Stanzel (1995) 147.
Gow (1952) ad loc. 10.36, citing the scholia on @
&!, notes: The word is not elsewhere
used in any metaphorical sense. Knuckle-bones are not conspicuously white, and, if they were, they
would not resemble Bombycas feet (27). And while his commentary on nightshade, 7,
cites the not less mysterious C *
[lily-like voice] of Il. 3.152, this, as he notes, is merely

to compare one unknown with another. The scholia refer to the plants softness.
76
praise of Bombyca becomes more heated, it consists increasingly of private

intuitions, and when he comes at last to imagine her actual presence as a
person, rather than simply picturing to himself her absent body, he can
no longer find adequate words: your ways I truly cannot speak of. This
is a strong assertion;64 like Polyphemus, Bucaeus has reached the limits of
description, the limits of his ability to conjure his beloveds presence for
himself and for Milon.
Returning to Idyll 11, then, one advantage of the dramatic mode of
presentation for the poems example of erotic desire is clear: it allows
Polyphemus to describe Galateia in his own language, and so brings the
audience into a more intimate relationship with the mind of the lover and
the circumscribed bucolic world he inhabits. The effect is heightened by
the change in the poems mode of presentation; Polyphemus voice contrasts so dramatically with the voice that speaks the frame narration in large
part because his distinctively subjective bucolic comparisons follow directly
upon the cool quasi-medical tone of the introductory address to Nicias. Yet,
as we have seen, his attempts to conjure Galateias presence fall well short
of allowing us to imagine her for ourselves. This is not because the Cyclops
is inherently inept at description. As he explains Galateias elusiveness to
himself, he gives an account of his own features that is as precise as the one
that Theocritus gives to Nicias (11.3033):
!h
(,
*, a 7!

a&
? /3 # h(8
#+ G/ 5 h - &,
E 1/ a
, " ? U # .
I know, lovely girl, why you flee. Because one long hairy brow is stretched across
my whole forehead from one ear to the other, and a single eye is under it, and a
wide nose above the lip.
We do not know how Polyphemus knows what he looks like. In Idyll 6, he

has seen his reflection in the water, and perhaps that is what we are intended
to imagine here; as he sits on the seashore entreating Galateia to appear, he
may have caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the sea. By contrast, the
sources of his knowledge of what Galateia looks like are mentioned in the
poem, but these references only make it more mysterious. He has seen her
face-to-face once, on a flower-picking expedition with his mother. Since
then, he claims, her habit is to appear when he is asleep, only to disappear
when he awakens (11.2224). He seems not to understand what dreaming
64
On & here, see Denniston (1950) 32931.
77
is, and makes no distinction between the Galateia he has seen in the flesh
and the Galateia that appears to him at night.65 Yet, while memory and
dream image have the same reality for him, only his sleeping mind is able
to produce a convincing illusion of her presence. His conscious efforts to
imagine Galateia lose their way in hyperbole, and so frustrate our efforts to
see what they ostensibly describe, but his unconscious mind is a veritable
fiction machine. Night after night, it produces an illusion whose presence
is as palpable as reality. Yet, since the reader cannot enter Polyphemus
dreams any more than he can enter the ocean into which he peers by day,
we once again miss the spectacular female presence that lies at the heart
of the fiction. The frame narrative describes desire as a wound in the
chest, a hateful dart which the Cyprian had fixed in Polyphemus liver. As
Polyphemus tells it, Galateias image is this wound (11.2529):
M&
? !(! , *, O P
T #PI
3 5
k 7
#+ C 5'
, #!Z F / O!*.
7

#
h a
8
# $( 7
I fell in love with you, girl, when you first came with my mother, wishing to gather
hyacinth flowers from the mountain, and I was leading the way. And having looked
upon you, from that time afterwards and even now I am unable in any way to stop.
Yet it is by not making her image available that the poem imparts the
workings of this hidden wound to its audience. By representing Galateia
only in Polyphemus comparisons and recollected dreams, the poem both
encourages and frustrates our wish to see her for ourselves, and so communicates the Cyclops experience of desire as an unrelieved craving to look
upon an object that remains stubbornly concealed. Just as the Cyprians
shaft lies out of sight in Polyphemus liver, yet is responsible for all he says
and does, so Galateia never appears in the poem, yet is the imaginary object
towards which our reading is directed. Having surprised the reader with the
irruption of dramatic presence into what began as a gnomic anecdote, the
poem now maps the appeal of its fiction onto the absent and the unseen,
the gleaming body of the Nymph that neither we nor the Cyclops are
permitted to see.66
65
66
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 11.223.

Cf. Lessing (1962) 104: In this respect, also, Homer is the best model of all. He says that Nireus was
beautiful, Achilles more beautiful still, and that Helen possessed a godlike beauty. But nowhere does
he enter into a detailed description of these beauties. And yet the entire poem is based on the beauty
of Helen. For voyeurism as an engine of narrative curiosity, Brooks (1993) 88122 is fundamental.
78
The uninterrupted dramatic mode that follows the introductory address

to Nicias excludes the poets voice from the greater part of the poem; Theocritus relinquishes his ability to comment directly upon his creation until
verses 8081. While Polyphemus is speaking, authorial comment can appear
only in the disguised form of irony, signals embedded in the characters
speech which communicate to the audience that he is not as fully aware of
his own situation as we are. These mostly take the form of unconscious allusions to Book 9 of the Odyssey, the events of which will take place after the
scene in Idyll 11.67 Thus, at verse 53 he speaks of his one eye being burned by
Galateia, at 61 of some stranger ( . . . +5) coming with his ship, and
at 79 he calls himself a somebody () on the land. Dramatic monologue
also limits the story time to the duration of Polyphemus song. However,
the real time of the fiction that elapses while he is singing is unobtrusively plotted against two different chronological axes. Firstly, there are the
coordinates created by Polyphemus himself: his first meeting with Galateia
(11.2529), the seasonal cycle of his flocks and their produce (11.3437), his
present love and its imagined culmination in a future in which Galateia has
left the ocean to cohabit with him (11.4453). Polyphemus experience of
time matches that of Theocritus other herdsmen; an idle present occupied
by erotic yearning is set against a background of rural work. The audience,
however, will compare the Cyclops subjective experience of time with the
temporal framework of the Odyssey, where his world is only a single episode
in the forward movement of the plot, and is not experienced on what we
learn from Idyll 11 to be his own terms. Polyphemus distinctive temporality
as a bucolic character further differentiates him from his epic and comic
antecedents.
One question that necessarily suggests itself in connection with this
distinctive presentation of the Cyclops is why Theocritus is offering it to
Nicias as the demonstration of a propositional thought that is advanced
with regard to a world outside the fictional one the Cyclops himself inhabits.
The frame suggests that Polyphemus is a token in a real-world discursive
exchange between the poet and his addressee, and, even if this exchange were
part of the poems fiction, it would nonetheless belong to a secondary fiction
that the poem situates outside that of the dramatic monologue. Since the
subject of discussion is poetry and its ability to alleviate the pain of desire,
and since both writer and addressee are poets, there is a natural presumption
that one or other of them is in love. However, this need not be so, and the
67
Brooke (1971) 79: The poems structure . . . is unique among the pastoral idylls in its combination
of the poetic presence [of Theocritus himself] with monodic song . . . But as a device it is not entirely
satisfactory; the poet is unable to present his objective point of view entirely within the frame and
must insert himself into the song as well by means of ironic allusions to the Odyssey.
79
poem may be intended as part of a purely theoretical inquiry. Either way,

we must at some point approach the long-standing problem of how it
figures the role of song in relation to desire.68 The notion that Polyphemus
achieves self-knowledge through his song appears to be hopeless. For he
knows everything he needs to know from the outset, including what his
problem is. He is ugly, and so Galateia shuns him: I know why you flee,
lovely girl, he says (11.30), pointing to his single Cyclopean eye, with
its overarching brow, just as he later refers to his unattractively hirsute
condition (11.50). He also knows that he is well endowed with pastoral
riches, and contemplation of them seems to do him good as he reviews
them in his imagination: his cattle, the fine milk and cheese they produce,
his musical skills, the abundance of baby animals he can offer as playthings,
his shady cave and its cool water from the snows of Mount Etna (11.3448).
He passes all these before his mind as he sits upon the shore, and, in doing
so, he turns the real world he inhabits into an imaginary object, a secondary
object of desire that can take the Nymphs place. By being pictured in this
way, as an imaginary presence rather than a real one, this familiar world is
able to exert the same attraction over him as the absent body of Galateia.
Come forth, he says, one last time, and having come forth forget, as I
do now, sitting here, to go home (11.64). But no sooner is the claim that
he has forgotten his home out of his mouth (as if he had not spent most
of his song describing it) than he comes to his senses and pledges to return
to it. O Cyclops, Cyclops, where has your mind wandered? (11.72), he
concludes, acknowledging his imaginary journey as he sets his face towards
home, his lambs, and his cheese.
Polyphemus achieves his return to reality by constructing in song a
fantasy double of his own pastoral existence as an alternative to erotic
fantasy. In this he resembles Theocritus other herdsmen. Lycidas in Idyll 7
imagines an idealized pastoral world he might have shared with Comatas;
Thyrsis in Idyll 1 imagines himself as Daphnis. Less happily, the goatherd
in Idyll 3 invokes his series of mythical doubles but cannot quite identify
with them successfully. The pastoral world he imagines remains rooted in
myth, and does not quite work as valorized double of his own experience.
He is unable to transmute his own world into an imaginary object. The
exchange of real for imaginary experience, however, enables Polyphemus
to stand outside himself for a time, and to desist at least from reinflicting
68
The problem begins with Gow (1952) ad loc. 11.13, who notes that Polyphemus singing appears
as a symptom of erotic affliction in a poem which asserts that singing is not a symptom of, but
rather a cure for, such affliction. The course of the debate over the effectiveness of the Cyclops song
as pharmakon can be followed in Erbse (1965), Holtsmark (1966), Spofford (1969), Brooke (1971),
Goldhill (1986), Deuse (1990), Manuwald (1990), Schmiel (1993), and Cozzoli (1994).
80
the wound of love; the effects of his song are evidently therapeutic, since
he clearly feels better after singing than he did when he began.69 This song,
then, clearly fulfils the healing function that is claimed for it in the opening
address to Nicias as far as its action upon the Cyclops himself is concerned.
There is, however, a second, and perhaps more important, way in which it
instantiates (rather than simply demonstrating) this claim. For Polyphemus
has not just himself as audience, but Nicias too. Many of the pastoral
poems feature the performance of song as their one and only action. In
Idyll 1 Thyrsis performance of The Sorrows of Daphnis, and in Idyll 3
the goatherds song for Amaryllis, are the major events of the poems in which
they occur. Likewise, in Idyll 7 the exchange of songs between Lycidas and
Simichidas is the centerpiece of the poem, and Lycidas song itself consists
largely of imagining a future performance by Tityrus, who will sing to
him of Daphnis and Comatas. Just as the goatherd of Idyll 1 professes
extreme pleasure in the performance he hears, so Lycidas imagines the
power of pastoral song to distract him from his love for the boy Ageanax,
and concludes by wishing that he might have been able to hear the voice of
Comatas himself (7.7189). It is in hearing, rather than performing, pastoral
song that its healing power resides for him.70 By allowing Nicias, then, in
Idyll 11, to overhear the song of a famous pastoral musician (Polyphemus
can pipe like no other Cyclops, 11.3839, just as Lycidas is the best of
pipers among the herdsmen and reapers, 7.2729), the poem impossibly
restages the performance scenes that occur in other poems between their
fictional characters across the boundary that separates fictional character
from real-world reader. Listening to the Cyclops song, we forget about
Theocritus, Nicias, their world and our own, which all disappear for the
duration of his monologue.71 We are absorbed by the Cyclops performance
until we are suddenly jarred out of it by the unexpected return of the poets
voice at the end of the poem (11.8081):
a( 7 # / (

(, UPI ? P! j 2
/ (.
So Polyphemus tended his desire with song, and did better than if he had paid
money.
69
70
71
So Hunter (1999) 22021, citing Kohnken (1996), concludes that the song is a palliative rather than a
cure for love; singing will not make desire go away for good, but will nonetheless provide temporary
relief from its pain: Song, therefore, is both symptom and pharmakon.
Cf. Walsh (1985) 13.
Cf. Seeck (1975) 199, on the intimacy generated by first-person narrative in Idyll 7: Der Leser wird
wie ein relativ enger Bekannter des Erzahlers angesprochen und zum Vertrauten gemacht. Er gehort
damit zu einem echten oder fiktiven engeren Kreis von Adressaten . . . sie interessieren sich fur
das kleine, ganz private Erlebnis des Erzahlers.
81
Theocritus can speak of Polyphemus, but Polyphemus cannot speak of

Theocritus; while the poet can prepare us for the appearance of his character,
nothing can prepare us for this characters sudden disappearance and his
replacement by the voice of the poet.72 Making the reader aware of his
absorption in the poems fictional world has a parallel in the ecphrastic
technique of Idyll 1, where in quick succession we enter and leave a series of
miniature scenes on the surface of the goatherds decorated bowl. Here the
transition from one narrative level to another is combined with a change in
mode, as the poets voice suddenly replaces that of his character, and the selfconsciousness this induces is proof of the poems gnomic proposition. The
immediacy of the poems fictional world is manifested as the felt presence of
its inhabitant, rather than simply an illusory image conjured by the poet.73
The surprise we feel at his sudden disappearance reveals our absorption in
Polyphemus song, and so demonstrates that such song is a pharmakon; for,
as long as it lasted, it drew the mind away from its own preoccupations.
The example, then, does not just work by demonstration alone; it does not
simply invite Nicias to inspect Polyphemus state of mind at the beginning
and end of his performance, and so judge the therapeutic effect of the
song upon its singer. It also works as imaginative experience, drawing us
in, and thereby demonstrating its power over us as listeners. Idyll 11 thus
works upon its reader in the same way as Polyphemus song works upon
the Cyclops himself. As in Idyll 1, where we follow the goatherd into and
out of the imaginary worlds he unfolds, so here the readers experience is
aligned with that of the poems character; we experience a contemplative
absorption in the pastoral world just as he does. The poem achieves a
powerful form of mental distraction, a willing forgetfulness of the self in
imaginary experience, which is all the more evident because we return to
72
73
McHale (1987) 35: The fictional world is accessible to our world, but the real world is not accessible
to the world of the fiction . . . We can conceive of the fictional characters and their world, but they
cannot conceive of ours.
John Ashberys The Instruction Manual, in Ashbery (1997) 810, is an excellent example of the
latter. The poem begins with the poet at work in an office, summoning a vision of the city of
Guadalajara as a distraction from the chore of business writing, and pointing out people and places
in this imaginary city: But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual, |
Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand! | The band is playing Scheherazade by
Rimsky-Korsakov. The poet feigns losing sight of parts of his own creation, adopts a conspiratorial
we that folds the reader into his own vision (Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the
side streets), and points to the incomplete, yet satisfying, account of the city his poem has provided,
before acknowledging that the one thing one cannot do with a fictional world is reside there: What
more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do. | And as a cool breeze freshens the top of the
weathered old tower, I turn my gaze | Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of
Guadalajara. Here, then, the fictional world remains in the poets give and take throughout, rather
than seeming to manifest itself directly to the reader.
82
reality so harshly at the end of it, just as the Cyclops returns to reality at
the end of his song.74
The didactic poem is typically dominated by the voice of the poet,
who addresses a named addressee in the opening and continues to provide
information and instruction in his own person throughout, without the
intervention of fictional speakers. Hesiods Works and Days contains little
direct speech, Aratus Phaenomena less, and the Theriaca and Alexipharmaca
of Nicander none at all.75 In Idyll 11, by contrast, the poet persuades us
of a real-world truth by the judicious effacement of his own voice. Its
reappearance at the end of the poem underlines the power of the poetic
fiction that has taken its place, and so points to the truth of its initial claim
about the power of song.
i d y l l 13: heracles as lover

The structure of Idyll 13 is much like that of Idyll 11. In the opening verses of
both poems Theocritus addresses gnomic remarks on the nature of love to
his friend Nicias, then illustrates his point with an ancient lover, Polyphemus in Idyll 11 and Heracles in Idyll 13. The presentation of the example in
the two poems is quite different, however. In Idyll 11 the prologue addressed
to Nicias introduces a monologue by Polyphemus in the form of a song,
and the Cyclops speech is uninterrupted until the end of the poem; it is
only in the last two verses that the poets voice returns to comment briefly
on what precedes. In Idyll 13, by contrast, Heracles does not speak, and
the single line of direct speech in the poem comes within a simile. The
poems offer a contrast in storytelling styles like the one Socrates creates
artificially in Book 3 of the Republic by recomposing the opening of the
Iliad in pure narrative without direct speech. In Platos terms, the poet of
Idyll 13 conceals himself nowhere, while the poet of Idyll 11 tries to make
us feel that he is not the speaker (Republic 3.392e394b). The remainder of
this chapter, then, will investigate the effects of the narrative mode (5+)
74
75
For psychagogia, originally a word with necromantic associations, as a term for literary pleasure in
the Hellenistic period, see Pfeiffer (1968) 166 and Fraser (1972) I.759. For its development in the
later literary theory of Philodemus, see Wigodsky (1995) 6568, who also provides a thorough survey
of earlier usage, and Asmis (1995) 14877. While the term may merely be part of a binarism with
didaskalia, instruction, so that one chooses ones preferred theory of poetrys value as one or the
other, it is nonetheless tempting to imagine that it found its way into this opposition because the
deeper, Gorgianic, experience of poetry as a conjuring of the soul that is reflected in its etymology
was still active in it. Cozzoli (1994) 107, by contrast, supposes that a Hellenistic poem can have
no such effect upon its recipient, since that recipient is now a reader, and not the auditor of a live
performance.
Works and Days 5458, 20711, 453, 454, 503; Phaenomena 12326.
83
chosen by Theocritus upon the message that his exemplary tale (*!)
seeks to impart. For, as I have argued, the dramatic mode is one of the
defining characteristics of bucolic poetry, and the speech of its characters
is crucial in securing our paradoxical assent to their manifestly fictional
world. They appear with an intimacy that is lost in narration, and so make
the world of poem a living presence rather than a mere discursive topic.
Idyll 13, then, begins with a gnomic proposition about love addressed to
Nicias (13.14):
O" / \ f( * , N # ,
i, V8 5 !
O" = = & = T,
p *
, / W #

Not for us alone did he beget Love, as we used to think, Nicias, whoever of the
gods it was that did beget this child, and what is beautiful does not appear so to
us first, we who are mortal, and do not behold tomorrow.
Having stated this thought, Theocritus introduces the figure who will prove
its truth (13.56): For even the bronze-hearted son of Amphitryon, he
who withstood the fierce lion, loved a boy. Heracles is the limit case,
as he is for Achilles at Iliad 18.11719. Informing Thetis of his resolution
to die in avenging Patroclus, he asserts: For not even mighty Heracles
escaped death . . . but fate mastered him and the fierce anger of Hera.
If anyone could have escaped the mortal necessities of love and death it
would have been Heracles, but even for him this could not be. Theocritus
use of Heracles is in keeping with epic precedent, and contrasts with the
departure from the Odyssey in his portrayal of Polyphemus as a love-sick
adolescent.
In Idyll 11 the use of dramatic monologue for the example facilitates
this departure; the Cyclops reveals himself to Nicias directly as a pastoral
lover, without intervention by the poet. No such intimacy is generated by
Idyll 13. Theocritus himself narrates how Heracles adopted the pederastic
role of surrogate father to his beloved Hylas (13.814):
& #
, N
>*,
4
Z @!/ @ / !

( 5 T, W 2 5
] C,
W F* O 7 @5 # K/ 9h,
W F* 1& " F I,

5 = / # 2* 7(8,
N I = / F " 5 % . . .
84
And as a father a beloved son, he taught him all the things which he had become
noble and famous himself by learning. And he was never apart from him, neither
if the middle of the day was rising, nor when Dawn of the white steeds turned
back to the house of Zeus, nor when chattering chickens looked towards their bed,
their mother haven shaken her wings on the smoky perch, so that the boy might
be fashioned according to his spirit . . .
The greater part of this account is taken up with the hyperbolic gloss on
never that falls between the main clause and the purpose clause that
(eventually) follows. The Homeric division of the day either dawn or
afternoon or midday (Iliad 21.111) is reworked so that its elements appear
as a succession of stylistic registers; the plain middle of the day is followed
by the elaborate Dawn of the white steeds, which is in turn succeeded
by the rustic chattering chickens. This is a parody of epic time-keeping.
In Idyll 11 dramatic monologue in the example means that there is an exact
match between the time that elapses in the story and the time it takes to
listen to the poem; we experience the same amount of time as Polyphemus
for as long as he is singing his song. In narrative there is no such equivalence.
Narrative duration does not match the story time it represents, and the
poet is free to compress or expand the time narrated at will. This freedom
is extravagantly signaled by the redundancy of the temporal markers in this
passage; Theocritus spends four verses telling us what never happened.76
This expansive retardation contrasts with the poems second chronological tour-de-force, the compression of Books 1 and 2 of the Argonautica
(or an Argonautica, if we do not suppose that Theocritus is writing after
Apollonius) into a three-verse relative clause (13.2124):
3 I 5J b q W # 9!h,

B P B'
& ( ,
@= +&+ J3 2
5 <P
,
2/ d, 5! ", @ r * &
.
And Hylas went down to the well-benched Argo with him, which ship did not
touch the gloomy clashing rocks but darted through and sped into Phasis, like an
eagle, the large bay, from which time the rocks stood still.77
76
77
Cf. Hamburger (1973) 159ff. on the relationship between narrating-time (Erzahlzeit) and narrated
time (erzahlte Zeit): the representation of time . . . was a criterion and a sort of crux for the fictional
character of the reality portrayed in the novel. See also Genette (1980) 86160 and the bibliography
in Martin (1986) 23031.
Cf. the text of Hunter (1999) 2/ d 5! " and his translation at ad loc. 13.2324: as
an eagle [soars] over a vast expanse. While this neatly extends the narrative ellipsis to the simile,
" in Homer, and at Argonautica 1.1299, even when unaccompanied by &
, always refers

to the sea and the ships or people making their way through it, and here too, I think, it refers to the
element through which the Argo, not the eagle, travels.
85
Whereas verses 1013 gloss a single word into four lines, here a sea-crossing
with its attendant adventures is confined within the same compass. The
artifice of the narrative is further marked by the contrast between the urgent
motion of verse 23 with its two verbs and the sudden halt on stood still in
verse 24, which involves a marked dislocation in the order of events.78
Moreover, after this account of the Argos successful navigation of the
Clashing Rocks, at verse 25 we find ourselves back on the Greek mainland,
where the Argonauts, we are told, in three lines, have not yet left home
(13.2528):
st @5 & , #
?
6 5 J*
, 5 % ,
P &
" 6(
Lh( . . .
But when the Pleiades rise, and the distant meadows feed the young lamb,
when spring has already turned, then the god-like crop of heroes recalled their
expedition . . .
As verses 1013 exaggerate Homeric narration, Theocritus here all but parodies the Argonauts adventure by recasting it as a seasonal urge, in the
almanac register of Hesiods Works and Days 38384.
The story that follows will be told as narrative in its entirety. Neither
Heracles nor Hylas say a word, and the only direct speech in the poem
appears within a simile. After the Argonauts arrival in the Hellespont,
Hylas leaves his companions to search for water (13.2852). As he dips his
pitcher into the spring that he has discovered, the Nymphs that inhabit it
take hold of his arm (13.4852):

&( != ( O= 5 #+*J

9!(8 # . $ # 5 a (
@*, N 4
/ @ @
$
@* # *(8, 7 5 ; H
* , - " , "
4
/ ).
Desire for the Argive boy disturbed the tender minds of them all. And he fell into
the black water, as when a fiery star from the heavens falls all at once into the sea,
and some sailor says to his companions, Make the rigging light, my lads; its a
wind for sailing.
The shock of Hylas disappearance is communicated by taking the audience

outside the story world of the primary narrative and into another world
78
Gow (1952) ad loc. 23f.: the fixation of the Symplegades is somewhat awkwardly separated from the
passage of the Argo which caused it.
86
that is entirely unforeseen; rather than with Hylas and the Nymphs, we
find ourselves unexpectedly at sea, hearing the voice of an unknown sailor.
Once again, Theocritus combines a shift in narrative level with a change
in narrative mode.
Like Galateia, Hylas is now inaccessible because he is underwater. While
in Idyll 11 the lover is so deprived of the object of his desire from the outset,
in Idyll 13 he vanishes in the middle of the poem.79 Like Polyphemus,
Heracles calls out to his submerged beloved, although, unlike the Cyclops,
he is unaware of his location (13.5865; I omit the spurious verse 61 see
Gow ad loc. 13.61f.):
? b q 6
, 4
J3 ! *
6 F " k&
, @= u (&
#+ a , Z ? &
/ % *(.
J !+5 # W
G&!
#+ P

H& # "
X v5 # @
@&
" *, 3 #&J .
Three times he cried Hylas, as loud as his deep throat could roar. And three times
the boy answered, but his voice came faint from the water, and although very close,
he seemed far away. When a fawn cries, a ravenous lion in the mountains speeds
from its lair to a ready feast. Even so Heracles roamed in the pathless thorns seeking
his boy, and covered a lot of ground.
The characters speech is given indirectly, yet the distinctive sound of both
voices is described by the poet. Heracles is a corporeal event; it erupts from
the throat, the laimos, more usually the site of eating than speaking, like a
belch, or a roar, despite being composed of articulate language.80 The voice
of Hylas, by contrast, emerges from the water faint, or weak, and can no
longer be traced to its origin. The literal description of the contrasting cries
is supplemented by the simile that follows, which suggests the emotions
that inform them. For, if when a fawn cries (13.62) inevitably equates the
helpless young animal with Hylas, so too the equation of the ravenous
lion with Heracles points not just to the intensity, but also to the nature,
of his feelings; the image of the hungry lion changes our understanding of
the erotic relationship portrayed in the poem.81
79
80
81
Segal (1981) 4765 explores the archetypal associations of the death by water motif in Idylls 1, 13,
22, and 23.
Gow (1952) ad loc. 13.58 notes that, in remodeling Iliad 11.462, Theocritus has substituted laimos for
kephale, head.
Mastronarde (1968) 27778.
87
Apollonius explains Heracles anger at Hylas loss as the origin of the

cult in which the present inhabitants of Mysia still seek the vanished youth
(1.134857). His account of the disappearance differs significantly from
that of Theocritus. While Polyphemus is said to hear the boy call out
(1.1240), there is no particular emphasis on his voice as the Argonauts
search for him, nor any mention of Heracles repeated calling. Theocritus,
by contrast, echoes the vowels of the boys name in the verb for Heracles
cry, where they reappear in inverted form, b q 6
, Hulan ausen.
Hylas has become merely the mirror image of Heracles vocalization of
desire,82 and Theocritus draws attention to the strange separation of the
boy from his voice that is so baffling for the hero: three times the boy
answered, but his voice came faint from the water, and although very close,
he seemed far away (13.60). There is a curious echo here of the ideal
pastoral scene in which Lycidas imagines himself listening to Comatas
(7.8689):
% # # :(" # ` T,
d #!Z #* @ ` = = ;!
(P 2
w(, 3 k/
j k/ 7
O 3
* 5
, " AP.
If only you were numbered among the living in my day, so that I, pasturing your
lovely sheep among the hills, might listen to your voice, and you, lying under oaks
or under pines, sing sweetly, divine Comatas.
Comatas sings sweetly, yet Lycidas does not say what he is singing about,
as he does for Tityrus, whose performance he describes in the preceding
verses. Lycidas imagines himself listening not to a song but to a voice.
Moreover, Lycidas hears this voice as he pastures his sheep among the
hills, while Comatas himself is elsewhere, reclining under oaks or under
pines.
This ideal listening scene is echoed in Idyll 11, where Nicias is invited
to hear the voice of Polyphemus. Similarly, in Idyll 10 the pleasures of the
voice are prominent among the attractions that Bucaeus finds in Bombyca.
The objects of the pastoral lovers desire often have speaking names, and
while these elsewhere refer to some aspect of their physical appearance
(Amaryllis, sparkling, Galateia, milky), in Idyll 10 delightful Bombyca, the flute player with whom Bucaeus is in love, is named after the
instrument she plays; the bombyx may be the flute itself, a part of a flute,
82
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 13.58: Hylas has been associated with kP, k" . . . as a rationalisation
of a ritual cry a.
88
or one of the sounds it produces.83 More specifically, in fact, it is either a

deep-toned flute or the lowest note played on an ordinary one,84 the pleasing low-pitched hum for which bees are praised elsewhere.85 This agrees
with Bucaeus mysterious description, your voice is nightshade (10.37).
For the scholia find the meaning of the comparison in the plants softness,86
and the image suggests a synaesthetic accord between the feel of its leaves
and the timbre of Bombycas voice, a reflection of the low pitch of her
instrument.87
Returning to Idyll 13, then, Hylas abduction inverts a number of characteristic bucolic motifs. The shady spring with its lush vegetation is a source
of peril, its Nymphs fearsome goddesses for the country people (13.44).
Straying from the epic community of heroes, Hylas is absorbed into the
landscape, where his disembodied voice enacts a grim parody of the pastoral song exchange with his lover Heracles; for this voice does not bring
pleasure, but violent anxiety.88 The reduction of body to voice that in Idyll 7
represents an overcoming of desire here merely indicates its unending unfulfilment.
Having described Heracles grief, Theocritus comments (13.6667):
5 > 5, @h 4
#*!

W 7, = Y&
a
& T.
Lovers are reckless; how greatly did he toil wandering the hills and thickets, and
Jasons affairs were all secondary.
In Idyll 11 dramatic monologue limits the poets commentary on Polyphemus to ironic allusions embedded in his speech; narrative allows him to
reflect on Heracles directly. The poet provides both story and interpretation, judgment is inseparable from narrative, and the readers sympathies
are guided not just by explicit intervention, such as we find here, but by
simile and epithet as well. The comparison of Heracles search for Hylas to
a ravening lions pursuit of a fawn (13.6263) controls our understanding
83
85
86
87
88
84 LSJ s.v. J*J+ II.

Hunter (1999) ad loc. 10.2627. Cf. Kossaifi (2002) 35051.
> ? / JJ
&
5
(1.107), V / JJ

&

5
(5.46), cf. O JJ

5
(3.13).
m 10.37, Wendel (1914) 233.
For an interesting study of Sapphos innovative adaptation of Homers epithets for the voice to
characterize vocal timbre among her female friends, see Paradiso (1995), especially 106, 113.
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 13.5860 compares the version of Antoninus Liberalis 26, in which Hylas is
assimilated to Echo, who has a prominent place in later pastoral.
89
of the characters inner experience just as much as being told that he is

reckless.89
The clause that introduces Heracles as the exemplification of the gnomic
proposition addressed to Nicias in Idyll 13 he loved a boy,
* (13.6) is virtually identical to that which introduces Polyphemus
in Idyll 11 he loved Galateia, P l (11.8). Moreover,
the experience of the two exemplary figures is very similar. What we are
told of Polyphemus, that he had a hateful wound in his breast, which a
dart from great Cypris had fixed in his liver (11.1516), resembles what we
learn here of Heracles suffering after Hylas disappearance: the harsh god
was tearing his liver within (13.71). Finally, there is a close verbal parallel
of the conclusion to Idyll 11 in this way Polyphemus tended his love,
a( 7 # / ( (11.80) in the verses that
end Idyll 13 (13.7275):
a( ? &
b q &( @"
X v5 x( #* 7,
a Mh
&:! 9!h,
:PI # A* 6+ u <P
.
In this way beautiful Hylas was numbered among the Blessed, and the heroes
teased Heracles as a deserter, because he abandoned the thirty-benched Argo, and
reached the Colchians and inhospitable Phasis on foot.
Yet we experience the two endings quite differently. The dramatic presentation of the example in Idyll 11 puts the audience in direct contact with its
subject, and the measure of this engagement is the shock we feel when the
poets voice returns at the end of the poem. Suddenly we leave Polyphemus,
whom we seemed to be directly overhearing, and return to the present, in
which the poet is addressing Nicias; the clear demarcation between frame
and example closes off the story world abruptly, and marks the separation
of fictional, imaginative experience from the reality the poet shares with his
addressee. In Idyll 13, by contrast, narrative imparts only a faint impression
of the characters inner experience. Neither Heracles nor Hylas speak, and
we learn of Heracles erotic torment in the same way as we learn of the
89
On the controlling function of the epic epithet, see the well-known comments of Booth (1961) 5:
Homer intrudes deliberately and obviously to insure that our judgment of the heroic, resourceful, admirable, wise Odysseus will be sufficiently favorable. Gow (1952) ad loc. 13.19 notes that
the epithet !*, hard-working, that is applied to Heracles in this poem is used only of
mules in early epic, and also of a slave woman at Argonautica 4.1062. It thus creates a resonant clash
with the elaborate matronymic, son of Alcmene queen of Midea, that appears in the following
verse. The deployment of epithets juxtaposes perspectives on the hero.
90
Argonauts dining arrangements (13.3235), or the vegetation around the

spring (13.4042): the poet tells us about it himself.
At the end of the poem, however, Theocritus does not comment on the
story he has just told, and no amount of tampering with the final verses
can introduce a point here; Heracles, the subject of the example, is not
even the subject of the final clause.90 Rather than concluding the poem,
like verses 8081 of Idyll 11, verses 7275 of Idyll 13 simply end it. They recap
what we have already heard that Hylas became an immortal and they
remind us that the story will now continue without us; Heracles had to go
on to Colchis on foot. Unlike Idyll 11, which either brackets off the pastoral
Polyphemus from the continuation of his story in other versions of his life or
perhaps invites us to imagine his sentimental education as a way of linking
them (the adolescent disappointed in his grand passion grows up into savage
monster), this poem ends by looking ahead to what awaits Heracles and
the Argonauts when they reach the Colchians and inhospitable Phasis
(13.75): the seduction of Medea, the flight from Aeetes, and the tragedy
at Corinth. If, then, at the end of the poem we glimpse the first link in
a chain of events in which other mortals will repeat Heracles experience
of desire as though it were something new, the narrative mode of Idyll 13
has also allowed us to experience the truth of its gnomic proposition: Not
for us alone did he beget Love, as we used to think, Nicias, whoever of
the gods it was that did beget this child, and what is beautiful does not
appear so to us first, we who are mortal, and do not behold tomorrow.
The poet links myth with actuality by narrating a story of human desire
that stretches without a break from the time of epic to the present moment,
in which he is talking to Nicias. Only the omniscience of the epic narrator
can allow a reader to see that his own desire is in fact the repetition of an
experience that has been enacted time and time again since the beginning
of the world. For only those who know what is, what has been, and what
will be can have a true perspective on human affairs the gods, and their
stand-in on earth, the epic poet.
For Plato, poetic narrative is true or false, not fictional. While the epic
poet may hide behind his characters in telling his story, he, just as much as
the poet who speaks in his own voice, can and should be questioned about
the knowledge he claims in his narration, its sources, and its status as truth
or falsehood.91 In Idyll 13 Theocritus has it both ways. While the opening
address to Nicias constructs a discursive situation in which one real-world
90
91
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 13.75 notes various attempts to improve the ending by making it more
forceful.
Gill (1993) 3887.
91
person apparently addresses another, the poems truth claim depends upon
him insensibly adopting the prerogatives of the epic poet as the poem
progresses, telling us what no one in real life could possibly know.92 Most
readers (unlike Plato) will not be put off by this; as Aristotle suggests, we
will judge the fiction not as a true account of past events but by how usefully
it models some aspect of reality. We are helped in this case by having the
poet tell us in its opening exactly what real-life universal the poem will
be attempting to demonstrate, so its success or failure as mimetic fiction
can easily be judged. In Idyll 11 the situation is more complicated. While
the poet makes a truth claim in the opening here too, and his characters
actions to some extent demonstrate its validity, this poem invites our assent
to its propositional statement not primarily by telling us a story but by
showing us a world. The power of the poem is grounded not so much
in the cognitive appeal of stories as a map of real-life experience as in the
power of fictional presences to induce our assent to, and engagement with,
an imaginary world. Idyll 11 is, like the other bucolic poems, better described
as fully fictional than as mimetic; its power resides in itself, in the world it
contains, not in that worlds ability to model a reality other than its own.
92
Booth (1961) 3. Hamburger (1973) 137 characterizes omniscience in epic (third person) narration
as the absence of a genuine statement subject: the absence of the real I-Origo and the functional
character of fictional narration are one and the same phenomenon. Cf. Dolezel (1998) 149: Where
does the narratives authentication authority originate? It has the same grounding as any other
performative authority convention. In the actual world, this authority is given by social, mostly
institutional, systems; in fiction, it is inscribed in the norms of the narrative genre.
chapter 3
Becoming bucolic
In the last chapter I argued that, in their concern to present characters who
are real presences to the reader, Theocritus bucolic poems are continuous
with the performed drama of classical and Hellenistic theater. In particular,
the poems that I examined make use of various kinds of framing device
that cause the reader to experience the transition to the story world in
a self-conscious way. Inducing an awareness of the poets control of the
boundary between story world and the reality of the reader thus becomes
a crucial element in the poems resistance to being taken simply as an
intellectual object at the disposal of the reader. Like the opening address
to the Muses in the Homeric poems, the framing of the story enables
the audiences consensual transition from their own world to a world that
is other than their own. Rather than limiting itself to a purely textual
existence, the result of the belated position in a song culture that has become
unexpectedly literate, Hellenistic literary drama insists upon its ability to
confront the reader with the uncanny presence of a world that is other
than his own. Indeed, the poems exploit a fact about fictional worlds that
becomes all the clearer when these worlds originate on the page literary
beings can manifest themselves to us, but we cannot manifest ourselves to
them. Rather than sapping the felt presence of fictional beings, textuality
in fact highlights the strange authority of their appearance, the fact that
the agency in this encounter seems to lie with them. It is as if they seek us
out, and, confronting us with the difference between their story world and
our own, call upon us to reflect on this difference.1
In this chapter, then, I want to argue that to be a bucolic character
means to have a character that is shaped by its relationship to an imagined
world, the fictional world of bucolic poetry itself, which is projected in
1
So Steiner (1989) 14243, taking his point of departure from the archaic torso in Rilkes famous poem,
whose message is change your life, argues that the question any art work asks of us is What do
you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are
implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?
92
Becoming bucolic
93
bucolic song and encountered in the fictional experience of listening to it.

In particular, I wish to consider how bucolic identity is bound up with
performance and impersonation. As I argued in the last chapter, the singers
of Theocritus monologue poems do not seem to be in communication
with their intended audience. Rather, as they sing, they become their own
audience, telling stories in which they fashion an imaginative escape from
the desire that led them to sing in the first place. The goatherd of Idyll 3
introduces mythical paradigms that lead not so much to the persuasion
of his beloved as to the imagination of the experience of his legendary
predecessors. Polyphemus envisions a pastoral world that he shares with
Galateia, who has left the ocean to become his wife. These characters are
able to achieve a temporary distraction from their present suffering by
invoking a more perfect version of their own bucolic existence. Comatas in
Idyll 5 is more confident about his ability to reenact his own bucolic vision;
he begins his song with Lacon with the Muses love me more than the
singer Daphnis (5.8081), and, after his victory, he promises a butting goat
(5.150): if I dont castrate you, may I be Melantheus instead of Comatas.
By imagining his kinship with Daphnis, he is able at the same time to
distance himself from an imagined antitype, the treacherous goatherd of
the Odyssey, who is defeated (and put to death) by Odysseus. Thyrsis,
the famous pastoral singer of Idyll 1, impersonates a still more famous
pastoral singer as he performs The Sorrows of Daphnis; he too is able
to successfully reenact a legendary counterpart for his fellow herdsmen.
Finally in Idyll 7 Lycidas, who is for Simichidas the archetypal herdsman
singer, looks forward to hearing of his predecessors from another singer,
Tityrus, and wishes that he could have been the audience of Comatas.
To have heard bucolic song, then, is to have been inspired with a desire
to emulate its leading characters, and dramatic impersonation is one way in
which this desire for reenactment expresses itself. By imagining themselves
as Daphnis or Polyphemus, the herdsmen try out roles from the repertory
of bucolic myth, and so stage their own imaginative involvement with the
bucolic world of which they are a part. As I shall argue in the next chapter,
it is clear from Idyll 16 that the Ithacan books of the Odyssey provided Theocritus with suggestive examples of rustic characters in disguise. Further
evidence for the influence of this Homeric material on the development of
Theocritus bucolic characters is provided by Comatas disparaging reference to the goatherd Melantheus. But Theocritus has turned the Homeric rustics disguise into deliberate theatricality; while Homers characters
are revealed in the course of the poem to be other than what they seem,
Theocritus herdsmen consciously experiment with personae. Even the
94
most heart-felt song is a kind of role play. The goatherd of Idyll 3 leaves
his animals at the opening of the poem to serenade Amaryllis, Polyphemus
abandons his flocks to go to the seashore and sing to Galateia. Real herdsmen sing while they are working, but the songs of the Idylls are always a
performance.
In this chapter, then, I shall look at two poems in which character is
inextricably linked to imaginative role play. Idyll 6 presents an exchange of
bucolic songs between Daphnis and Damoetas. However, the only way we
know that the exchange is between these two characters is that Theocritus
tells us so in the frame narration that precedes the songs themselves. Within
the world of the poem, Daphnis speaks as a friend of Polyphemus, and
Damoetas responds to him in the persona of the Cyclops. Without the
frame narration, in other words, there would be no way for a reader to
tell that the characters are not simply Polyphemus and his advisor, as they
appear to be from their own words. In Idyll 12, a poem that has received
very little critical attention, a speaker who has much in common with the
characters of the bucolic poems imagines how his own unhappy love affair
would look to observers from the distant future, reimagining it in erotic
categories derived from the distant past. Like the goatherd of Idyll 3, he
looks for roles to reenact, and doubts his ability to fulfil them. However, at
the end of the poem he turns away from the present completely, and begins
an imaginary conversation with men who lived far away and long ago. He
is able to achieve freedom from suffering by imagining himself in a fictive
identity, and Idyll 12 therefore makes an interesting comparison with the
bucolic poems in this respect.
idyll 6
Idyll 6 is in many ways the most enigmatic of the bucolic poems. The poem
begins with Theocritus addressing a friend, much as he does in the opening
of Idyll 11 and Idyll 13 (6.15):

, ! "# $ % & ' ( ) *
# ( ' + % ,
' -.
/$' 0 $.1 - ' -' .
2 ' -3 # ,

2 4$' .
Damoetas and Daphnis the cowherd once drove their herd together into one place,
Aratus. One of them was red-haired, the other was just getting his beard. Both
sat down at a certain spring and in the heat of a summer day they sang thus. And
Daphnis began first, because he first proposed a contest.
Becoming bucolic
95
There is much here that resembles Idyll 11: the address to Aratus, the presentation of bucolic lovers in their youthful prime, who are made to sit down
and sing for the poems addressee, the explicit formulation of the poets
invention they sang thus with which their songs are introduced. Yet
the differences are also immediately apparent; Theocritus gives no indication of why he is writing this poem to Aratus, and there is consequently
no sense that the bucolic characters are being introduced as an example or
a response to a behavior in the real world that Theocritus shares with his
friend.2
It has frequently been argued that in narrative fiction the narrators own
evaluative stance towards the story he tells points to its significance for the
reader.3 Presenting a story, whether narrative or dramatic, as the illustration of a gnomic proposition, as Theocritus tells the stories of Polyphemus
and Heracles in Idyll 11 and Idyll 13, is perhaps the most obvious way to
ensure that the reader gets their point. Here narrative is most obviously a
situation-bound transaction between two parties . . . an exchange resulting
from the desire of at least one of these parties, such that narrative meaning is a function of the situation in which narratives occur.4 In drama,
however, where there is no narrator to guide us, the point of the story will
be less obvious. Yet, as Ross Chambers has observed of Othello, storytelling
situations within a dramatic work will often suggest our response to the
play in which they appear. As Desdemonas father recognizes the mighty
magic of the tales Othello tells his daughter, so we see his own vulnerability to the seductive fictions of Iago, and are able to construe various
models and anti-models of storytelling within the play.5 Likewise, in Idyll 1
the goatherds responses to the visual fiction of the decorated bowl and the
dramatic performance of The Sorrows of Daphnis key our response to
the fictional world in which they occur. While the point of dramatic fiction
may be less obvious, it may nonetheless be legible in the dramatic situation
if we attend to the outcome of any storytelling situations within it.6
If, then, Theocritus does not explicitly offer the fictional world of Idyll
6 to Aratus as the exemplification of a gnomic proposition, what is the
dramatic situation that it produces in which we might discover its point?
What are the consequences of the story for characters and reader? What
we find when we reach the world of the poem is a surprise. We leave the
2
3
4
6
Cf. Fantuzzi (2004) 17071, who notes Idylls 6s variation of the structuring device of Idylls 11 and 13.
See, for example, Brooks (1984) 35, 236 for modern prose fiction, Labov (1972) on point in oral
storytelling, and my comments on Idyll 13 in the previous chapter.
5 Chambers (1984) 219.
Prince (1988) 7.
Prince (1988) 7, commenting on the work of Chambers, notes that he has insisted on the importance
of reading narrative meaning as a function of the situation in which narratives occur and on the equal
importance of reading in narratives the situation they produce as giving them their point.
96
frame narration in the expectation of a song contest between Daphnis and

Damoetas, but the first words that we hear from Daphnis make little sense
as a fulfilment of this promise (6.69):
# 56# 7 8 9
$ # '$.
- ' :$%

6 * 0;$0# # # 0;$
8' $$'. .
Galeteia throws apples at your flock, Polyphemus, and calls you a wretched lover
and a goatherd. And you do not look at her, you wretch, but sit sweetly playing
your pipe.
Not only is Daphnis apparently addressing Polyphemus and not Damoetas

(a situation that no other bucolic poem could have prepared us for); what
he is saying to him contradicts everything we know about the Cyclops from
Idyll 11.7 Now it is the nymph who is in love with him and has left the sea to
solicit his affections, while Polyphemus is either indifferent to her charms or
master of his own desire to such a degree that he is able to feign indifference
to her. Daphnis thus fictionalizes the Cyclops in his own performance for
Damoetas, just as Theocritus fictionalizes him for Nicias in Idyll 11. By
setting his characters imaginative reinvention of Polyphemus against his
own, Theocritus does away with the uniqueness and authoritative status
of his own bucolic Cyclops. What he did to Homer, he has Daphnis do to
him. Moreover, it is not just Polyphemus who is raised to another power of
fictionality by this second reinvention. Daphnis himself, who in Thyrsis
impersonation of him in Idyll 1 appeared as a tragic hero, overpowered, as it
seems, by some hopeless infatuation, here appears as the witty advocate of a
light-hearted carpe diem approach to desire, who mocks Polyphemus for not
availing himself of the opportunity for pleasure that Galateia is offering him
(6.1519). His character, too, is quite different in the two poems in which he
appears as himself and as the object of another characters impersonation.
It has been argued that Theocritus intended the Daphnis of Idyll 6 to
be understood as a different character than the Daphnis of Idyll 1, and
that the poet is simply careless in his use of names because he published
his poems individually, and did not envisage them being read together in
a collection.8 Regardless of the details of publication, this claim seems to
7
Several scholars have argued that Idyll 6 is written after Idyll 11, and presupposes knowledge of it; see
Ott (1969) 7276, Kohnken (1996), and Hunter (1999) 244. Daphnis performance certainly creates
a Cyclops who is older and more self-assured than his counterpart in Idyll 11, so that the dramatic
setting of Idyll 6 has to be later.
Wendel (1899) 24.
Becoming bucolic
97
me unlikely. Idyll 6 quite deliberately toys with the idea of the Cyclops
the possibility of a Cyclops still more surprising than those of Idyll 11 or
Philoxenus (it is the variety of the tradition that is invoked, not merely
that of his own corpus). Idyll 6, in other words, is a poem that is about
the malleability of characters in a fictionalized literary tradition, so that to
imagine that Theocritus could have been unaware of this possibility in the
case of Daphnis (that the Daphnis of Idyll 6 could have been mistaken for
the Daphnis of Idyll 1, or vice versa, depending on which appeared first)
seems to be highly implausible (and likewise in the case of Comatas, who,
like Daphnis, appears as himself in Idyll 5, and as the subject of someone
elses song in Idyll 7).9
By contrast, the irony that the poem exploits is that we learn less about a
character when he appears in his own person than we do when he appears as
the object of another characters impersonation. When we think of Daphnis,
we think first of all of Idyll 1, not of Idyll 6, though in the former Daphnis is
not actually present in the poem at all, but is made manifest solely through
Thyrsis impersonation of him. Conversely, when he does appear in person
in Idyll 6, his character consists of the ability to make another bucolic
character the object of his own impersonation. Daphnis is more palpable,
more present when he is projected by someone elses impersonation than
when he appears in his own person. Fictionalizing self-projection is thus
the most characteristic form of subjectivity in the bucolic poems it is by
pretending to be others that the characters are most truly themselves.
Damoetas is also witty and self-assured when he takes on the persona of
Polyphemus (6.2128):
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Kossaifi (2002) 35556 suggests that, en donnant un nom identique a` deux personnages opposees, le
poète veut parfois montrer les facettes differentes dun meme concept. Thus, for example, Tityrus
in Idyll 3 looks after the sheep of the nameless goatherd as he sings for Amaryllis, while in Idyll 7 he
is a singer himself, thereby revealing the reciprocity of bucolic song, which requires its herdsmen to
be both performers and audience. Cf. the discussion of Daphnis in the post-Theocritean Idyll 8 as a
combination of traits belonging to the Theocritean Daphnis in Fantuzzi (1998), to which I will turn
in my conclusion.
98
I saw her, by Pan, when she was throwing apples at the flock, and she did not
escape my attention, or my one sweet eye, with which I pray I may see until the
end (but may the prophet Telemus who prophesied evil to me take it home with
him instead, and keep it for his children). For I myself, to tease her back, dont
look at her, but say I have another woman, and she hears it and is jealous, o
Paean, consumed with desire, and from the sea peeks longingly at my cave and my
flocks.
What were unconscious allusions to the Odyssey in the Cyclops mouth in

Idyll 11 become conscious references when Damoetas impersonates Polyphemus. He refers to the prophecy of the seer Telemus, who, as the Cyclops
recalls after his blinding, had predicted it (Odyssey 9.50712). Moreover,
rather than being willing to sacrifice his one eye, a source of his ugliness
as he saw it in Idyll 11, for Galateia, Damoetas Polyphemus views it as the
instrument of his power over the Nymph and, like his gleaming teeth, a
source of beauty when he views himself reflected in the ocean (6.3438).
He is likewise able to feign to Galateia what he imagined for himself at the
end of Idyll 11, that, because of his vast pastoral holdings, he would be an
object of desire for women on the land. However, while in Idyll 6 he is not
nave as he is in that poem, he is still bucolic; to avoid the evil consequence
of seeing his own reflection, he says: I spat three times into my chest, as
the old woman Cotyttaris taught me (6.3940). The rustic magic, and the
old woman who is its source, recall Idyll 3: Agroeo the sieve diviner and
the premonitions of the future from symptoms in his own body by which
the goatherd anticipates the appearance of Amaryllis.
The performances of Daphnis and Damoetas embed resistance to authoritative interpretations of the bucolic characters in the collection itself. There
can be no final understanding of their character, because their character is
essentially labile and performative. It is manifested in song rather than
found through introspection; possible selves, like possible worlds, are, in
Kripkes terms, stipulated, not discovered.10 No matter then that this is not
the real Polyphemus (or the real bucolic Polyphemus). For if this is the
real Daphnis, he is present only in his performance of a part, and is less
substantial in his own person than when he is impersonated by Thyrsis
in Idyll 1. What, then, is Aratus to make of this exchange? As I observed
earlier, point in narrative may be got either from the narrators reflection
on the events of his story or from the characters own responses within it.
Here we get both, for after Damoetas is done with his impersonation of
the Cyclops Theocritus comments (6.4246):
10
Kripke (1980) 4344.
Becoming bucolic
99
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With these words Damoetas kissed Daphnis, and the former gave the latter a pipe,
and the latter gave the former a beautiful flute. Damoetas plays the flute, and
Daphnis the cowherd plays the pipe. Immediately the calves danced in the soft
grass. Neither won, they were both undefeated.
As at the end of Idyll 1, the goatherd is visibly delighted with the performance
he has just witnessed. Moreover, as Thyrsis performance in Idyll 1 draws out
the similarity of Daphnis both to himself and his audience the goatherd,
so here too the outcome of the exchange of songs is to blur the difference
between the two herdsmen. Damoetas gives Daphnis a syrinx, Daphnis
gives Damoetas an aulos, and they play these instruments not to discover
a competitive edge, but in harmonious consort. The exchange suggests
equivalence, and even their animals participate in this happy outcome as
they dance to the music in the soft grass. The almost comic exuberance of
the dancing calves forces us to attend to the poems fictionality and to the
importance of fictionality in the self-projection of its dramatic characters.
Even if Aratus is the friend of Theocritus whose unhappy love for a
boy is alluded to in Idyll 7, the message he has for him here is anything
but obvious.11 For the poem hardly contains a program for action. Like
Idyll 11, it seems to suggest the importance of imaginative experience in
human communication, particularly insofar as that experience takes the
form of role play. The herdsmens own response to one anothers adoption
of an imaginative persona is the only clue we have in responding to the
poem, and their delight must largely stem from their success in shedding
their own identities for the duration of their songs. This interpretation is
further suggested by the concluding narration, where Theocritus tells us
that, after they had become Polyphemus and his advisor, they gave one
another musical instruments and began to play on them. This is like a
reprise of the exchange of songs insofar as, when they play, they become
virtually indistinguishable from one other the loss of self in the musical
performance parallels the assumption of a fictional identity in the songs. If
there is a message here, it would seem to be that the pleasures of bucolic
11
Bowie (1996) suggests that the poem is Theocritus guarded declaration of feeling for him. If so, it
is so unemphatic one could hardly imagine it being greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm. See also
the reservations of Hunter (1999) 244.
100
song and bucolic impersonation are their own reward, even without the
pain of erotic desire that in Idyll 11 makes this distraction desirable.12
The bucolic characters thus shift between dramatic levels, depending on
whether they are imagined by the poet or by other characters. Polyphemus appears as Theocritus example in Idyll 11 and Simichidas example in
Idyll 7, but as the object of Damoetas impersonation in Idyll 6. Comatas
appears as himself in Idyll 5, and as the object of Lycidas wish in Idyll 7.
However, it is particularly instructive in this respect to consider Daphnis
in the authentic and the spurious Idylls. Daphnis appears as the object
of Thyrsis impersonation in Idyll 1, as the subject of a song that Lycidas
will hear at his rustic symposium in Idyll 7, and as a singer who teases his
friend Damoetas as if the latter were Polyphemus in Idyll 6. In Idyll 1, then,
Daphnis is at one remove from the poems first dramatic level, in Idyll 7 at
two removes, while in Idyll 6, in which he appears as a character, he does
not speak as himself, in order to address his friend at the level of dramatic
fiction for which the introductory verses have prepared us, but through
a secondary persona he has adopted. Whether he speaks as impersonator
or object of impersonation, the name Daphnis points to the theatrical
nature of bucolic song, and the fictionalizing self-projection it encourages.
In Idyll 8, by contrast, Daphnis and Menalcas appear as boys, while in Idyll
9 they compete in a song contest; in Idyll 27 a youthful Daphnis seduces
a girl. All three poems invent new episodes in the life of Daphnis, but the
role play of the authentic Idylls has disappeared; Daphnis is simply a character, and his name merely a sign of the pastoral genre. The projection of
inner experience into imaginative role play seems therefore to be a defining
feature of bucolic character in the authentic Idylls, particularly insofar as
it provides a means of escape from the traumatic experience of unfulfiled
desire. It will be interesting, therefore, to consider the part of such therapeutic role play in Idyll 12, which shares many unacknowledged similarities
with the pastoral poems.
i d y l l 12
Idyll 12 is one of the least studied poems in the Theocritean corpus. A
detailed account of its narrative structure and technique will, however,
reveal a particularly intriguing example of the Theocritean role poem, with
12
Marco Fantuzzi has suggested to me by email that the final lines of Daphnis song What is not
beautiful, Polyphemus, has surely often looked beautiful to love (6.1819) is in fact the poems
gnomic proposition, here moved from the frame, where it appears in Idyll 11 and Idyll 13, to the
dramatic exchange. From this perspective, the value of assuming a fictional identity is clear, for the
impersonator can thereby see himself through the eyes of another.
Becoming bucolic
101
a number of interesting resemblances to the pastoral Idylls. The Idyll is a

monologue by an unnamed speaker, expressing delight at the return of his
beloved boy (12.1) after an absence of two days. The opening verses greet
his beloved you have come, dear boy, after two days and nights you have
come (12.12) in a way that recalls Sappho 48 you have come, and
I was longing for you and has its literary origin in Eumaeus greeting
of Telemachus at Odyssey 16.2329: You have come, Telemachus, sweet
light . . .13 This greeting is, however, followed by a series of comparisons
which are lacking in Sappho and Homer (12.39):14
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As spring is sweeter than winter, as the apple is sweeter than the sloe, as a ewe is
woollier than its lamb, as a maiden is better than a thrice-married woman, as a
fawn is friskier than a calf, as the clear-voiced nightingale is the most songful of all
winged creatures, even so your appearance made me glad, and like a traveler when
the sun is scorching I ran beneath a shady oak.
The speaker begins his encomium with two unremarkable comparisons:

as spring is sweeter than winter, as the apple is sweeter than the sloe . . .
The next, however, appears to reverse the priority of youth over age that
one would expect in the praise of the beloved: as a ewe is woollier than its
lamb . . .15 And while what follows as a maiden is better than a thricemarried woman appears to restore it, some questions are raised by the
13
14
15
Attempts have been made to identify this opening with the kinds of welcoming speech outlined by
Menander Rhetor in his second treatise. Thus Giangrande (1971) 38 refers to it as an epibaterios logos
(Menander 377.31388.16), while Cairns (1972) 18 calls it a prosphonetikos logos (Menander 414.32
418.4). For Menander, however, both are types of public political oratory conducted in prose. The
epibaterios is either (i) an address to ones native city on return, or (ii) an address to a city one visits,
or (iii) an address to a visiting governor, while the prosphonetikos is a small-scale encomium of a ruler
(Russell and Wilson [1981] ad loc. 377.32378.4). Thus, while both types of speech may ultimately
derive from poetic greetings such as those in Homer and Sappho, I accept the conclusion of Russell
and Wilson (1981) xxxiiixxxiv that the similarity of expression in Idyll 12 is better understood as
imitation of a familiar poetic topos rather than as a clear generic announcement (Cairns [1972] 25).
Cf. Wilamowitz (1924) II.141, on Lycidas song in Idyll 7: Es lehrt gar nichts und kann nur verwirren,
wenn man das Lied ein nennt; man lauft Gefahr, die Rhetorik heranzuziehen, die
hier nichts zu suchen hat.
Sappho 48 proceeds directly to the effect of the beloveds arrival you cooled my heart which was
burning with desire and Eumaeus, having expressed his fear that he might not see Telemachus
again, continues: but come now, enter, dear child, so that I may delight my heart looking at you
inside (16.2526).
Cf. Kelly (1979) 58.
102
choice of epithet. Gow points out that , thrice-married, in Stesichorus PMG 223, and ., having three husbands, at Lycophron
851, refer to Helen.16 Whether or not one understands a specific allusion,
thrice-married suggests a much more nuanced appreciation of the relative
claims of innocence and experience than, for example, riper than a pear,
which is used of a boy whose charms are fading at Idyll 7.120.17 For while
the virgin girl reflects the attractiveness of the beloved boy, the suggestion of Helen in the older woman to whom she is compared prevents the
comparison from appearing entirely to the speakers disadvantage. As in the
previous assertion of the ewes superiority to its lamb, the speaker appears
sensitive to the ways in which the juxtaposition of young and old mirrors
his own relationship with his youthful lover. Thus, as if shying away from
his own reflection in an image that pits youth against age, his next comparison effaces this difference altogether, and the two young animals are
all but indistinguishable: as a fawn is friskier than a calf . . . In the final
comparison the speaker switches from comparatives to a superlative: as
the clear-voiced nightingale is the most songful of all winged creatures . . .
Here too there seems to be a hint of self-praise, given that the speaker is in
the role of clear-voiced singer, and his greeting as a whole suggests that
it has been composed with one eye on its author all along.
The series of images has provoked considerable disagreement among the
poems commentators. Gow was offended by its apparent lack of emotional
restraint,18 while for Giangrande it marks the vulgarity of an ignorant
rustic with a tendency to grotesquely overdo things, to overcompensate,
as it were, for his lack of articulateness and genuine education.19 For
Cairns the hyperbole marks the poems generic affiliations,20 while Hunter
has emphasized its dramatic function in conveying the speakers emotional
excitement.21 It will be helpful therefore to look at another occasion in
the Idylls when a speaker employs a similar series of rustic images. Thus
Polyphemus, conjuring up, if not Galateia herself, then at least her image,
begins his song (11.1921):
G 9# 7 ;S#
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O white Galateia, why do you spurn one who loves you, whiter than cream cheese
to look at, softer than a lamb, friskier than a calf, sleeker than an unripe grape?
16
17
18
21
Gow (1952) ad loc. 12.5.

For the connection of this image to the invective of Archilochus, see Henrichs (1980).
19 Giangrande (1971) 43.
20 Cairns (1972) 25.
Gow (1952) II.221.
Hunter (1996a) 18990.
Becoming bucolic
103
When the two series are compared, their functions are clearly different.
Polyphemus hyperbole is an attempt to describe Galateia directly, and is a
spontaneous characterization of what he finds attractive in her. The speaker
of Idyll 12, on the other hand, uses the comparisons not to praise or describe
his beloved but to calculate his own feelings in response to his arrival: As
spring is sweeter than winter . . . even so your appearance made me glad.
Moreover, as I argued in the previous chapter, the qualities that Polyphemus
discovers in Galateia in the end defy his powers of description, and so
suggest the limits of comparison itself. One might also compare Bucaeus
song at Idyll 10.3637, where the attempt to praise his beloved results in
a feeling of inadequacy, and silence: Lovely Bombyca, your feet are dice,
your voice nightshade; your ways I truly cannot speak of. Thus, while
the comparisons in Idyll 12 resemble the language of bucolic infatuation
in their content (fruits, birds, baby animals), the speakers use of them sets
him apart from Polyphemus and Bucaeus; while they strain metaphor to
breaking point to express the intensity of their admiration, he offers a more
self-conscious modulation of its laudatory powers: he never loses sight of
his own reflection in his praise, and his final image is more about himself
than his beloved boy.
After the series of encomiastic metaphors the poem changes course
(12.1011):
U0
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If only equal loves breathed upon us both, and we might become a song for those
who come after.
Who are these people who will come after him, and what kind of memorialization is craved here? Given the pederastic context, Gow preferred to
see here a reference to Theognis 251 (Theognis and Kyrnos), rather than
Iliad 6.35458 (Helen and Paris),22 and the pathos of this allusion has been
explored at length by Hunter.23 Here, then, I want merely to examine how
the speaker of Idyll 12 has recourse to a voice other than his own when he
approaches the topic of immortality. Theognis speaks of fame that he, as
author, has already conferred upon his beloved (237): I have given you
wings. Moreover, the consequences of this immortality are expressed as a
series of future indicatives that apply to the beloved alone and which culminate in the lines (25152) to which Idyll 12.11 alludes: You will be a song
for those who come after. Theognis thus appears as a bestower of fame
rather than in need of it himself, and his address to Kyrnos assumes a body
22
Gow (1952) ad loc. 12.11.
23
Hunter (1996a) 19092.
104
of poetry in which the speaker has already been immortalized as poet, and
his addressee as lover. The speaker of Idyll 12, on the other hand, cannot
make promises about the future that derive their performative authority
from references to his own work. He can only wish that he and his partner
might be remembered by others for the quality of their affection: If only
equal loves breathed upon us both, and we might become a song for those
who come after. Rather than reflecting on the power of his own speech to
confer fame on his beloved boy, he can merely imagine the kind of thing
that people might say about them both in the future if their relationship
were different (12.1216):
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These were two splendid men amongst our ancestors, the one inspirer, as one
speaking in the Amyclean dialect would say, the other what a Thessalian would call
listener. They loved one other with equal yoke. There were indeed then golden
men again, when the beloved loved in return.
While Theognis 23754 looks sideways, as it were, deriving its authority

from the corpus of the Theognis poems, the speaker of Idyll 12 moves
vertically between past and future to give shape to his fantasy. He uses
the archaic U$ ;, inspirer, and ;, listener, to reimagine himself and his lover, but sets these archaic terms in the mouth of a speaker
from the future.24 Looking back to the present of Idyll 12, the latter will
see not the asymmetrical attraction of an older lover and his youthful
beloved but a relationship from which physical desire has been entirely
effaced.
While the speaker cannot confer a future he can reimagine the present,
and the terms in which he chooses to do so find an interesting echo in
24
The speakers manifest desire for lexical rarity is as immoderate as his other appetites. However,
his particular choices (Amyclean and Thessalian) remain obscure. Given the interest in curious
local pederastic festivals evinced by the end of the poem, a connection with the Amyclean cult of
Hyacinthus may have motivated his decision to describe the term U$ ; as Amyclean rather
than simply Laconian (Gow [1952] ad loc. 12.13f. points out that the two are less than twenty stades
apart). For in one version of the myth Zephyrus causes the death of the beautiful youth whose favors
he shared with Apollo by blowing ( E ) the latters discus off course a story of pederastic jealousy
much like the speakers own, with the ironic complication that it takes place in the very golden age
in which he feels their relationship would have been free of such problems. The attribution of ;
to a Thessalian speaker is more puzzling, since the word has no known connections with Thessaly
or any other dialect.
Becoming bucolic
105
Idyll 7. In the song which he performs for the narrator Simichidas the
goatherd Lycidas describes the torment of his desire for Ageanax (7.5256),
and then imagines a rustic symposium he will celebrate upon the latters
arrival in Mytilene (7.634). There he will hear songs on pastoral subjects,
and these lead him to wish that he could share an ideal present with the
singer Comatas (7.8689):
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The polarity of lover and beloved with which the song began has been
transmuted into a relationship between singer and audience, and it is clear
that in this ideal world Lycidas would prefer the role of listener. Idyll 12 uses
the same imagery in its progression from desire to idealization. The speakers
prayer seemed initially to be a plea for reciprocity: would that equal loves
breathed upon us both (cf. with equal yoke). His lexical fantasy, on
the other hand, imagines a relationship between an active inspirer and a
passive listener similar to that between Comatas and Lycidas. However,
while the lovers roles will be as distinct as the dialects in which they are
preserved, the speaker of Idyll 12, as we shall see, imagines himself as the
inspirer, and his beloved as his charming listener (12.20).
In both Idylls erotic dissatisfaction leads to literary invention, and this
movement accounts for the structural similarity noted by Legrand: Entre
elle [Id. 12] et les chansons de lidylle VII, il existe une parente. Ici et là, le
theme sentimental est indique plutot quil nest traite, et sert de pretexte a`
toute sorte de developpements parasites.25 Lycidas song in Idyll 7 begins
as an expression of his desire for Ageanax, but this desire is displaced by
the embedded narratives of Tityrus, Daphnis, and Comatas. In Idyll 12 the
speakers response to his infatuation is to invent a song that will be sung
about him by men of the future, and this brief fantasy derives its imaginative
appeal from the distinct accents of Thessalian and Amyclean it contains.
Lycidas and the speaker of Idyll 12 thus attempt to escape their present pain
by inventing other voices, which they imagine themselves hearing even as
25
Legrand (1925) 80.
106
they incorporate them in their own speech, and these fictions in both cases
involve an idealized image of their composers.26
Unlike Theognis, then, the speaker of Idyll 12 cannot confer immortality
with his own voice, and so he prays for the kind of love that could give him
an afterlife in song (12.1721):
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If only, father Zeus, if only, ageless gods, this might be, and someone, two hundred
generations from now, might announce to me in inescapable Acheron: The present
love of you and your charming listener is upon everyones lips, and especially those
of unmarried youths.
The mention of the underworld seems once again to recall Theognis 23754,
where the poet promises Kyrnos that he will not be deprived of fame, even
when he goes down into the much-lamenting house of Hades, under the
depths of dark earth (24344). Here too, however, there are characteristic
changes. Firstly, the lover will not simply descend into Hades while the fame
produced by the speaking voice remains upon earth. Instead, the speaker
imagines himself in the underworld, where an anonymous messenger will
deliver a report of his continuing fame in the world above. Moreover,
this vivid future scene also belongs to the speakers continuing attempt to
reimagine his present. In verse 12 the person from the future uses the deictic
'. . . . N', these two, to refer to the lovers not as they actually are,
but as the speaker of Idyll 12 would like them to become, and here too the
present love of you and your charming listener, spoken by the visitor to
26
De Jong (1987) 7778 observes a similar phenomenon in the Iliad. In a study of tis-speeches she
notes that on two occasions Hector imagines an anonymous future speaker, whose potential speech
is embedded in his own, speaking an oral epitaph for himself (6.46061) and for an opponent
(7.8990). On the first occasion he imagines the speaker looking at Andromache who is still alive,
and recalling that she was Hectors wife, on the second looking at the tomb of a warrior, and recalling
that Hector was the man who killed him. The oral epitaph differs from an actual epitaph in that it
is spoken by passers-by, whereas real epitaphs are spoken by the stone and addressed to passers-by,
and that the content of the epitaph reveals more about the character speaking than about the
person it is supposed to talk about. The situation envisaged by the speaker of Idyll 12 is rather less
concrete. Since the anonymous future speaker refers to the lovers in the past tense, he is not looking
at them in person, as Hectors first speaker is looking at Andromache. On the other hand, neither
does he refer to a memorial like the tomb that Hectors second speaker sees. The speaker of Idyll 12
has therefore put the epitaphic demonstrative N', these two (12) into the mouth of his
future speaker without any indication of how it got there.
Becoming bucolic
107
Hades, refers to an affection that does not yet exist, since it is the object of
the speakers wish in verses 1011. Formally, the speaker of the Idyll has again
voiced his reconstruction of the present as embedded direct speech by an
anonymous future speaker, and here too the invention expresses his desire
to be not the composer, but the theme, of erotic song. Finally, it is obvious
that, despite his plea for reciprocity, it is his own fame that concerns him
most; the report to the underworld will be delivered to me, not to us
(12.19).
After the bookish fantasy of these embedded narratives the speaker
returns to reality with the observation that such matters are in the hands
of the gods (12.2223), and that by reverting to erotic encomium he will at
least not be convicted of falsehood (12.2324): but in praising your beauty
I will not grow pimples on my slender nose (pseudea, or pimples, being
the sign of a liar).27 The bathetic image contrasts with the idealized lovers
that his archaizing imagination created, the inspirer and listener, donor
and recipient of a pure, disembodied breath. Unlike Lycidas, who is able to
transmute his erotic yearning into the desire for pastoral song, the speakers
imagination is not yet strong enough to distract him from his lover entirely,
and the fantasies of verses 1221, which rework his present situation, do not
offer lasting escape. So he lapses back into the emotional arithmetic28
with which the poem began (12.2526):
] ' ;S# 7 ) ) *0O 40; #
'$ ' \ ;$# 4. ' , J0 .
If you hurt me sometimes, you immediately set it right, so you confer a double
benefit, and I depart with a profit.
As with the pimples on the nose, the language here is remarkably mundane;
, , profit, is elsewhere confined to prose,29 and it is a measure of
the speakers ultimate imaginative success that his accounting imagery will
appear transfigured in the poems conclusion.
His final fantasy is a description of the festival of Diocles in Megara,
which is appended to the hesitant strivings that precede it as an exultant
apostrophe of the Megarians themselves, without any kind of transitional
motif or syntactical connection; the speaker is no longer even addressing
his ostensible audience. Just as in the series of images with which the poem
begins, however, what starts off as the praise of an addressee soon begins to
look very much like an encomium of the speaker himself (12.2731):
27
Gow (1952) ad loc. 12.23f.
28
Walsh (1990) 19.
29
Gow (1952) ad loc. 12.26.
108

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Nisaean Megarians, excellent with the oar, may you dwell in good fortune, since
you honored superlatively your Attic guest, boy-loving Diocles. Every year in early
spring a host of youths compete around his tomb to win the prize for kissing.
No mention is made of Diocles having sacrificed his own life on the battlefield to save that of his lover (which is what the Diocleia commemorated),
and, in the speakers vision, he is honored simply as an older lover. Similarly,
he transfers the blessing that is conferred upon the victor in poems celebrating athletic achievements from the competitor to the judge (12.3437):
L B$ $
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Blessed is he who judges those kisses for the boys. Surely he calls often upon brighteyed Ganymede that he may have a mouth equal to the Lydian stone with which
money-changers test true gold to see if it is false.
His reference to the Lydian stone, or basanos, marks a fantastic distance from
the victory poems of Pindar and Bacchylides, where it is the guarantee that
the poets voice is speaking the truth; it is the touchstone, in other words, of
a mouth that is singing, not kissing. The speaker thereby invests the festival
with the same aura of unreality that pervades his embedded songs. However,
while the account of the festival may be questionable from an antiquarian
perspective, its erotic exuberance is undeniable. There is no resolution of
the relationship between lover and beloved; after a greeting, a series of
comparisons, a pair of wishes, and a prayer, the speech simply ends with an
image of rapture: an umpire comparing kisses from a throng of anonymous
young men. One might compare the end of Idyll 7, where, after addressing
unanswered questions to the Castalian Nymphs about the experience he has
just undergone, Simichidas expresses a wish that he may once again plant
his winnowing fan before the altar of Demeter, whose statue smiles over the
end of the poem. These fantasy endings contrast with the pastoral Idylls
tendency to close on a quiet or even bathetic note (Idylls 1, 3, 4, 11). Yet, by
identifying in fantasy with the judge of the kissing competition, the speaker
at last accepts the role of agent rather than object of commemoration, and
this acceptance yields his most successful composition, as attachment to
Becoming bucolic
109
his beloved is effaced in an ecstasy of his own imagining. In the words of

Legrand, il en vient a` oublier lui-meme son bien-aime, a` commettre envers
lui une infidelite de pensee, puisquil envie larbitre qui, a` Megare, recoit
et apprecie les caresses des concurrents.30
Earlier I cited Legrands observation regarding the similarity between
Idyll 12 and the songs of Idyll 7: Le theme sentimental . . . sert de pretexte a`
toute sorte de developpements parasites.31 These parasitic developments
can now be seen as the means by which the composer is able to escape
his sentimental theme. For just as in Idyll 7 the embedded narratives of
Lycidas song eventually involve him in an imaginative world that frees
him of his desire for Ageanax, so here too infidelity of thought leads the
speaker away from his lover and into the world of his own imagination.
Nevertheless, while Idyll 12 offers many points of resemblance to the pastoral
poems in its themes, imagery, and narrative complexity, one crucial question
remains in determining its relationship to them: who speaks the poem? Is
the voice purely textual, a persona of the poet himself, like Theognis 23754,
or should we imagine a dramatic character? The rustic imagery of verses 39
associates the speaker with pastoral lovers like Bucaeus and Polyphemus,
and the pimples of verse 24 are found again at Idyll 9.30. Since this poem is
a pastoral by someone other than Theocritus, the imitation would suggest
that its writer thought Idyll 12 was pastoral too.32
There are some difficulties, however, in assigning it to a fictional character, a Polyphemus or a Bucaeus. The first of these is the Ionic dialect in
which it is written, since the other dramatic poems, both rural and urban,
are in Doric; the poem thus stands out from the Doric character poems,
though the choice of Ionic itself remains obscure.33 The second is that in
other Idylls that consist wholly or in part of character monologue there are
clear indications of the fictional identity of the speaker, and of the poems
dramatic setting. In Idyll 3 the goatherd identifies himself as such by his
references to his flock and his companion (3.15), and his song is performed
before the cave of Amaryllis (3.6). Similarly, in Idyll 11 Polyphemus is named
in both the frame narrative and his own self-address (11.8, 72, 80), and he
sings on a high rock by the seashore (11.1718). Moreover, in both these
poems it is clear that the addressee is absent, not simply because, as in
30
32
33
31 Legrand (1925) 80.

Legrand (1925) 80.
Not so the scholiast, who in the Hypothesis describes the poem as spoken by the poet to his beloved
(Id. 12 arg., Wendel [1914] 249). Cf. Gow (1952) II.221: The Idyll is a monologue addressed by the
poet to a boy whose two days absence has seemed all too long.
Cf. Gow (1952) II.221: It is impossible to guess why a piece of such content should be written in
Ionic hexameters.
110
Idyll 12, there is no reply, but because the speaker tells us so. The goatherd
of Idyll 3 complains that the Nymph will not leave her cave (3.6), and
Polyphemus that Galateia will not leave the sea (11.42, 63). We are therefore
given plenty of details with which to imagine the scene of the performance.
In Idyll 12, by contrast, there is no indication of a dramatic setting, no
mention of the speakers identity, and no sign of whether or not the boy is
present to hear the speech addressed to him. While one might imagine him
as a silent listener, like Simaethas servant Thestylis in Idyll 2, or Tityrus
in Idyll 3, the presence of these non-speaking characters is signaled by the
speaker, and they offer opportunities for increased dramatization of the
monologue.34 Similarly, while no one expects a reply to songs like those in
Idylls 3 and 11 (if the singer were not separated from the object of his desire
he would have no reason to sing), an extended greeting without a response
reads as a very peculiar kind of performance; it appears to be conducted for
its own sake rather than for its natural function of greeting the new arrival.35
While it is in keeping with the speakers all too obvious concern for his own
fame that we cannot tell whether his addressee is present or not, the absence
of direct reference by which we might understand his presence extends to
the physical setting as well, and should not, I believe, be explained simply
as the solipsism of the dramatic character Theocritus has created. Rather,
the unique combination of formal features a fictional first-person speaker
in the Ionic dialect without a narrative frame and with no indications of a
dramatic setting within the speech itself points to an intriguing curiosity
in the cabinet of Idylls. For Idyll 12 lies midway between the textual drama
of the Aeolic poems, with their range of addressees the distaff of Idyll 28,
the faithless boy of Idyll 29, and the poets own heart in Idyll 30 and the
fully developed mise en scène of the dramatic poems.
In Idyll 3 the goatherds song before the cave of Amaryllis appears to be a
kind of private role play, in which he indulges temporarily while his animals
34
35
On the use of the unspeaking addressee in mime, see Wiemken (1972) 22, Albert (1988) 8083, and
my Chapter 2.
For Walsh (1990) 1920, the poem departs from the rhetorical agenda signaled in the opening
because it is spoken some time after the boys arrival. As the speaker has already been relieved of his
desire, he no longer has to conciliate or seduce, and his speech is free to follow [his] unconstrained,
autonomous thoughts. An interval between the speakers gratification at the boys return and the
moment when the poem is delivered requires understanding the aorists in the opening e0
(12.1), =; (12.8) as simple past tenses. However, while Walsh (1990) 19 n. 53 criticizes Gow
for unaccountably translating them as perfects Thou art come . . . so hast thou gladdened me
the latter was presumably thinking of Telemachus return at Odyssey 16.23, where, since he has just
arrived, a perfect is required to render Eumaus greeting, &0. Given that Idyll 12 contains no
indication of the occasion of the speakers delivery of his speech, I do not believe that one can decide
between the different dramatic situations envisaged in these two versions.
Becoming bucolic
111
are watched over by a friend. Only the reader of the poem witnesses his
solitary performance. As he adopts a persona for the duration of his song,
so he uses myth within it as a vehicle for his own imaginative experience.
Rather than an attempt to persuade an addressee, his examples are a form of
role play, mythical figures whom he longs to reenact. The speaker of Idyll 12
would also be the hero of his own tales. The poem is difficult to place because
it exhibits features of the pastoral dramatic poems without projecting a
fully realized setting through the speakers words; it falls midway between
genuine drama and poems spoken by a persona of the poet himself. Yet
the shift from erotic distress to the freedom of imaginative self-absorption
is shown quite clearly by the speakers apostrophe of an imaginary ancient
audience at the end of the poem. Like the bucolic characters, he purifies
his own world of its shortcomings and so makes it an object to which he
can aspire in his imaginary experience. In the next chapter I will look at the
importance of this experience in the depiction of poetic apprenticeship and
poetic autobiography in Idyll 7. In this poem, as many commentators have
pointed out, there appears to be a deliberate attempt on the poets part to
counter the characterization of poetic experience as a form of distraction
that not only lacks therapeutic value but is positively harmful to psychic
well-being that Socrates presents in the Phaedrus. Before that, then, it will
be well to conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of how far the
poems I have discussed depart from the account of the relationship between
mimetic experience and psychic health that is outlined in the Republic,
Platos fullest treatment of this subject.
In Book 10 (604b605c), Plato contrasts two possibilities for a soul that
is dealing with painful experience, on the one hand therapy ( A), on
the other lamentation (0; .1'). Lamentation, Socrates argues, belongs
to the unreasoning part of the soul, and leads us to dwell on the painful
experience in our memory in such a way that we relive its pain. In this respect
it is the opposite of the therapy that philosophy provides, which analyzes
the underlying causes of the pain, and so leads us to recognize that, as he
has earlier claimed, nothing in mortal life is worthy of great concern.
Poetry that offers mimetic portrayals of suffering characters hinders this
therapeutic process because these imitations implant an evil constitution
in their audience. Recurring here to the argument that was introduced
in Book 3 (395cd), when the distinction between mimetic poetry (poetry
employing the direct speech of characters) and diegetic poetry (poetry in
the voice of the poet) was first introduced, Socrates claims that fictional
creations have power over our real lives because they leave behind in the
soul residues of the mimetic character to which that soul responded with
112
imaginative identification. These may seem harmless enough, but in the

course of time they build up to the point where the souls original appearance
is as unrecognizable as that of the sea god Glaucus, who is so thoroughly
encrusted with the detritus of his undersea world that his original shape is
no longer apparent (611d). More dangerous still, not only do we easily forget
that these residues are in fact alien to ourselves (401bc), their presence may
induce us to repeat the behavior of the mimetic character with which we
first identified if suitable triggers are present in our real life, so that we will
end up by responding to authentic pain with inauthentic behavior, without
even being aware that we are doing so. The only remedy, Socrates argues,
is to strip away these alien accretions so that the soul can embark upon the
project of philosophical knowledge unhindered by these impediments.
It should be clear from the foregoing that Plato conceives of a relationship
between an active poetic representation and a passive audience. Identification is something that just happens to us when we are exposed to mimetic
literature, and its residues simply end up in our souls whether we like it or
not. He never discusses the possibility of an elective relationship between
particular listeners and particular mimetic characters, or even the possibility of elective affinity, the possibility that, even if they do not fully choose
to identify with particular characters, particular listeners may nonetheless
be predisposed towards some characters rather than others. The process by
which the soul becomes burdened with mimetic residues seems to be as
unwilled and as ineluctable as the process by which an object submerged
in the sea is overwhelmed by marine parasites. The bucolic characters, by
contrast, appear to be fully in command of their mimetic choices. They
are freely chosen models for their behavior rather than virus-like intruders
that subvert it. They allow the herdsmen to aspire to, and attain, states of
themselves other than the present state of pain in which they find themselves. The poems, in other words, offer a vision of self-development that is
based not upon the philosophical project of self-knowledge but upon the
literary project of self-projection.36 They show the necessary presence of
fiction in any vision of selfhood in which the self posits a version of itself
in imagination to which it aspires in reality, by demonstrating how identification with an imagined (and hence, from the perspective of the present,
36
Or self-staging as Iser (1993) 303 calls it: Staging is the indefatigable attempt to confront ourselves
with ourselves, which can be done only by playing ourselves. It allow us, by means of simulacra, to
lure into shape the fleetingness of the possible and to monitor the continual unfolding of ourselves
into possible otherness. As he argues (24), pastoral is paradigmatic of literary fictionality in this
respect because it thematizes the act of fictionalizing, thereby enabling literary fictionality to be
vividly perceived.
Becoming bucolic
113
fictional) future self inevitably figures in any version of self-growth.37 Pastoral rejects the idea that an original self can be present to itself as an object
of knowledge as a dream of philosophy, and offers instead its own vision of
a self that, through its encounters with fictional counterparts, is endlessly
en route to its imagined possibilities.
37
So Moran (1994) 75106 in an important paper argues that the general problem of fictional emotions
that has been a concern for philosophers is in fact a pseudo-problem insofar as the imaginative
projection that is proper to our engagement with fictional worlds is in fact just the kind of intuitive
projection that is involved in our real-world experience of modal operations, memory, sympathy,
and so forth.
chapter 4
From fiction to metafiction
Aristotle, as we have mentioned, thought of dramatic poetry as poetry

from which the poets own person was excluded, and praised Homer for
approaching as closely as is possible in epic to this condition of drama. While
other poets are constantly intruding into their poems, Homer, after a brief
prologue, brings in a succession of dramatic characters who advance the
plot through their interaction with one another (Poetics 24). Conversely
Longinus, while fully acknowledging the dramatic quality of the Iliad,
would read its drama not as an exclusion of the poets self but as the
form in which the vigor and plenitude of Homers creative genius found
their natural expression when the poet was at the height of his power. He
contrasts this with the love of storytelling that marks the Odyssey and which
is, he suggests, characteristic of the mellowing of Homers power in old age
(On the Sublime 9.13). The form of both poems may be understood as a
projection of the poets psychic life. While Aristotle sees drama as the goal
to which all poetry should aspire, Longinus sees all poetry as, in effect,
species of lyric that give concrete embodiment to the inner world of their
writer in a variety of formal guises. Drama is simply the form this expression
takes when the writers need to externalize his inner life is most urgent and
vigorous.
Longinus position had long been anticipated by the Hellenistic poets.
Consider these verses of Hermesianax (fr. 7 Powell):

! !
" #$ %&' &( ) *!'+
-./
, . 0 1' '
2 3 3 &4 56' .
+' ! + 7
8 %+ 69 : .! ;!<
: =+' > ? ! &9.
114
115
And the Bard himself, whom the justice of Zeus maintains to be the sweetest spirit
of all the race of singers, divine Homer, worked up slender Ithaca in his songs for
the sake of shrewd Penelope, on whose account he traveled to that little island,
suffering greatly, leaving his own wide homeland far behind. And he celebrated
the family of Icarius, and the people of Amyclas, and Sparta, drawing on his own
experiences.
Hermesianax catalogue poem Leontion, a long fragment of which is preserved by Athenaeus, consists of a series of miniature biographies of the
Greek poets that playfully explore the notion treated so seriously by Longinus that a poets work can be considered as a fictional analogue of his own
experience. So here it is Homer himself who makes the long journey to
Ithaca for the love of Penelope that in the Odyssey appears as the voyage
of his hero Odysseus. This is by no means the most outlandish of Hermesianax tales; Hesiods poems, we learn, are the outcome of his infatuation
with the Ascraian girl Ehoia, whose name is derived from the opening formula of the Catalogue of Women (@ 0'). Hermesianax makes no attempt to
make his stories credible; indeed, the gap between their evident erudition
and the blatantly fantastic use to which this erudition is put is perhaps the
first thing about his poem that calls for explanation.1 If Hemesianax knows
as much about poets and poetry as his work would seem to indicate, why is
it that this knowledge is used to construct a series of narratives that give the
impression of having been written by someone who knew nothing about
either?
The lives of the Greek poets have often been treated as if they were
produced by nave projection of details from the poetry.2 No one, however,
would, I think, mistake Hermesianax biographies for a truth claim: they
are simply too fantastic for that. Rather than falsehood, then, what we
see here is a deliberate and transparent fictionalization of the relationship
between poets life and poets work.3 The Homeric poems are understood
to be in some sense a fictionalization of Homers own experience, but
1
C. L. Caspers, in a paper to appear in the proceedings of the Seventh Groningen Workshop on

Hellenistic Poetry, argues convincingly for the fundamentally allusive nature of Hermesianax biographical constructs, and hence for the enhanced appreciation of the poem that comes from studying
it in the light of its intertextual affiliations. I thank him for sharing this paper with me in advance of
its publication, and for his felicitous translation of > ? ! &9.
So Lefkowitz (1981) viii. Pelling (1990) 219 wonders why no tradition of systematic mendacity seems
to have developed in political biography as it did in the biography of cultural figures. The answer,
I would suggest, is that there is no mystery to be accounted for in the former case; as Aristotle tells
us, all men are political by nature; not all of them are poets, however.
Cf. Bing (1993) 629 on the bizarre fairyland, beguiling but weird, to which we are transported by
Hermesianax.
116
Hermesianax does not attempt to give a true account of the relationship

between the two; rather, he tells a story that in its manifest fictionality
draws attention to the mystery of poetic creation. By inventing a narrative
in which the experiences of Odysseus have become those of Homer himself,
Hermesianax, in his blatant mystification of the relationship between a
poets life and his poetic work, points to the fact that we cannot give a
reasonable explanation of this relationship, even though we may guess that
the two are, in some way, related. For what experiences could possibly have
given rise to the fantastic invention that is the Odyssey? The fictional story,
on the other hand, recaptures the wonder of poetic creation that for an
earlier time was expressed by locating the source of poetic stories with the
Muses.
Hermesianax poem is a useful introduction to Theocritus Idyll 7 because
many of its themes recur in a more nuanced way there. For the poem
presents itself as the autobiography of a poet, or, to be more precise, the
autobiographical account of a moment of decisive importance in the life
of a poet. As we shall see, however, reality effects coexist with elements of
manifest fiction, so that it is impossible to understand the poem as straightforward autobiographical narration. Rather, like Hermesianax poem, it
belongs to a special genre of poetic biography, which tells of poetic inspiration by mingling biographical detail with transparent invention. In Idyll
7 a speaker named Simichidas recalls how he traveled from the city of Cos
to a harvest festival at the country estate of some friends. On the way he
and his traveling companions met a goatherd named Lycidas, and the two
of them exchanged songs before their paths diverged. Lycidas tells of his
love for a boy, but soon turns from erotic to pastoral themes. He imagines
the songs that will be sung for him at a rustic symposium he is to host, and
recalls the famous bucolic singers of long ago. Simichidas song remains
within the present, but it is full of pastoral details as it cautions his friend
Aratus against unrequited love. Lycidas gives Simichidas a staff as a token
of his esteem, and the two parties go their separate ways. In the last part
of the poem Simichidas gives an account of his surroundings at the festival
that is both rapturous in tone and exceptionally rich in descriptive detail.
He concludes by comparing the wine he drank there with wine drunk by
Heracles and Polyphemus, and wishes that he might be allowed to experience the festival again in the future.
Idyll 7 thus recaps all the major themes of the bucolic poems. Lycidas
is a none too realistic herdsman who wishes to emulate his legendary
counterparts; in his song, longing for an ideal pastoral world takes the place
of erotic desire. The song that Simichidas sings recalls the rustic imagery
117
with which lovers express their desire in other bucolic poems. His careful
evocation of his surroundings at the end of the poem is a more expansive
version of the deictic gestures that bring to life the fictional worlds of Idyll 1
and Idyll 3. His use of Polyphemus and Heracles as imaginative equivalents
for his own experience is like the use of such mythical examples by Theocritus fictional herdsmen. Yet there are several features of the poem that
prevent the reader from understanding it as simply an invented tale. The
story is set on the island of Cos rather than in an undefined fictional place.
Simichidas and Lycidas discuss real Hellenistic poets, and Simichidas songs
are said to have reached the throne of Zeus, generally understood to be
a reference to the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was born on and
patronized the island, as Theocritus recalls in his encomium for the king
(Idyll 17.5872). Finally, while the other pastoral poems use the present
tense of literary drama, Idyll 7 is a retrospective account of an event that
happened at some time in the speakers past; its form purports to be an
account of lived experience, which ancient commentators took to be that
of Theocritus himself.4
Like its poet narrator, Simichidas, Idyll 7 is a poem fabricated for the
sake of truth (7.44). In it Theocritus stages an encounter between a youthful poet who is all too likely to be taken for himself and a figure who looks
very much like one of his own poetic creations. Since the older bucolic
singer gives the younger one a staff, as the Muses gave a staff to Hesiod,
this encounter looks very much like an inspiration scene. Theocritus seems
to have dramatized his own involvement with bucolic poetry in the form
of an encounter with a figure from that world who embodies its imaginative appeal in a particularly compelling fashion. In the other poems
the bucolic world is a self-contained fictional universe, although Theocritus uses its appeal to produce a real-world effect upon Nicias in Idyll 11,
much as Polyphemus uses it to influence himself. In Idyll 7, however, when
Simichidas reflects upon his rustic symposium at the end of the poem,
he is emulating not just Polyphemus and Heracles, whom he takes as his
examples, but also Lycidas, who proposed just such an occasion for himself
earlier in the poem, a rustic feast at which he would listen to tales about
Daphnis and Comatas, powerfully imagined representatives of the bucolic
world that he himself inhabits. Lycidas thus inspires Simichidas with the
same desire to project a world of bucolic characters to which he can aspire
in his imagination that animates his own psychic life. The bucolic fiction
4
Cf. Puelma (1960) 144: Im Gegensatz zu manchen anderen, deutlich als imaginar gekennzeichneten autobiographischen Berichten alexandrinischer Dichter hat Theokrit seinem Selbsterlebnis
der Thalysien einen ausgesprochen historischen Anstrich gegeben.
118
embodied in Lycidas is, in the fiction of Idyll 7, given power over the
image of the real-world poet Simichidas in the autobiographical account
of his own development. What in the other poems is represented as an
autonomous fictional world appears in this poem as a model for behavior
in a world that is a mimetic image of historical reality.
Theocritus suggests the implications of his fictional creation by showing
its transformative effect upon the image of its creator. The poem shows the
transformation of the young poet Simichidas from the composer of erotic
poetry with a superficial pastoral flavor into a poet capable of projecting his
inner life into imagined dramatic characters whose fictional experiences are
themselves capable of inspiring emulation in others. In generic terms this
could be described as the union of an erudite erotic elegy with a superficial
rustic flavor (the kind that Hermesianax fr. 7.7778 associates with Philetas)
with the conventions of Sicilian mime as represented by Theocritus fellow
Syracusan Sophron. Idyll 7, however, is less concerned with demonstrating
its cunning redeployment of generic models than with impressing upon us
the effects of a certain kind of mimetic desire the desire to refashion ones
life after literary models. The text that is interrogated, transformed, and
ultimately turned inside out in this regard is not a work of poetry, but Platos
Phaedrus. The poem contests Socrates suggestion that the self-forgetfulness
involved in imaginative experience is a kind of stultification, and that, by
aspiring to repeat this experience in real life, we depart without purpose
from the useful pursuit of self-knowledge. It does so by employing the same
curious structure that Plato employs: a walk in the country by city folk, an
exchange in this unfamiliar setting of literary compositions that reflect upon
the relationship between writing and desire, then a telling demonstration
of what the kind of life the interlocutors aspire to might actually look like.5
Needless to say, the life of the imagination to which Simichidas aspires bears
little resemblance to Socrates perpetual intellectual vigilance. Yet it is in this
reversal of Socrates disparaging account of the value of poetic seduction that
Theocritus espousal of mimetic desire finds its clearest expression. As we
have seen in the other bucolic poems, identification of the self with mimetic
models is, within the world of these poems, a form of self-projection, an
inevitable component in the process by which one evolves towards an
imagined future. Idyll 7 demonstrates how this is also true for the poet: by
having Simichidas engage in the very kind of mimetic self-fashioning that
defines the bucolic characters, he allows the poems in which they appear to
5
On the structure of the Phaedrus, see Ferrari (1987) 2526. Hunter (2003) 23334 points to a structural
similarity between Idyll 7 and the Phaedrus insofar as they tell of nave enthusiasts [Phaedrus and
Simichidas] who encounter an ironic wisdom beyond their understanding.
119
be read as metafiction, that is to say, as instances of the poets self-projection,

much as Hermesianax would read Homer. Idyll 7 therefore has a unique
value for the understanding of bucolic poetry, for it allows us to see the
literary drama of the other poems as a kind of lyric, an imaginary stage on
which the poets inner world takes shape.6 The relationship between the
empirical self and its fictional counterparts is expressed as another fiction,
a narrative that preserves the mystery of this self-fictionalizing projection
by casting it as an inspiration scene. This experience cannot be predicted
in advance, nor can the forms that result from it be anticipated before the
inspiration that gives them concrete shape. As a means of clarifying this
process, I will compare Theocritus achievement in Idyll 7 with that of the
twentieth-century poet who went furthest in developing the lyric poem
as a means of giving independent life to possible versions of the creative
self, Fernando Pessoa. For, in his invention of a series of heteronymic poets
whose work is stylistically autonomous from his own, Pessoa gives a striking
account of inspiration as the emergence of other selves within the empirical
self of the writer.
Idyll 7 begins with a voice that is hard to place within the kinds of
dramatic structure employed by Theocritus bucolic poetry. In contrast to
literary drama, in which fictional characters speak about their situation in
the present tense, or the poems in which Theocritus frames this drama with
some sort of introductory address to a friend, the speaker here tells a story
about his own life that took place some time ago (7.12):
A B+ ? 6C : DE+ > )
0+ ! F : + G!! ;!<.
Once upon a time Eucritus and I were on our way to the Haleis from the city, and
Amyntas was with us as a third.
The discursive situation is strange the poem addresses us intimately,

as if we knew who Eucritus, Amyntas, and the speaker were, and this
information did not have to be repeated. Likewise, if we know that the
river Haleis and the spring Burina (7.49) are on the island of Cos, we will
know that this is where the poem takes place. It is almost as if we were
within the world of the poem, and already familiar with its characters and
setting. Yet the speaker refers to this world as a world of once upon a time,
a world to which he no longer belongs, although he does not say how or
why he has come to be separated from it.7 Again, in the verses that follow,
6
7
As we shall see in the next chapter, Idyll 3 was already read this way in antiquity.
Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.1: the Greek implies only that the epoch referred to is closed, or the state of
affairs no longer existing, not that it belongs to the distant past.
120
we are placed in a position of unwarranted intimacy; the speaker simply

tells us that he and his friends made the journey because Phrasidamus and
Antigenes were offering a harvest festival (7.34), but he does not give any
details about their relationship to himself.8
The unspecified once upon a time (7.1) that locates the story in relation
to the present contrasts with the precision of detail within the story itself.
When the travelers had not yet gone half way, and the tomb of Brasilas
had not appeared to them (7.1011), they meet with the goatherd Lycidas,
a Cydonian man (7.12). After the speaker has given Lycidas name and
origin, his description continues (7.1319):
A > 9 9
H6 ' >C : > $ 8I B C.
,
!J 63+ <+B B +6
9+! K! 9 !
!: 9 L M& 69+ 66 9
N.+ +$, O 3 8B 6+
I+P$ +<.
He was a goatherd, and no one could not have known it looking at him, since he
looked exactly like a goatherd. On his shoulders he had the dark skin of a shaggy,
thick-haired goat still smelling of rennet, and around his chest an old tunic was
fastened with a wide belt, and he held a crooked staff of wild olive in his right
hand.
The structure of the thought seems clear enough: Lycidas is said to look
just like a goatherd, and a picture is given which explains this assertion. Yet
the straightforward propositional content of the words is belied by their
Homeric resonances. Verses 1314, no one could not have known it looking
at him, rework an expression in which one god recognizes the actions of
another,9 while verse 14, he looked exactly like . . ., is standard when a
8
Furusawa (1980) 9697 argues that the naming of genuine and identifiable heroic ancestors for
Phrasidamus and Antigenes points to the historicity of these two, and indeed of the poem as a whole
fictional descendants could not be added to historical antecedents in a way that would be acceptable
to a contemporary audience, for such a combination would be understood as false, not fictional. She
thus picks out the problematic blend of reality effect and fiction that lies at the heart of the poem,
while rejecting as impossible the very quality that, as we shall see, made Idyll 7 so suggestive a model
for later writers of pastoral fiction, namely its combination of real history with manifest fiction.
Krevans (1983) 20120 approaches the problem in a different way, arguing that the poem contrasts
a named geography that recalls not actual places, but rather literary history, with the anonymous
geography of bucolic poetry that arises from direct or natural inspiration, rather than evolving out of
earlier poetry. Such a distinction between immediate and learned poetry is impossible to maintain,
however the named, real-world geography of Cos is in fact the very site of bucolic inspiration and
exchange, and Lycidas, the master of bucolic song, explicitly compares his composition with trends
in Hellenistic poetics even as he sings of his imagined counterparts, Tityrus and Comatas.
9 Il. 1.53637 (Hera realizing that Zeus had been with Thetis), Od. 5.7778 (Calypso recognizing
Hermes).
121
god adopts a disguise.10 Lycidas, perhaps, is not a goatherd, but someone,

or something, who looks just like one.11 Unlike the disguised gods of epic,
however, Lycidas is never revealed as anything other than what he seems.
If he is wearing a mask, the mask remains firmly in place. The suggestions
of divinity that surround him are, moreover, not facts imparted by an
omniscient narrator, as they are in the Homeric passages on which they are
modeled, but the response of one participant in the story to another.12
In addition to these echoes of Homeric epiphany scenes, there are resemblances between Simichidas meeting with Lycidas and Odysseus meeting
with the goatherd Melantheus at Odyssey 17.20416. In both poems the
encounter occurs on the road, a spring is described, and the goatherd greets
the travelers with mockery here Lycidas teases Simichidas for rushing to
the feast in the midday heat, when even the lizard sleeps in the dry stone
wall, and the crested larks do not go forth (7.21).13 Theocritus comments
explicitly on the Ithacan books of the Odyssey in Idyll 16, the Encomium
of Hieron. Along with the leaders of the Lycians, the sons of Priam, and
Cycnus, he observes that the rustic characters of the Odyssey also owe the
preservation of their names to Homer (16.5457):
6&' Q R +S
DE! : S : T ! 6
8+6 8B +6B U9+'
> !M K % + .
The swineherd Eumaeus would have been forgotten, and Philoetius busy with the
herded cows, and courageous Laertes himself, if the songs of the Ionian had not
favored them.
The transition from Trojan princes to Ithacan herdsmen is surprising in a

series of examples offered to a ruler as proof of the commemorative power
of poetry until we recall the importance of disguise in the rustic scenes
of the Odyssey. Eumaeus is the son of a king who, as a boy, was abducted
by pirates and brought to Ithaca, where he has served Odysseus family
10
11
12
13
Cf. Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.14, Hunter (1999) ad loc. 7.13.

Gow (1952) II.12930, rejecting the bucolic masquerade proposed by earlier scholars, who saw
Lycidas as a contemporary poet in disguise, lists the candidates proposed. More recently, Lycidas has
been interpreted as a god in rustic costume; Lawall (1967) proposes a satyr, Williams (1971) Apollo,
Brown (1981) Pan, while Hunter (1999) ad loc. 7.1011, 21 sees traces of Hermes.
Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.14: The passage seems adequately explained by the assumption that Simichidas
is striking in advance the amused and quizzical tone which Lycidas assumes in his opening speech.
Cf. Seeck (1975) 199: Im Gegensatz zum allwissenden Typ des Erzahlers, der das Geschehen vollig
durchschaut und die innersten Regungen und Gedanken der Personen kennt, besitzt der Ich-Erzahler
nur ein subjectives Teilwissen . . . So erfahren wir zwar nicht, was hinter dem Lacheln des Lykidas
steckt.
See Ott (1972) 14748 for a tabulation of verbal and thematic echoes.
122
loyally ever since (15.40384). Philoetius too (20.185, 254), like Eumaeus
(14.22, 121; 15.351, 389; 16.36; 17.184), is a leader of men. Their humble
dress conceals a nobility acknowledged only in Homers narrative. They
occupy a middle position between Odysseus himself, who even as a beggar
looks like a kingly ruler (20.194), and the wicked goatherd Melantheus,
in whom appearance and reality are one.14
From here it is only a step to the aristocratic foundlings and piratical
abductions of the Greek novel; in Daphnis and Chloe the pastoral decor is
merely a temporary costume for lovers who will eventually be restored to
their rightful position in society. Yet in the Ithacan scenes of the Odyssey
there are deeper and more disquieting disguises. The island itself is disguised by Athena so that Odysseus, after all his efforts to return, is unable
to recognize his home (13.187216). Athena herself appears to him disguised, as a shepherd who looks like the delicate son of a king (13.22123),
and Odysseus responds to her disguise by pretending to be a fugitive from
Crete (13.25686) and telling the first of his self-fictionalizing tales. Athena
then changes Odysseus appearance to ensure that he passes unrecognized,
although she appears unseen by Telemachus to remove the disfigurement
for the duration of the recognition scene between father and son (16.172).
Odysseus disguise is restored at 16.454, although his scar ensures that he
can be identified by Eurycleia (19.46773) and Eumaeus (21.22127). Yet
Penelope refuses to acknowledge him until he reveals his knowledge of their
houses secret architecture (23.173230). Dramatic suspense in this unmasking, the last and most important of all, hinges on the fact that Penelope
seems not to recognize her husband even when his rags are removed (23.175
76): I know very well what kind of man you were when you left Ithaca
on your long-oared ship. After twenty years away from home, Odysseus
transformation, we fear, may be deeper than his disguise.
It is not simply the rusticity of the Ithacan books of the Odyssey to which
Idyll 7 responds, then, but their combination of rusticity and disguise. The
Lycidas that Simichidas encounters is not just a goatherd, but some worthy
(& ) wayfarer (7.12). As Gow observes, this epithet, which occurs
nowhere else in the Doric poems, occurs five times in this poem, where it
describes the hosts of the festival (4), Lycidas (12), the poet Sicelidas (39),
bucolic songs (93), and Simichidas friend Aristis (100).15 Yet the disguised
14
15
Cf. Parry (1972) 2122, who argues that the use of apostrophe to introduce the speeches of Eumaeus
helps to communicate a special sense of his character as the type of the loyalty which Odysseus
good kingship in Ithaca has won from those worthy of appreciating it, and distinguishes him from
the other loyal servants, like Philoetius, who are developed less fully.
Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.12.
123
nobility, which is a fact in the Odyssey, is only a suggestion in Idyll 7.

We never learn why the speaker of the poem calls Lycidas worthy, and the
epithet adds to the enigma of his appearance. If Lycidas is playing a role, he is
identified with it completely. While Athena as a herdsman looks like the
delicate son of a king, and Odysseus as a beggar resembles a kingly ruler,
Lycidas, in his shaggy goatskin and wretched tunic, not only looks like a
goatherd, he smells like one too (7.1517).
Yet, when Simichidas invites this evil-smelling rustic to an exchange of
songs by comparing his own work modestly with that of Sicelidas and
Philetas, Lycidas responds with a disquisition on Hellenistic poetics (7.43
48):
8 +< +< ! V
P &$ !9 8+ .
W ! : 9 !96 9B& X +./
Y+ +P$ 9 ! Z+ !9
: [ P Y+B X : \(
<N C ! B&N .
I will give you, he said, my staff, since you are in all respects a shoot fashioned
for truth by Zeus. How hateful to me is the builder who strives to fashion a house
equal to the peak of Mount Oromedon, and the cocks of the Muses who, laboring
in vain, crow against the Chian bard.
A goatherd who speaks like this must surely be a poet in disguise, or

a manifest fiction. What light, then, does Lycidas song throw upon his
identity? He introduces it with an invitation come let us now begin the
bucolic song, G6 S P B9 +IC!& P (7.49)
that recalls the refrain of Thyrsis Sorrows of Daphnis in Idyll 1 beloved
Muses, begin the bucolic song, G+B S P [ (
G+B P (1.64). And, like Thyrsis, Lycidas will also sing of desire
(7.5262):
] D ;6 [M
BK ^+ D+ R6+3 C'/
<! B-+ X -_, `B
` U 5<! I ;+
O<'7 &+! 63+ 8+ _ ! &.
B +a 3 <! &
b+ 8B (,
? 6( c'+' !
5+B '& X 9 + I ? G6+.
;6 N'!9$ [M
K+ 69 : E X+! 0 .
124
There will be good sailing to Mitylene for Ageanax when, with the Kids in the
west, the south wind chases the wet waves, and Orion sets his feet upon the ocean,
if he saves Lycidas, who is roasting because of Aphrodite. For hot love for that boy
is scorching me. And halcyons will calm the waves of the sea, the south wind and
the east, which stirs the seaweed in the lower depths, halcyons, most beloved of
birds to the green Nereids, and all those who take catches from the sea. May all
things be favorable to Ageanax as he seeks passage to Mitylene, and may he arrive
at the harbor with good sailing.
As Thyrsis begins by contrasting the scene of Daphnis death with landscapes of distant mountains and streams (1.6669), so Lycidas sets his lovers
journey within its full astronomical and geographical framework. In his
imagination, Lycidas follows Ageanax from his departure to his safe arrival
in Mytilene. Ring composition sets the imagined journey apart from what
follows, as he goes on to picture the parallel future that he will inhabit: On
that day I will wreathe my brow with anise or roses or a crown of white
flowers, and I will draw Pteleatic wine from the bowl as I lie by the fire
(7.6366). Lycidas imagines a kind of rustic symposium at which he will eat
and drink, remembering Ageanax (7.69). He imagines the music that will
accompany this symposium: two shepherds will play the flute, and Tityrus
will sing of how Daphnis loved Xenea and at his death was mourned by
hills and trees, and how Comatas was imprisoned in a cedar chest by an
evil king and fed with honey by bees (7.7285).
Intense expression of desire gives way to the vision of a pastoral listening scene that resembles those we have observed in other poems; as
Ageanax arrives in Mytilene, Lycidas imagines himself hearing about the
legendary singers of the past from one of their present-day counterparts. As
he imagines himself hearing this song, he begins to separate himself in his
imagination from the boy who was its cause. He then thinks of a greater
pleasure still, an imaginary present in which Comatas lives, and he himself
is his audience (7.8689):16
`& !a N ( +&! K A!
W 64 ! K+ 3 3 6
P >d F R +: @ R <
?F ! ! 9 &( e !P.
16
Cf. Kelly (1983) 113: No longer will his verbs be future or past but, as the grammarians say, present
contrary to fact. In this world of the imagination, time can be negated and events inverted: instead
of being buried alive, the now dead singer comes back to life.
125
By following his projection of Tityrus future performance with regret for an

imaginary world in which he would have been able to listen to Comatas in
person, Lycidas suggests that the effect of such songs is to create a yearning
in their audience to belong to the world that they portray. Lycidas does
not dramatize the appeal of this world merely by singing about it, but by
showing its effect upon him as a listener, even when that listening is a form
of auto-suggestion. In this purified version of his own pastoral existence
even the goats are beautiful,17 and longing for it displaces his grief over
his lovers departure.18
Lycidas introduces his imagined stories of Daphnis and Comatas with
the indefinite temporal expression, W , once (7.73, 78); he imagines
a pastoral world distinct from his own, peopled by fabulous herdsmen
with enchanting powers of song. Simichidas likewise begins his story of a
meeting with one such herdsman, A B+ ?, once upon a time
(7.1). The sense of separation from a more desirable life is the same in
both. Moreover, as Simichidas responds to Lycidas appearance with marked
recollections of Homer (7.1314), so Lycidas represents Comatas plight
with an equally obvious Homeric echo: the goatherd falls victim to the
wicked folly of his master, ( & G (7.79).19 The
stylistic mannerism that introduces Lycidas in Simichidas narrative recurs
when Lycidas speaks of Comatas, and marks the reframing of the figure
of the herdsman singer: as Idyll 7 contains Lycidas, so his song contains
Tityrus, whose imagined song in turn contains Daphnis and Comatas.
There is, moreover, a curious echo of this formal device in the theme of
enclosure in the Comatas story. Like Daphnis, he is shut up in a cedar
chest where he is fed by bees because the Muse had poured sweet nectar
17
18
19
Lawall (1967) 94.

Serrao (1977) 217: E` stato giustamente osservato come tutti i carmi teocritei di argomento amoroso
terminino con un motivo rasserenatore, e come Teocrito proponga lazione e la confidenza del canto
come unico rimedio per le pene di amore. I boukoliasmòi inseriti nel nostro carme sono idilli in
miniatura e seguono le norme degli altri idilli teocritei: Lyk`das sotto lazione del canto si libera
gradualmente dalla sua passione amorosa e riacquista lo stato di hasychà. Il mito di Komàtas con cui
Lyk`das fa terminare il suo carme, appunto perche non presenta nessun rapporto con largomento
centrale, sta a significare che il canto ha esercitato il suo effetto e lautore ha raggiunto la sua catarsi.
Cf. Walsh (1985) 13: Lycidas happily contemplates a series of good things which lead him farther and
farther from the immediate present until he forgets the boy with whom his poem began. For Seiler
(1997) 11430, the content of Lycidas song is likewise sublimation of desire through the creative
process. However, his insistence that a generalized intertextuality is the means by which sublimation
is achieved and expressed seems to me to miss the distinctive form it takes in Theocritus bucolic
fiction the identification of the herdsman singer (and, as we shall see, his poet) with the objects of
his own bucolic imagination.
See Od. 12.300, 24.458. Cf. Hunter (1999) ad loc. 7.79, a grand heroisation of the fate of the
goatherd.
126
on his mouth (7.82): O blessed Comatas, you did indeed suffer these
delights, you too were shut up inside the chest, you too labored out the
fertile season of the year feeding on the honeycomb of bees (7.8384). His
imprisonment is a mixture of pleasure and pain; the chest is spacious
(7.78) and made of sweet cedar (7.81), and within it he suffered the
delight of an imprisonment in which he was fed on honey. Comatas, in
fact, receives the reward for his song that the goatherd wishes upon Thyrsis
in Idyll 1: May your mouth be filled with honey (1.146). This mixture
of toil and sweetness echoes the two aspects of bucolic song stressed by
Lycidas in the prelude to his song and in the stories that he imagines:
the laboriousness of composition (7.51) and the sweetness of the singing
voice (7.89). Once again, framing tale and embedded narrative reflect one
another.
The figure of the herdsman singer recurs in increasingly diminutive
stories: the meeting with Lycidas occupies forty-one verses (7.1051), the
symposium at which Tityrus will perform eleven (7.6172), the stories of
Daphnis (7.7377) and Comatas five apiece (7.7882), and the recapitulation of the latter three (7.8385). While it is nowhere else as complex as in
Idyll 7, this process of embedded miniaturization can be seen in other Idylls.
In Idyll 1, the goatherds speech contains the description of the decorated
bowl, with its three framed scenes, in the last of which a child is weaving a
cage for crickets (1.52).20 Since the goatherd compares Thyrsis to a cicada
(1.148),21 it is natural to see the boys desire for the crickets song as analogous to the goatherds desire for The Sorrows of Daphnis: the longing
for song lies at the heart of the fictional world of the bowl, just as it lies
at the heart of the fictional world of the poem. In both cases, the readers
imagination is directed towards a voice that sums up the attractions of the
pastoral world, but is figured within it only as a suggestive absence. As the
boys cage remains empty, so Thyrsis voice is the material presence that
cannot be enclosed within the poems structure of words.
In Idyll 7, the series of reframings leads ultimately to Lycidas imagination of the voice of Comatas, which is able to replace his longing for
20
21
Cf. Haber (1994) 24 on Idyll 4: The governing structure of the idyll and it is one that recurs
throughout the Idylls could be described as a series of diminishing mirrors. As we progress from
Herakles to Aigon to Korydon . . . we are continually confronted with diminished versions of what
we have left behind. Cf. 168 n. 38: In addition . . . one might consider the following two series:
the goatherd, the boy with the cage for the cicadas, the cicadas (Idyll 1); Daphnis and Damoetas,
Polyphemus, Polyphemus dog (Idyll 6; here the concern with mirror images is made explicit
[3541]).
Cf. Cairns (1984) 104, an explicit symbol for the singer. Cf. 7.41, where Simichidas compares
Philetas and Sicelidas to crickets.
127
Ageanax with a greater longing for pastoral song. The diminutive reframing produces a series of increasingly concise reflections of a single event:
the listening scene between the pastoral singer and his audience. This series
can properly be understood as a form of mise en abyme, the recursive repetition of the structure or content of a framing text within that text itself.
Lucien Dallenbach has argued for the self-reflexive, and hence explanatory,
function of such structures. The mise en abyme sheds light on the primary
narrative because the reduced scale of the copy exaggerates the distinctive
features of its original. It stylizes its model, and so distinguishes what is
essential from what is only contingent. In this way it provides a kind of
internal dialogue and a means whereby the work can interpret itself.22 The
mise en abyme therefore reveals just as clearly as Thyrsis impersonation of
Daphnis in Idyll 1 that bucolic song is both a manifestation and a vehicle
of what Rene Girard has called mimetic desire, the attempt to replicate in
ones own life the desires one has found expressed in a work of literature.23
It is in showing the effectiveness of mimetic desire as a kind of therapy that
the poem offers the most striking critique of its Platonic model. For while
there are many superficial similarities between the pastoral experience of the
Phaedrus and that of Idyll 7 the walk in the countryside by city dwellers,
the exchange of speeches on the topic of love, the particularly close attention
to the details of their surroundings on the part of Socrates and Phaedrus, the
curious bipartite structure of this dialogue, which is so like Idyll 724 it is
in the dramatization of mimetic desire that the poem engages most closely
with the content of its philosophical anti-model. For Phaedrus wishes to be
a lover not because he truly loves but because he would imitate the idea and
expression of love as he has found it formulated in the speech of Lysias. In
this way he shows himself to be like the cicadas, whose story Socrates tells
him (259ad) these were the Muses first human audience who, under
the spell of their song, forgot about their own lives to such an extent that
22
23
24
Dallenbach (1989) 5556. Pucci (1998) 177 discusses the listening scene between Odysseus and the
Sirens in the Odyssey as the Homeric texts self-conscious reflection upon the themes of enchantment
and literary desire.
Discussing the Paolo and Francesca episode in Dantes Inferno, Girard (1978) 3 notes how Dante
emphatically underlines the fact that the lovers adulterous kiss is performed in imitation of Lancelot
and Guinevere, who they have just been reading about, and observes: The hero in the grip of some
second-hand desire seeks to conquer the being, the essence, of his model by as faithful an imitation as
possible. I am referring therefore to the more limited idea of mimetic desire as imitation of literature
rather than the generalized model of human desire as essentially mimetic that Girard develops from
it. The idea appears first in Girard (1966), and is refined and developed in Girard (1978).
These resemblances were observed by Murley (1940) 28195. Hunter (1999) 14546 notes Theocritus
transformations of Platos narrative technique. For the role of topography in articulating the two-part
structure of the Phaedrus, and focusing our attention at crucial moments in its argument, see Ferrari
(1987) 3, 2528.
128
they neglected to feed themselves and, so dying, were transformed into

the insects whose meaningless yet seductive murmur fills the country air.
Moreover, when Socrates demonstrates the shortcomings of Lysias speech,
Phaedrus abandons his love as suddenly as his admiration for the author
who inspired it. The pendulum swing of sudden contempt with which he
rejects Lysias, until that moment the object of his emulation,25 points to the
inauthentic character of his feelings. Rather than arising autonomously in
himself, they were grafted in him artificially by a work of literature. When
these feelings, and the mimetic desire that gave rise to them, are revealed
as inauthentic and assumed, both are rejected in favor of the pursuit of
reality through philosophical dialogue which occupies the remainder of
the dialogue. In Idyll 7, by contrast, it is the inauthentic, the mimetic,
that is, paradoxically, the most real. It is Lycidas mimetic desire to be
like Daphnis and Comatas that makes him who he is, not his genuine,
but trivial, desire for Ageanax, which he is able to displace through song.
Lycidas, as we have seen, is defined by his consummate resemblance to a
herdsman, and he achieves this perfection of his role by imitating others.
The reflection of Simichidas narrative in Lycidas song clarifies the
goatherds role in the poem: Lycidas is to Simichidas as Comatas is to
Lycidas, and as Lycidas endeavors to emulate Comatas, so Simichidas will
endeavor to emulate Lycidas. What, then, of Simichidas himself? What does
his reaction to Lycidas song tell us about him, and how does his own song
fit into the structures of mimetic desire that we have seen to be constitutive
of bucolic song? His immediate response is self-praise: (7.9195):
U 3 !J G
c<! H!J I K+ S 9
& : f' : &+ G66 !7
3 6 !96 R+ B g$ 6++
+Ia! 7 R : 8 [ .
Lycidas my friend, the Nymphs have also taught me many fine things while I was
tending my flocks in the hills, which fame has brought perhaps even to the throne
of Zeus. But this is by far the most superior, with which I will honor you now.
Listen then, since you are a friend of the Muses.
Whether the throne of Zeus here refers literally to the heavens26 or to the
court of Ptolemy Philadelphus,27 the speaker clearly has a high opinion of
his own work, and the poem that he will perform is intended as a proof of
this prowess. While Simichidas is already a poet, and a pastoral poet too,
25
Ferrari (1987) 28.
26
= 7.93a, Wendel (1914) 102.
27
Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.93.
129
his response to Lycidas is defensive, competitive even. While the objects of

Lycidas emulation Daphnis and Comatas belong to a world he cannot
hope to enter, the object of Simichidas emulation confronts him in person,
so that competitive rivalry may overshadow imitation, just as it does in a
song contest proper, as each of the rival herdsmen strives to instantiate
bucolic excellence more fully than the other.28
The exchange of songs between Lycidas and Simichidas echoes those
of other pastoral poems (Id. 5, 10), as Simichidas suggests by his use of
let us sing bucolic songs, S C!& (7.36), to introduce it. The
exchange is not quite a contest, however, and the performances complement, but do not respond directly to, one another.29 Simichidas signals
his familiarity with bucolic song by beginning his own contribution to the
exchange with obvious rustic imagery: the divinities of erotic desire have
sneezed for him (a favorable omen) because he, poor thing, loves Myrto
as much as goats love spring (7.9697). The sneeze as love omen, like the
wish with which the poem ends that an old crone may spit on him and
Aratus to ward off evil have their parallels in the goatherds rustic love
tokens in Idyll 3.2839 a plant smacked against the arm, sieve divination,
eye twitching and the pimples on the nose to which the speaker of Idyll 12
appeals (12.24). Likewise the comparison of his desire with goats in spring
recalls the rustic comparisons of Polyphemus in Idyll 11, Bucaeus in Idyll
10, and the anonymous speaker in Idyll 12. Yet there is something studied
in these motifs, as is clear from the way he introduces himself in the third
person in his own song the Erotes sneezed for Simichidas. Simichidas
is self-consciously representing himself as a figure of bucolic song, rather
than actually being a bucolic singer. His song takes for granted his own fitness as a subject of such song, rather than exploring the possibility that he
might belong to its world, as Lycidas explores his identification with Daphnis and Comatas, and as Simichidas himself, at the end of the poem, will
explore the similarity of his own experience at the festival with archetypal
pastoral scenes. His complacent assumption of the bucolic mode is clearer
still in his invocation of Pan, whom he enjoins to help his friend Aratus
by bringing him the object of his desire. The goatherd of Idyll 1 refuses
to play his pipes because this threatening god may be nearby. Simichidas,
28
29
Girard (1978) 3: The nearer the mediator, the more does the veneration that he inspires give way
to hate and rivalry.
Serrao (1977) 210 tabulates how Lycidas responds point by point (7.4350) to Simichidas invitation
to sing (7.3541), although, since both songs are prior creations rather than spontaneous effusions,
this excludes the exact correspondence one would look for in a song contest proper (215). Furusawa
(1980) 1011 sees the progress from erotic suffering to emotional tranquility as the common theme
of the songs of Lycidas and Simichidas, and hence the ground of the poems unity.
130
however, speaks as though he could summon and dismiss him at will. So,
having heard of an Arcadian ritual in which boys flog an image of the god
in times of scarcity, Simichidas threatens him with this punishment if he
does not heed his wishes, or with exile to the coldest place on earth in
the winter, and the hottest in the summer (7.10314). The threats demonstrate the superficiality of Simichidas relationship to bucolic song; while
Lycidas reverence for Daphnis and Comatas matches that of the anonymous goatherd for Pan and of Thyrsis for Daphnis in Idyll 1, Simichidas has
yet to develop a deeply felt relationship with this world, expressed through
identification with its leading characters. His invocation of Pan reveals no
knowledge of his bucolic character, and seems to be included not because
of any real belief in its potential efficacy, but rather as a demonstration
of his familiarity with obscure points of geography and cult. So too in
calling upon the Erotes, whom he now compares to reddening apples,
to appear from the sweet stream of Hyetis and Byblis, and Oecus, the
high seat of blond Dione (7.11517), he mixes obvious bucolic motifs with
learned topographical references. Then, as he asks these divinities to wound
with their bows the boy Philinus, with whom his friend Aratus is in love,
Simichidas calls him riper than a pear, imagining the cries of women
who mock him for his fading charms. The rustic comparison, elsewhere a
means by which the lover explores his almost inexpressible infatuation with
his beloved, becomes, in Simichidas mouth, a piece of invective instead.30
Finally, he suggests to Aratus that they no longer wear out the night on
the doorstep of his beloved but let another be choked in that wrestling.
Having thus invoked the customs of urban serenade and the urban landscape of the wrestling school, Simichidas ends with a wish for peace, the
guarantee of which will be having an old woman spit on them, to keep
what is unpleasant away (7.12027).
Simichidas, as we know, is from the town (7.2), and it would be all too
easy to dismiss his claim that the Nymphs taught him his song while he was
tending his flocks in the hills (7.92) as the sentimental delusion of an urban
30
Henrichs (1980) 727 points to the origin of Simichidas abuse in the poetry of Archilochus, and
Hunter (2003) 228 has likewise emphasized that it is certainly the iambic mode that is evoked by
Simichidas liberal use of (to us at least) obscure proper names, the sense that the poem is full of
in-jokes, the joking prayer to Pan, and the persistent detached irony that is so remote from the true
pathos that is productive of elevation. To this I would simply add that if iambic poetry is being
recalled here, then it is iambic poetry reimagined through the lens of its bucolic counterpart, the
acerbic style of the Comatas of Idyll 5, who is as attuned to the physical shortcomings of his rivals
as any iambic poet, and no less knowing than Simichidas in his manipulation of bucolic motifs
and archetypes. It seems to me incorrect therefore to see Theocritus urban poetry as the model for
Simichidas song, as do Kuhn (1958) 6768 and Ott (1969) 167.
131
visitor.31 However, as a stylistic medley the song has obvious affinities with
the song of Thyrsis in Idyll 1, and its tendency to invective is paralleled in the
abusive style of Comatas in Idyll 5, two characters whose bucolic credentials
are hardly in doubt. It is not so much, then, that Simichidas song is spurious
bucolic, but rather that it is immature; as comparison with Thyrsis and
Comatas reveals, it is marked as such not by what is present in it but by
what it lacks, the sense that ones identity as a bucolic singer depends upon
identification with, and reenactment of, other powerful bucolic singers
who are present to the imagination as models for ones own experience.
While already a poet in Idyll 7, Simichidas is still a young poet. His songs
may have reached the throne of Zeus (7.93), but he has not yet attained
the personal relationship to archetypal bucolic paradigms exhibited by the
song of Lycidas.32 And it is in this spirit that Lycidas responds to his song,
confirming the gift of the staff that he had offered him earlier as a promising
young starter on the right path of poetry (7.12829):
!7 9 ! 6S ?F 6
h + [ P IM K A!.
So I spoke. But he, laughing sweetly as before, gave me his stick as a token of
friendship in the Muses.
This gift has been compared with the Muses gift of a staff to Hesiod at
the beginning of the Theogony, and the meeting with Lycidas has therefore
been called an initiation into bucolic poetry that enables Simichidas to
experience and describe the festival so richly in the remainder of the poem.33
Simichidas does not explicitly connect the staff with the gift of song, as
Hesiod does, since he is already a poet of some accomplishment, nor is the
disparity between him and Lycidas in the art of song so great that one might
speak of genuine initiation here, as one can with Hesiod and the Muses.
However, the gift clearly acknowledges a kind of kinship on the part of
Lycidas, a recognition that the younger poet will belong to the ranks of
31
32
33
So Giangrande (1968).
Cf. Hunter (2003) 230: Lycidas . . . finds personal, exemplary comfort in the bucolic and aipolic
heroes of his own world Daphnis and Komatas and what is important, as it had traditionally
been in the poetic representation of myth, is how their stories, their pathe, act as paradigms for his
own experience. For an interpretation of Simichidas song as an ironic demonstration of the limited
abilities of the youthful poet as seen from the perspective of the writer of Idyll 7, see Van Groningen
(1959).
Puelma (1960) 15556; Theogony 3031: And they cut and gave me a staff, a shoot of flourishing
laurel, a wonder. And they breathed into me an inspired voice, so that I might celebrate things that
will be and have been. Cf. Pearce (1988) 300: the last part of the poem expresses the result of the
encounter between Lycidas and Simichidas.
132
bucolic singers, of whom he himself is an outstanding example.34 In the

remainder of this chapter I will consider some of the ways in which Lycidas
esteem for his younger contemporary is borne out by the end of the poem.
Having parted from Lycidas, Simichidas and his companions arrive at
the estate of Phrasydamas, where they recline with delight on beds of deep
rushes and newly cut vine leaves (7.13335). At this point Simichidas gives
a lengthy description of his surroundings (7.13547):
: G!! V+& 3 + 9
`6+ 9 7 66<& L+ V+
c!P I G+ S ! +N.
: J : +( 5+ ! >&
96 6a 8B 7 ? 5 6C
' & ( S +<N &7
G + : & 8 +6C
_ I &: +: !: !9.
i &9+ ! i 5C+.
YB !J 3+ +3 +( J !P
j9 ?!( : 9B
Y+ S+S S+& 8+N7
+ J & < + G+.
Many poplars and elms murmured over our heads, and nearby the holy water from
the cave of the Nymphs babbled as it fell. Black cicadas conducted their chatter
on the shady branches, and the tree frog muttered from afar among the dense
thorns of the brambles. Larks and finches were singing, the dove was moaning,
and buzzing bees flew round about the springs. Everything was very fragrant of
the rich harvest, and fragrant of the fruit. Pears rolled in abundance by our feet,
and apples by our sides, and the young trees hung down to the ground laden with
plums. And the four-year seal was removed from the top of the wine jars.
The passage is a full representation of sensory experience, which progresses

from sound murmured, babbled, chattered, muttered, sang,
34
Some scholars, by contrast, have seen Lycidas gift as ironic, like his laughter, a mock-investiture in
which he teases the city poet for his rustic song. Cameron (1995) 412 cites Homeric usage of the
phrase ?F 6 (7.42, 128) in support of the idea that Lycidas attitude to Simichidas is one
of ironic disparagement. However, as Cameron acknowledges (416), a completely ironic attitude on
the part of Lycidas is difficult to reconcile with his giving a gift in the first place. Moreover, seeing a
hostile pun in presenting the staff to Simichidas, since he is a shoot thoroughly fashioned for truth
by Zeus, P &$ !9 8+ (7.44) Ill give you my staff because
youre a chip off the old block namely as wooden as the staff, stupid! (417) contradicts the
Homeric precedent cited in support of his interpretation of ?F 6: of the four occurrences
of shoot, 8+ , in Homer, three indicate a nurturing relationship (Il. 17.53, farmer and olive
sapling; 18.53 [= 18.437], Thetis and Achilles; Od. 14.175, Eumaeus and Telemachus), while the other
is a complimentary comparison (Od. 6.163, Odysseus to Nausicaa). Similarly, in Idyll 28, a poem to
accompany the gift of a distaff to the wife of Nicias, Theocritus refers to his friend as a holy plant
of the Graces, whose voices are desire, \+ >!+ C `+ < (28.7).
133
moaned, buzzed35 to smell everything was very fragrant of the

rich harvest, and fragrant of the fruit and taste the four-year seal was
removed from the top of the wine jars. The mass of sensations has led
some commentators to see the description as a generic landscape, even a
combination of seasonal events impossible in nature.36 The coincidence
of grain harvest (&9+ , 143) and fruit crop (5C+, 143) was, however,
standard ancient practice,37 and, rather than an impossibility, is another of
the poems reality effects. Moreover, the vocabulary of the description is
anything but conventional; a large proportion of the nouns, and in particular the botanical terms, are elsewhere confined to scientific or technical
authors, and the Hellenistic poets who utilized them.38 The specificity
of Theocritus botanical language has in fact long been recognized,39 and
the technical register of the nouns here contrasts with the more traditional
poetic language of the verbs that accompany them: 9 , murmured,
+N, babbled, 6a, chattering, +<N, muttered,
G , sang, 8, moaned. As Simichidas names the elements of
the scene, he fills the poem with technical vocabulary; as he attempts to
communicate what he felt, he integrates these terms into a representation
of the full expressive range of the human voice; the conflict of vocabularies
points to the unexpected confluence of fictional and lived experience in
this moment.40
In contrast to the listening scenes in which we are invited to imagine the
voice of a single human singer which sounds like falling water, a nightingale,
a cicada, or a swan (Id. 1.78, 136, 148; Id. 5.29, 13637), the passage asks us to
imagine the voice of nature itself: poplars, elms, water, cicadas, frogs, larks,
35
36
37
38
39
40
I have followed the suggestion of Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.142 in translating I &, which elsewhere
may also refer to color and movement: the context here points strongly to sound.
Schonbeck (1962) 11415.
Gow (1952) II.127; Hunter (1999) ad loc. 7.143. So too Furusawa (1980) 12027 argues for the der
Wirklichkeitscharakter der Thalysienszene.
>+9 is a hapax, cf. >+ Hp. Mul. 2.206, `+ X. Oec. 19.18, Thphr. HP 9.13.5, Babr.
34.2, >+9 Ibyc. 1.6, Hp. Mul. 2.195, >+N Ar. Pax 1147; 5+ ! AP 9.3, Thphr. HP
9.16.3, Call. fr. 139, Nic. Th. 863, Al. 603; S Od. 24.230, Aen. Tact. 28.6, Hp. Mul. 2.112, Ar.
fr. 754, Thphr. HP 1.5.3; & Arist. HA 616b31; YB' (tree) Od. 7.115, 11.589, 24.234, Thphr. HP
2.5.6, (fruit) Od. 7.120, Nic. Th. 513, Rufus Medicus Ren. Ves. 14.6; S+S Antyllus Medicus ap.
Orib. 10.20.4, Gal. 6.612. Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.139 judges the 5 6C to be a frog rather than
a nightingale by comparing Thphr. fr. 6.42, Arat. 948, Arist. HA 536a11, Plut. Mor. 982E, Ael. NA
6.19, 9.13, Pliny NH 11.172. In this context one might wonder whether >& as applied to the
cicadas is merely a descriptive epithet, or likewise belongs to the scientific register.
By Lindsell (1937) first, cf. Lembach (1970). The former argues that the medical and botanical
vocabularies in the Idylls are related, and suggests that Theocritus familiarity with both may stem
from an acquaintance with the medical school of Cos.
Cf. Hamon (1981) 15: [la description] risque dintroduire dans le texte des vocabulaires etrangers,
et notamment le lexique specialise des diverses professions qui soccupent de lobjet decrit.
134
finches, doves, bees. These singers do not perform in the orderly sequence of
a song contest, but all around, and all at once. Nature is, however, carefully
stylized in Simichidas account; chiasmus (YB !J 3+ +3
+( J !P), repetition (i . . . i), and highly mannered
word order (+: !)41 give form to his sense that nature itself
has here taken on an almost human voice. Literary artifice is a prominent
theme in Lycidas prologue to his song. He compares the wasted effort of
those who labor in vain, constructing large-scale works in competition
with Homer, with the trouble he has taken over his own modest effort.
The artifice of Simichidas voice here his heterogeneous vocabulary and
the density of stylistic and mimetic effects he employs is a surprise after
the straightforward narration that precedes it, and is the first unambiguous
indication that the Simichidas who narrates the poem is a rather different
poet from the one who appears within it. Like the herdsmen of Idyll 1, he
is now able to hear human music in the sounds of trees and streams, and
to imitate what he has heard there.
In the effort to combine accurate deixis with the feeling of lived experience the poems curious form once again makes itself felt; Simichidas
reports an event in his past with the intensity it would have if it were
occurring in the fictional present of literary drama. The poem ends, however, with emphatic reminders that the period of his life that it records
is over. Concluding his description of the festival with the wine that
was served there, Simichidas seeks mythical parallels for his experience
(7.14857):
c<! e 1+ 8B
k+ 69 $ T 3 G+
+.+ l m+. 69+ \+;
k+ 6 $ . !9 ;$
++ 1 <! K+ P 8S
( 9+ 8 E : B +a
n " _! + c<!
S!_, 3+ !+ ? ;
Castalian nymphs, who inhabit the slopes of Parnassus, did old Chiron set a cup
such as this before Heracles in the stony cave of Pholus? Did nectar such as this
persuade that shepherd by the Anapus, the mighty Polyphemus, who hit ships with
mountains, to dance about the sheepfolds with his feet, such a drink as you then
mixed beside the altar of Demeter of the Threshing Floor, Nymphs?
41
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 7.139, 142, 143, 144.
135
Hunter suggests that the question addressed to the Nymphs bucolizes

the epic practice of questioning the Muses,42 and compares Iliad 2.484
93: Tell me now Muses who have your homes on Olympus . . . who were
the leaders and chiefs of the Danaans. In contrast to the Catalogue of
Ships, however, Simichidas is not asking for divine assistance in recalling
a fact, but reflecting on the nature of the experience he has just described;
he does not ask what wine was drunk by Heracles and Polyphemus, but
whether it was such as he drank at the Thalysia. Homers question is the
performers guarantee that what he is about to tell his audience is true.
Simichidas, by contrast, does not answer his own question, and so invites
us to look closely at the question itself.43 His first example recalls how
Heracles, in the performance of his labors for Eurystheus, was entertained
by the centaur Pholus, who opened a cask of wine that had been given
to him by Dionysus. Simichidas does not mention that the aroma of this
wine led the other centaurs to attack them, and so resulted in the deaths
of Pholus and Chiron.44 The second tells how Polyphemus danced around
his sheepfolds under the influence of wine. Simichidas does not mention
that the wine was given to him by Odysseus, and so led to his blinding. In
both examples, Simichidas focuses on the pleasure the wine brings at the
moment of its consumption and suppresses its unpleasant consequences.
Yet in the tale of Heracles and Pholus the attraction of the other centaurs
to the wine of Dionysus is the very thing that reveals its marvelous nature,
and, in telling the story of the Cyclops, Simichidas calls him the mighty
Polyphemus, who hit ships with mountains, recalling what he does after
his blinding. Both examples reveal the speakers knowledge of the story as a
whole and show his tentative engagement with the myth as an imaginative
equivalent of his own experience.
Here, then, is a second change in the voice of Simichidas. While the song
he represents himself as performing in the past of the poem lacks the play
with imagined models that is characteristic of bucolic song, in reflecting
on that past at the moment of writing he now thinks, like a true bucolic
singer, that his own experience at the festival may have been a reenactment
42
43
44
Hunter (1999) ad loc. 7.14855, and ad loc. 7.148. For the Nymphs as bucolic Muses, and the
problematic counter-example of Thyrsis, who invokes the Muses repeatedly as patrons of bucolic
song in the refrain of the Sorrows of Daphnis, see Fantuzzi (2000) 14247.
Cf. Walsh (1985) 1718: [Simichidas] begins to report the activity of his imagination, speaking as
much to himself as to any other auditor . . . Even if he really wanted answers to these questions,
none could be given.
Apollodorus 2.5.4. Fantuzzi (1995) 27 notes that the story formed a part of Stesichorus Geryoneis
and was the subject of at least two comedies.
136
of the very models that were absent from his song at the time. He has
not yet achieved the mastery of a Comatas or a Lycidas in this respect, for
these characters are able to instantiate for others the very archetypes they
imagine for themselves. Simichidas is more like the goatherd of Idyll 3; he is
trying out the relationship between myth and personal experience, but he
does so without a great deal of confidence. His examples are still questions,
and we can entertain a variety of answers to them. Simichidas imagines the
pleasure of Heracles and Polyphemus in the wine they drank as a kernel of
identity with his own experience at the festival. Yet this kernel of pleasure
contrasts with the catastrophic outcome of the episode as a whole; their
pleasure proved very short-lived. One might compare the more extended
use of Heracles and Polyphemus in the examples of Idyll 11 and Idyll 13;
allusions to the Odyssey recall the impending destruction of the pastoral
Cyclops at the hands of Odysseus, of which he himself is unaware, while
Idyll 13 ends with a suggestion of the labors that lie ahead of Heracles,
unknown to the hero himself. Simichidas questions likewise evoke what
lies beyond the moment of comparison, and we wonder how the festival
relates to the rest of his life. Did pleasure precede misfortune, as it did in the
stories of Heracles and Polyphemus?45 This uncertainty makes the prayer
with which Simichidas ends the poem that he be allowed to return to the
festival some time in the future all the more poignant (7.15557):
o : +$
b 64 I! !96 < p J 6
+6! : ! ! 9+ 8B .
On her heap may I fix the great winnow once again, and may she smile holding
sheaves and poppies in her hands.
In the first verse of the poem Simichidas once upon a time suggests that
he is now a different person from the one who appears in the story. In the
last verse, his wish to repeat the experience he has just described suggests
its importance to him. How, then, are we to relate the moment at which
the story is told to the moment at which it took place? For it is the use
of retrospective first-person narration that sets Idyll 7 apart from the other
45
Cf. Fantuzzi (1995) 28: Both questions which Theocritus asks the Nymphae imply in fact a negative
answer Phrasidamus symposium has obviously nothing to do with those mythical wines which
provoked such violence. For Fantuzzi, the function of examples in Theocritus bucolic poetry is
deconstruction of the traditionally exemplary features of mythical characters (20), and in this
poem, in which the poet speaks in his own voice, he avoids the responsibility of the failure by the
interrogative form, which, half in jest half in earnest, stresses the problematic nature of paradigms
which seem to be positive, but hardly can be (28). On this reading, then, Simichidas keeps an ironic
distance from his mythological stories even as he tests his own imaginative identification with them.
137
bucolic poems. When people tell their own story, whether in fiction or real
life, convergence is the rule story time usually ends in the moment of
narration.46 The Odyssey offers a rather convoluted proof of this rule. In
Book 12 Odysseus is recounting his adventures to Alcinous. In doing so
he is also giving the back story of the Odyssey to the poems audience.
However, when he reaches the island of Calypso, a problem arises, because
from this point on the audience of the poem has already heard the story
from Homer. The poet therefore has Odysseus recall that he told Alcinous
the latter part of his story (up to his arrival at his house) the previous evening
(Odyssey 12.45053):
!& 6<;
q' 6+ B&N !& !' : `$
: >&!'/ B$7 B&+ 9 !
b +NM >+'!9 !& 6<.
But why should I tell you this? For in fact I told it yesterday in the hall to you and
your noble wife. It is a hateful thing to me to tell again what has been clearly said.
In the Aeneid the solution is simpler when Aeneas (in Book 3) reaches the
end of the story of his travels, he tells Dido (3.71415): This was my last
labor, this the end of my long journey; from here a god drew my wandering
self to your shores.
It has in fact been argued that this convergence is essential for autobiographical writing. It is the autobiographers sense that he is different from
the person he used to be that leads him to write in the first place, and it is
the need to explain how this change came about that gives his narrative its
shape:
It is the internal transformation of the individual and the exemplary character
of this transformation that furnishes a subject for narrative discourse in which
I is both subject and object . . . The narrator describes not only what happened
to him at a different time in his life but above all how he became out of what he
was what he presently is.47
Starobinskis analysis holds good not just for the confessional type of prose
narrative that he is speaking of here, but also for the autobiographical
narratives of the Greek poets. Hesiod, for example, to have composed the
Theogony, must have had the encounter with the Muses that he narrates in
its opening, in which the goddesses give him a staff and inform him that
46
47
Genette (1980) 221, citing examples from the modern novel.

Starobinski (1980) 7879. Cf., in the same volume, Mandel (1980) 65: In ratifying the past, the
autobiographer discloses the truth of his or her being in the present.
138
from now on he will be a poet capable of recording the kind of information

about the gods and the world that the poem contains. A transformation that
we might imagine to have occurred over time is told as a single decisive event
that has its outcome in the poem we are reading. So too, in the Mnesiepes
inscription, the way in which Archilochus becomes a poet is not a lengthy
process of education and training, but is the result of single encounter with
the Muses, whom he meets while driving his cows into town.48
From this perspective, then, Idyll 7 both invites and rebuffs autobiographical readings.49 The poem written in the first person, it is full of
allusions to the historical world in which Theocritus lived, and records an
important, and perhaps even decisive, moment in a poets sense of self.
However, the story time does not end in the moment of narration, and the
speaker refrains from explicitly addressing the changes in himself at which
the poem hints. Simichidas the narrator never comments on Simichidas the
character, and Idyll 7 avoids the convergence between the narrator and the
character who is a younger version of himself; past and present are simply
juxtaposed by the act of narration. Moreover, the absence of a common
name shared by author, narrator, and protagonist might seem to deny the
poem the status of autobiographical writing altogether, for it is in the identity of these three figures that the autobiographical pact between writer
and reader has been located.50
How, then, are we to understand this puzzling narrative? Who is the I
who speaks to us from this poem, and what kind of life story is he telling
us? In order to answer this question, let me first briefly review the poems
structure. The events of the poem all take place within a single afternoon.
There are, however, marked variations in emphasis. Half the journey, from
departure to the meeting with Lycidas, is accomplished in nine verses (7.1
9). From this point until the travelers separate from Lycidas, narrative
duration approximates story time very closely because he and Simichidas
are talking (7.10127). After the exchange of songs and the gift of the staff,
however, the departure of Lycidas, the remainder of the journey to the
house of Phrasidamus, and the arrival at the festival are compressed into
48
49
50
Discussed by Lefkowitz (1981) 27, and see now Clay (2004), who locates the cult of Archilochus on
Paros amid the full range of cult honors for poets in the Greek city.
The most ambitious attempt to grasp the autobiographical project of Idyll 7 is Meillier (1993), who
approaches the poem under three principal rubrics: the involvement of the poet in his own poem,
the self-fictionalization in the transformation of Theocritus into Simichidas, and the construction of
a personal temporality by means of which autobiographical experience is given literary form (104).
The deeply insightful reading of Idyll 7 is connected with a highly questionable theory of the origin
and order of a collection of Theocritus bucolic poetry, but this ought not to prevent it from being
better known than it seems to be at present.
Lejeune (1989) 45.
139
four verses (7.13034). The poem focuses upon two incidents, the meeting
with Lycidas and the festival (7.135155), and these incidents are juxtaposed
with a minimum of intervening narration. Moreover, we never meet the
hosts whose ancestry is recounted in the opening verses, and Simichidas
companions gradually fade from sight: Eucritus and Amyntas recline with
Simichidas at verses 13132, trees murmur over their heads at verse 135, and
then they are not heard of again. The festival is presented not as a communal
celebration but as the private aesthetic experience of the poems speaker.51
Changes in style and content distinguish this part of the poem from the
narrative that precedes it. Moreover, the juxtaposition of this change in
register with the meeting with Lycidas suggests that the two are in some
way related, although nothing is said explicitly on this subject.
The key to understanding the poems status as autobiographical narration lies, I suggest, in the bucolic poems to which it responds and whose
appeal is embodied in the person of Lycidas. All ancient biographies (and
autobiographies) of poets contain a large admixture of fiction.52 Moreover,
in writing this poem Theocritus has surely been influenced by the tradition
of Socratic biography, in which experiments with life-writing are directed
towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual
lives,53 as the echoes of the Phaedrus demonstrate. However, while these
forms of life-writing no doubt occupy an ambiguous position between fact
and imagination54 Hesiod may never have met the Muses, and Socrates
and Phaedrus may never have taken their walk in the countryside the
separation between historical person and imagined counterpart in them is
less radical than in Idyll 7, as Theocritus use of an assumed name indicates.
The autobiographical project of Idyll 7 rather owes its peculiar form to
the presentation of character in the bucolic poems upon which it reflects:
their use of a bucolic persona for imaginative role play, and the rejection of
Platonic forms of self-analysis that this fictionalizing self-projection entails.
It is against the function of role play in the bucolic poems that this version of autobiography, and its peculiar reimagining of the scene of poetic
inspiration, must be understood.
Idyll 7 does not commemorate either its author or its narrator becoming
a poet. Simichidas is already a poet at the time the poem is set, and while,
in his own estimation, his poems do not equal those of Sicelidas or Philetas,
two near contemporaries with well-established reputations, the fame of his
songs has reached the throne of Zeus. Simichidas, in other words, is
51
53
52 Lefkowitz (1981) viii and passim.

Cf. Seiler (1997) 11416.
54 Momigliano (1971) 46.
Momigliano (1971) 46, cf. Kahn (1996) 33.
140
portrayed as a poet in the early years of an already established poetic career,

and one who already has some kind of reputation for bucolic poetry. He
is comfortable using its terms to introduce his exchange with Lycidas, and
what he performs for him contains the elements of a rustic love song. Lycidas
acknowledges his degree of accomplishment in this vein with the gift of the
staff, but, as we have shown, there is a striking transformation of Simichidas
voice at the end of the poem that seems to stem from his encounter with this
acknowledged bucolic master. What Simichidas understands at the festival
is how to make a start on the kind of song that Lycidas performed earlier
in the poem. This kind of song combines close attention to the singers
own pastoral world with the ability to reimagine that world by focusing on
archetypal bucolic characters and situations that embody it more perfectly.
From the light-hearted mocker of love who advises his friend Aratus simply
to seize the day and ignore the stronger bonds of erotic desire Simichidas, at
the end of the poem, is able to conceive the kind of imaginative experience
that could make this desire of secondary importance in a persons psychic
life. It has become possible for him to imagine his own experience at the
festival as a reenactment of the experience of Heracles and Polyphemus,
much as Lycidas is able to envision the rustic symposium at which he
will listen to Tityrus as the near equivalent of a fictional experience in
which he is the audience of Comatas. The gift of the staff thus precipitates
not an initiation into poetry as such, or even into bucolic poetry, but the
conception of a kind of poetry that is able to invent fictional doubles as
aspirational models for ones present existence. The poetry Simichidas is
able to imagine at the end of the poem contrasts with the more limited
version of bucolic song he performs in it earlier. Simichidas cites Philetas and
Asclepiades as models, and it seems reasonable to assume that his song is an
image of the erudite erotic elegy for which they are celebrated incorporated
into the hexameter poetry of Idyll 7, just as Idyll 1, for example, represents
Thyrsis song in the same meter as the spoken dialogue that surrounds
it. They are obvious models for the kind of song the young Simichidas
has to offer, though neither put erotic elegy in the mouths of fully realized
fictional herdsmen, the development for which Theocritus has traditionally
been credited by the subsequent pastoral tradition.55 Both the song itself,
then, and its literary historical affiliations contrast the youthful poet with
the more imaginative successor whose emergence is commemorated, and
whose works are anticipated, by the end of the poem.
55
I cannot therefore agree with the suggestion of Bowie (1985) that Lycidas is derived from the poetry
of Philetas. Philetas is acknowledged as the model for the poetry to which the young Simichidas
aspires, but not for Lycidas or his song.
141
If, then, Idyll 7 commemorates the separation between the poet who has
written the poem and the poet who is remembered in it, this is because it
imagines the transformative moment that gave birth to his more imaginative
successor. Like Hesiods encounter with the Muses in the opening of the
Theogony, the poem imagines a scene of inspiration that changes its poet
forever. But who is the inspirer here? Who or what is Lycidas? He appears in
the poem as the exemplary herdsman, and the song he sings gives supreme
expression to the mimetic desire that animates all of Theocritus bucolic
fiction. Theocritus, it appears, has made his inspiration scene an encounter
between a version of himself and a fictional dramatic character who is in
fact the fruit of that inspiration.56 Why, then, has Theocritus chosen to
portray himself under an assumed name in this encounter? Lejeune, in his
earliest efforts to theorize autobiography at least, argued that the absence
of a single name shared by author, narrator, and protagonist ruins the
notion of autobiography: The hero can resemble the author as much as
he wants; as long as he does not have his name, there is in effect nothing.
Autobiography is not a guessing game; it is in fact exactly the opposite.57
Yet the line between autobiography and autobiographical fiction is not
so easy to maintain, as his own efforts to police it show. He cites Gide,
Mauriac, and Sartre, who all claim that the truest, and perhaps the only,
way in which the autobiography of a fiction writer can be told is as fiction.58
This, as we have seen, is an insight that was already possessed by ancient
biographers and autobiographers. The moment of inspiration, in which
the distinctive self responsible for the creation of the poetic work is born,
cannot be truly told as a story of everyday growth and self-development.
Something more dramatic is required an encounter with a being who is
not oneself.
At this point I would like to turn again to Pessoa and the heteronymic
poets among whom he divided his poetic works. As many scholars have
noted, the poets Pessoa invented Alberto Caeiro, the writer of pastoral,
Ricardo Reis, the neoclassical pessimist, Alvaro

de Campos, the futurist
look like ways of bestowing full ontological independence upon Pessoas
various styles of poetic writing. This is the adventure that binds the heteronyms together.59 It is crucially important to appreciate that the heteronymic writing is not intended to provoke our wonder at the creative
genius of a single author who was able to adopt a variety of masks, all
56
57
Cf. Meillier (1993) 115: Lycidas se presente comme le personnage de la fiction litteraire quest la
bucolique, confronte a` un createur de cette meme fiction quest Simichidas, jeu comparable a` celui
du personnage dIcare dans le roman de Queneau.
58 Lejeune (1989) 26.
59 Nogueras (1985) 450.
Lejeune (1989) 13.
142
ultimately to be recognized as the many modes of a single self, but rather to

draw our attention to an empirical self that is best conceived as it is in fact
experienced as a number of fully independent beings.60 There is no self
behind the masks, no author behind the personae, only an experience of
selfhood that finds itself best articulated as a series of contradictory others.
Pessoas poetry thus does not simply enlarge the domain of the empirical
self of author and reader by giving it access to worlds it could not otherwise
have; almost any literary experience could do this. Nor does its contribution consist in showing that the empirical self, in its social manifestations,
is not the whole self; this is hardly news by the early years of the twentieth century.61 While the minute analyses of alienation and projection
recorded in Pessoas prose masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, complement
the poetry in interesting ways, the experience of the poetic heteronyms is
rather more disquieting. For it suggests that personal development occurs
through a process of self-fictionalization so radical that it amounts to the
appearance of entirely new beings within the self. Pessoas heteronyms are
not temporary disguises that can be put on and off at will but ontologically independent others that coexist with the person that bears the name
Pessoa. The multiplicity in selfhood amounts not to a Whitmanesque
abundance of actionable possible selves but rather to a feeling of ontological separation in their copresence.62 And so it is that Pessoa looms larger
and larger in the landscape of early modernism. As ontological experiments
have become the dominant ones in postmodern poetics,63 Pessoas adventures in this area look decidedly prophetic. In particular, the dramatization
of the discontinuity of selfhood as the authors encounter with his own
literary personae is a postmodern fictional trope that is very fully explored
in Pessoas account of his relationship with his heteronyms.64
This relationship is not simply ludic. Pessoa describes the emergence
of the heteronyms in a letter to Adolfo Casias Monteiro, a younger
contemporary:
60
61
62
63
64
So Hamburger (1969) 13847 and De Sena (1982) 1932 distinguish Pessoas aims and achievement
from the persona poetry of Pound, Eliot, and other twentieth-century poets.
Cf. Hamburger (1969) 147.
Cf. Pessoa (2001) 262: My dramas, instead of being divided into acts full of action, are divided into
souls. Thats what this apparently baffling phenomenon comes down to . . . I subsist as a medium
of myself, but Im less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by
them all. I too am a disciple of Caeiro.
McHale (1987) xii, 10, 148, 21314.
So Timothy Findley, in Famous Last Words (1981), imagines a meeting between Ezra Pound and
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (see Hutcheon [1988] 148), and Kurt Vonnegut, in Breakfast of Champions
(1973), records a meeting between Kilgore Trout, a caricature of the straightforward science fiction
writer he used to be, and that authors author, Kurt Vonnegut (see McHale [1987] 72).
143
In 1912, if I remember correctly (and I cant be far off ), I got the idea to write
some poetry from a pagan perspective. I sketched out a few poems with irregular
verse patterns (not in the style of Alvaro

de Campos but in a semiregular style)
and then forgot about them. But a hazy, shadowy portrait of the person who wrote
those verses took shape in me. (Unbeknownst to me, Ricardo Reis had been born.)
A year and a half or two years later, it one day occurred to me to play a
joke on Sa-Carneiro to invent a rather complicated bucolic poet whom I
would present in some guise of reality that Ive since forgotten. I spent a few
days trying in vain to envision this poet. One day when Id finally given up
it was March 8th, 1914 I walked over to a high chest of drawers, took a sheet
of paper, and began to write standing up, as I do whenever I can. And I wrote
thirty-some poems at once, in a kind of ecstasy Im unable to describe. It was the
triumphal day of my life, and I can never have another one like it. I began with a
title, The Keeper of Sheep. This was followed by the appearance in me of someone
whom I instantly named Alberto Caeiro. Excuse the absurdity of this statement:
my master had appeared in me. That was what I immediately felt, and so strong was
the feeling that, as soon as those thirty-odd poems were written, I grabbed a fresh
sheet of paper and wrote, again all at once, the six poems that constitute Slanting
Rain, by Fernando Pessoa. All at once and with total concentration . . . It was the
return of Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself. Or rather,
it was the reaction of Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.
Once Alberto Caeiro had appeared, I instinctively and subconsciously tried to
find disciples for him. From Caeiros false paganism I extracted the latent Ricardo
Reis, at last discovering his name and adjusting him to his true self, for now I actually
saw him. And then a new individual, quite the opposite of Ricardo Reis, suddenly
and impetuously came to me. In an unbroken stream, without interruptions or
corrections, the ode whose name is Triumphal Ode, by the man whose name is
none other than Alvaro

de Campos, issued from my typewriter.65
What begins as play, a prank upon a younger poet, becomes an unsettling

experience of the self-alienation that is inseparable from fictional invention.
As in Idyll 7, this invention is given a particular date and time, one that
can only figure as a source of nostalgia since the writer knows it will never
be experienced with the same intensity again. Most striking, however, is
Pessoas sense that this master who has appeared in him is an independent
being, so that he can hardly speak of himself as his inventor. His autonomy
is acknowledged by the heteronym, and by the need that is immediately
felt to fashion a disciple for him.66 So it is that, as another younger poetic
65
66
Pessoa (2001) 256. The letter is discussed by Paz (1995) 78, an introduction to Pessoa.
It is interesting to note that Caeiro, the sun around whom the other heteronyms and Pessoa himself
keep their courses, in the metaphor of Paz (1995) 10, was conceived by Pessoa as a bucolic poet, the
author of The Keeper of Sheep and The Amorous Shepherd. Paz points out that Caeiro (and in this he
is like Lycidas) is a sage, not a philosopher, insofar as his life is inseparable from his thinking, and
so is paradoxically the least real of all the heteronyms because his existence denies the very distance
between lived and imaginary experience (in Pessoa) of which he is the outcome.
144
acquaintance of Pessoa has claimed, the older poets mystification of his

inner life is a serious way of reaching the core of the creative process,
for it is only through self-fictionalization that the poet is able to attain the
relationship with himself that would allow him to create mimetic poetry.67
And so it is that Pessoa, a poet who, in his own words, is several different poets at once, a dramatic poet who writes lyrical poems, refuses the
distinction between dramatic and lyric poetry, so that lyric poetry draws
close to dramatic poetry without assuming dramatic form. The poems of
his heteronyms, he claims, are a literature that I have created and lived,
sincere because it is . . . felt in the others person; written dramatically, but
as sincere (in my sense of the word) as what King Lear says, though Lear is
not Shakespeare, but one of his creations.68
Something like the heteronym seems to have been current in the Hellenistic period, for some poets are known to have used a name resembling
a patronymic to sign parts of their work, and Theocritus alludes to this
practice in Idyll 7 with his reference to the poet Asclepiades under his
assumed name Sicelidas.69 However, the extended use of heteronymic narrative for the inspiration scene of Idyll 7 has special relevance for a poem in
which an authentic bucolic poetry of impersonation and imagined identification is contrasted with a superficial bucolic poetry that merely cloaks
the expression of erotic desire with rustic imagery. For the bucolic character is essentially labile; in any given poem, a character no sooner appears
before us than he imagines himself in the role of other bucolic characters.
Idyll 7, then, engages in a double play with this distinctive characteristic
of bucolic song. Just as Lycidas projects himself into an imagined past, so
that by thinking of himself as the audience of Comatas he completes his
self-creation as a bucolic character, so Theocritus projects Simichidas into
the past, imagining the moment at which he was the audience of Lycidas
as the decisive experience in his becoming capable of the authentic bucolic
poetry of which Lycidas is the embodiment.70
67
69
70
68 Pessoa cited in Hamburger (1969) 139, 146.

De Sena (1982) 29.
See Gow (1952) ad loc. 7.40, who also notes: Ligyastades is said to be formed from 6<, and, if so,
refers like Melicertes to the writers poetical quality. Cf. Wendel (1899) 20: veri homines suis veris
nominibus appellantur exceptis ut videtur duobus, ipso Theocrito et Asclepiade poetis, qui nomina
Simichidae ac Sicelidae assumpserunt.
Why Theocritus chose the name Simichidas is unknown. Some ancient commentators saw a link
with the epithet simos, snub-nosed, which the goatherd of Idyll 3 applies to himself, and imagined
that the anonymous herdsman of this poem was also the poet in disguise; see = 3.1a, 8/9a, Wendel
(1914) 117, 119. This is an attractive suggestion insofar as it points to the transformation of real
life in the image of pastoral fiction that is such a prominent theme of Idyll 7. Certainly no better
explanation has been offered to date; the other suggestion found in the scholia, that Simichidas is
Theocritus real patronymic, is contradicted by the evidence that his parents were named Praxagoras
145
The heteronym Simichidas allows a version of the poet to meet Lycidas,

a fictional character, in a fictional inspiration scene.71 By showing this
nave, yet initially rather smug, younger self outwitted, yet inspired, by the
embodiment of his own bucolic fiction, Theocritus creates a poem that
is unlike anything else in ancient literature. Yet in doing so he remains
faithful to the message of this fiction, that we change by identifying with
the products of our imagination. It is, then, entirely fitting that a kind of
fiction that celebrates the power of imaginary experience to transform the
lives of those who engage in it should represent its founding moment as
the encounter between its creator and one of his own fictional creations.
As Girard observed of Proust, mimetic desire achieves its truest expression
when the author shows himself to be the subject of the very experience he has
portrayed in his invented characters.72 As we have seen with Hermesianax,
other Hellenistic poets invent stranger and more hilarious relationships
between the poets life and his work. If my reading of Idyll 7 is right,
however, this poem conceives of an entirely new possibility in this regard.
For the poem does not simply imagine the possibility that a work of poetic
fiction might be conceived as the expression of the inner life of the poet
who wrote it, but envisages the possibility that its creator might appear
in it alongside his fictional characters. This possibility is not explored by
Hermesianax, but, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is enthusiastically
embraced by a certain line of development in Theocritus bucolic imitators.
71
72
and Philinna; see Gow (1952) I.xvi, Hunter (1999) 1. Kossaifi (2002) 35861 compares the formations
Melicertes and Ligyastades and concludes that Simichidas is a programmatic formation from simos
that emphasizes the poets solidarity with those of his characters who achieve peace through song
while at the same time gently mocking the pretensions of his self-representation as a sonorous
mouthpiece of the Muses. For Nickau (2002) 398, the name points to Simias of Rhodes.
Cf. Bowie (1985) 77: Theocritus could hardly, on a walk in the countryside, encounter a fictitious
character. So too, by the use of the heteronym, Pessoa was able to invent a meeting between himself
(his orthonym) and the bucolic master Caeiro in which Caeiro inspires his inventor Pessoa with
a new kind of poetry: Pessoa, completely shaken upon hearing Caeiro read poems from his The
Keeper of Sheep, immediately went home to write verses of a kind he never could have produced
otherwise. See Pessoa (1998) 6, 41, and Guillen (1971) 242.
See Girard (1966) 38, cited in Introduction, n. 38. So too Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 9.7.34,
1167b3468a4 concludes that were a poets work to come to life, he would love this work more that
it would love him.

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Someone told me you were dead, Heraclitus, and it brought me to tears. I remembered how often the two of us, chatting, put the sun to bed. You, I suppose, my
Halicarnassian friend, are long since dust. It is only your nightingales that live. On
them Hades, who snatches all things, will not lay his hands.1
Callimachus famous epigram is a studious and poignant reflection on

the possibility of a kind of personal immortality through the survival of
ones literary work. The message at first seems familiar and consoling:
Heraclitus is dead, but no matter, his works live on and assure him a kind
of afterlife. Contrasts between literature and life structure the poem. The
physical separation of friends in the real world, Callimachus in Alexandria,
Heraclitus, his Halicarnassian friend, dead someplace far away, is overcome
by the fiction of literary address as the poet seems to speak to his dead friend,
just as his poems, his nightingales, will speak to all those addressees that
Heraclitus will never know in the eternal present of poetic communication.2
As Plato imagined in the Symposium, works of art are our most authentic
progeny, a reflection that gains additional poignancy here when we recall
that all we now have of Heraclitus is not a collection of poems that restore
him to us with some sense of the fullness of a life lived, but a single funerary
1
2
Callimachus, Epigram 2, Pfeiffer (194953) II.81 = AP 7.80.

On the innovative use of fictions of direct address in the poem, see Walsh (1990) 16. Cf. Hunter
(1992a) 11323, who points to various ways in which the poem complicates its theme of literary
immortality.
146
147
epigram, for a wife who died in childbirth, taking with her to Hades one
of the twins she was in labor with.3
Yet the poems ironies are not primarily concerned with the accidents of
survival. While the disappearance of all but one of Heraclitus poems has
proven Callimachus prediction wrong, the poem in fact asks us to consider
just how much of a consolation their survival, in their entirety, would really
be. The poem balances a fond memory of shared conversation, the many
times that, in what sounds like a colloquial expression, the two friends,
chatting, put the sun to bed, with the formalization of speech in writing,
the nightingales that constitute Heraclitus claim to fame and hence to
a kind of personal immortality. But it is this very relationship between
literary work and living person that makes the question of immortality
troubling rather than consoling. While it seems clear enough that $!,
nightingales, stands for poems, this is anything but ordinary language.
The literary person that will be available to posterity through Heraclitus
poems will hardly be the genial conversational friend that is remembered
in Callimachus epigram, but rather some stylization of him. The second
self the poems contain is a source of anxiety for Callimachus even as he
contemplates the possibility that this self may live forever.
We can also appreciate the irony of the poems fictional form of address
from this perspective. Callimachus knows quite well of course that his
friend cannot hear him, and that it is his own anxieties about the relationship between the empirical self and its projection in literary work that he
is confronting here. If the debates surrounding the structure and editions
of Callimachus magnum opus, the Aetia, have taught us anything, it is
that its poet was intensely concerned that the poem as a whole should be
a full portrait of the creative life of the modern poet in all his guises
scholar, dream interlocutor with the Muses and the illustrious poetic
dead, raconteur of curious and erotic tales, court poet and praise poet
of the Alexandrian royal family.4 Callimachus confronts the possibility
of his own immortality by fabricating a dazzling multiplicity of possible
selves in preparation for the afterlife. This self-portrait is further complicated by the collection of Iambi, in which the poet fabricates other
3
AP 7.465 = Page (1975) p. 113 (Heraclitus 1). Cf. the discussion of poets as parents of their works in
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 9.7.34, 1167b3468a4.
Cf. Meillier (1993) 111: Callimaque va meme très loin. Il ne fait pas un ou plusieurs receuils, mais
ledition de ses oeuvres, cest-à-dire la representation de toute une carrière de poète. Ledition par ellememe devient le temoignage de dun bios, comme le souligne le rapprochement entre sa jeunesse et
sa vieillesse dans lInvective aux Telchines, qui tient lieu de pièce liminaire. For an excellent summary
of the ongoing debates about the form of the Aetia, see Hunter (2004) 4449.
148
personae moralist, impersonator of the archaic abuse poet Hipponax,

polemicist, fabulist that add to, and complicate, the self-image presented
in the Aetia. Callimachus avoids nostalgia for the empirical self, and its
occlusion by a simplified literary persona, by fabricating an array of literary
selves that are as various as the poetic genres in which they are manifest.5
The Aetia also anticipates the kind of biographical approach to a poets
work that we have seen in Hermesianax and Longinus reading it with
varying degrees of seriousness as an analogue of his social or imaginative
experience by including a number of scenes in which the author gives
a more or less tongue-in-cheek account of the origin of various moments
in the poem we are reading: the antiquarian research that concludes the
romantic tale of Acontius and Cydippe (frr. 6775), the meeting at a drinking party with a stranger from the island of Icus that precedes the account
of this islands curious ritual customs (fr. 178), and, most famously, the
words of Apollo to the youthful poet with which the poem begins and
which lay out the poetics of the poem we are about to read (fr. 1). Given the
fragmentary state of the poem, it is difficult to assess how the demystified
account of the origins of poetic speech in the tale of Acontius and Cydippe,
or in the description of the ritual practices of the Icians, coexisted with the
framework of an ongoing question-and-answer session with the Muses that
structured Books 1 and 2 of the Aetia. What seems clear, however, is that the
persona of a pedantic cataloguer is deliberately constructed so as to contrast
at particular moments with the wonder of the tales themselves. The fabulous love story of the long-dead Acontius and Cydippe, for example, gains
extra luster by contrast with the imagined dullness of the local historian
of the island of Ceos, Xenomedes, in whose work the poet has found it,
and with the equally dull life of the antiquarian poet who spends his days
engaged in such reading.6 The opening of the Aetia situates the poem in
a tradition of inspiration stories that begin with Hesiod and Archilochus,
and their encounter with divinities of song; here too an account of the
special ontology of poetic narratives precedes the particular examples we
are about to hear, and is connected with the autobiographical account of a
moment in the poets life in which the capability for this kind of narrative
was guaranteed by the encounter with a god. However, the implied selfportrait of the poet as heir to a special kind of psychic richness as a result
5
For a detailed discussion of the theme of polyeideia, or writing in different genres the accusation
of his critics that Callimachus sets out to justify in the Iambi (though the accusation may have been
directed at his work as a whole) see Acosta-Hughes (2002) and Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 17,
460.
Cf. Hutchinson (1988) 3031.
149
of this encounter is contrasted with the vignettes the poem offers of the
poet in action, where he appears both literally and intellectually a model
of sobriety. The imaginative richness of the Aetia cannot be discovered in
the poet we encounter within it, so that the traditional mystery of poetic
storytelling reappears in the poem as the contrast between the engaging
variety of its tales and the image of the poet who has created them.
We have observed something similar in Theocritus Idyll 7. The poem is
an autobiographical account of a poets life that seems to record a decisive
moment in his literary development. However, the young poet who is the
subject of the narrative is definitely not an inspiring presence in the poem.
He comes from the city, is somewhat ill at ease with the inhabitants of
the bucolic world to which his own poems lay claim, and the song he
volunteers in his exchange with Lycidas suffers by comparison with that of
the authentic herdsman singer. It is not until the end of the poem that he
seems to grasp what is required of a genuine bucolic poet, but even here
nothing of the poet who is capable of writing the poem as a whole appears in
his poem except the fact of writing itself. The glamour of creative personality
is deferred to the character of Lycidas, who appears to be a product of
the imagination of the genuinely creative poet whose presence is excluded
from his own inspiration story. Together, then, these two poems offer a
fascinating meditation on the relationship between the imagined world of
a writers work, and the origin of that world in his empirical experience.
For both poets thwart easy answers to questions about the ontology of their
literary worlds, Callimachus by including in his own poem an ironically
simplified depiction of its relationship to its sources, Theocritus by creating
a fictionalized autobiography in which the relationship between creator and
created is reversed.
Interest in the relationship between poetic worlds and their authors is,
as we have seen, widespread in the poetry and poetics of the Hellenistic
period. However, bucolic poetry was uniquely well positioned to become
the medium in which reflection on this topic could occur. For while any
work of literature may be read as a projection of the inner life of its author
(as Hermesianax and Longinus read Homer), there is, in bucolic poetry, a
particular symmetry between represented world and real world that invites
autobiographical exploration on the part of both author and reader. The
defining characteristic of Theocritus shepherds is that they are singers
whose major concern in the time in which we are able to observe them
is to engage in fictionalizing self-projection in the medium of song. They
are thus obvious doubles of the poet himself in a way that the characters
of epic, or any other genre, are not. Because bucolic poetry consists of
150
dramatizations of characters who, like their authors, are makers of songs,

we are able to see clearly that literary characters may be understood as
projections of the inner life of their authors. Because these characters are
shepherds, which their authors are not, we can see that such projections are
fictional, that is to say, that it is by imaginative identification with invented
others that the psyche gives life to its own movements. This point is clearer
still when we recall that the contents of the shepherds songs are efforts
to identify with characters that they imagine as counterparts of their own
inner life.
The claims of the bucolic world as a representation of the poets literary
imagination have, as we shall see, been set forth with exemplary clarity in
the case of Virgils Eclogues,7 and it is no part of my intention to underestimate Virgils achievement in this respect. However, by examining in
some detail the path from the Idylls to the Eclogues, I hope to show how the
reception of Theocritus poems prepared the way for the thematization of
this relationship in Virgils work by making explicit the analogy between
bucolic poet and bucolic character that is, as I have shown, already present
and clearly legible in the Idylls themselves. In particular, I hope to show that
the contrast between a simple or mimetic Theocritus and a complex, or selfreflective, Virgil that has underwritten so much of the comparison between
the two poets is illusory insofar as it concerns the poets self-representation
in his poems. For the very self-consciousness about the bucolic fiction that
has been taken as one of the defining characteristics of Virgils adaptation
of his Theocritean models was recognized in the Idylls themselves by their
earliest commentators and adaptors.
A variety of interpretive approaches to the bucolic poems are apparent in
the first critical and creative responses to them. The majority of the ancient
scholarship preserved in the scholia tries to accommodate them within the
familiar categories of Aristotelian genre theory. For Aristotle, genre is determined by correlating character type with form. Thus, the representation of
men better than ourselves in dramatic form gives tragedy, the presentation
of men worse than ourselves in dramatic form gives comedy, and so on (Poetics 34).8 This synchronic view is combined with a diachronic perspective
on the evolution of tragedy and comedy as a development of the dramatic
potential inherent in the ritual origin of both genres: tragedy arose from the
speech of the leaders of the dithyramb, comedy from the speech of the leaders of phallic song. Both ideas can found in the scholia to Theocritus. The
7
8
See the discussion of Putnam (1970), Schmidt (1972), and Alpers (1979) below.
Cf. Gill (1993) 7677: Each poetic form is characterized by certain generic features: it has its own
specific objects of mimesis, and its own specific means and modes of mimesis.
151
diachronic perspective is found in section B of the Prolegomena, where the

account of bucolic poetrys ritual origin is modeled upon the discussion of
comedys ritual origin in Poetics Chapter 3.9 The synchronic view is found
in Section D, where it is argued that the bucolic poems represent ordinary
peasants in a variety of literary forms.10 While there is not a consistent relationship between content and form in these poems as there is in the classical
genres, genre theory can still be used to analyze them because their subject
matter remains constant, and all forms may ultimately be regarded as either
narrative, dramatic, or mixed, depending on whether or not the poet speaks
in his own voice in them.11 The Prolegomena thus treat the bucolic characters as ordinary herdsmen, even though the commentaries on the individual
poems identify some of them as mythical beings the desire for generic
consistency outweighs the recognition that they are drawn from a variety of
realms.12
The same desire for consistency can be seen in the scholiasts unwillingness to leave any of the herdsmen without a name. They suggest that the
goatherd of Idyll 3 is Battus of Idyll 4, since at 4.3840 Battus mentions
Amaryllis as the object of his affections, and this is also the name of the
Nymph courted by the goatherd in Idyll 3. Similarly, they propose that the
unnamed goatherd of Idyll 1 is either Menalcas or Comatas. The scholia
to Idyll 7 even suggest that Comatas and Menalcas are one and the same,
further simplifying the cast of characters. As the scholiasts are troubled by
the fact that anonymous characters occupy center stage in Idyll 1 and Idyll
3, and try to fill in the names that Theocritus has left blank, so too they are
concerned with the fact that characters with the same name have markedly
different attributes from one poem to the next. Thus, the scholia to Idyll 9
9
10
11
12
Cremonesi (1958) 10922. The scholia consist of Prolegomena, which precede the collection,
Hypotheses, which precede and summarize the individual poems, and line-by-line commentary.
The Prolegomena consist of the following: the life of Theocritus (A), the invention of bucolic poetry
(B), the kinds of herdsmen (C), the form of the poems (D), the meaning of the term Idyll (E),
dialect (F), epigrams on the collection (G, H). See Wendel (1914) 17.
Prolegomena D, Wendel (1914) 5: As far as is possible this poetry portrays the ways of countrymen,
depicting very delightfully those who are made sullen by their rusticity in accordance with their way
of life. This is what Van Sickle (1976) 35 calls the simple mimetic concept of the poems.
As discussed in Chapter 2. See, for example, Id. 1 arg., Wendel (1914) 23, Id. 5 arg., Wendel (1914)
154.
The Hypothesis to Idyll 8, which, like Idyll 9, includes a dialogue between Daphnis and Menalcas,
refers to Alexander Aetolus, in whose work Daphnis appeared as the tutor of Marsyas, and to
Sositheus, in one of whose plays his companion Menalcas was judged the loser in a singing contest
by Pan. Cf. Gow (1952) ad loc. 8.2, Hunter (1999) 66. The effort on the part of the scholiasts to
systematize the bucolic world, and thereby make it recognizable as a synecdoche of a segment of
real life, is discussed with exemplary thoroughness in Fantuzzi (forthcoming). I thank the author for
sharing this work with me ahead of publication and only regret that it did not come to my attention
sooner.
152
ponder whether the Menalcas of this poem is the same as that of Idyll 8, having swapped his sheep for cows, or a different Menalcas who is a cowherd,
and assert, in the Hypothesis to Idyll 1, that the Daphnis of Idyll 6 is the
Daphnis of Idyll 1. As I have argued earlier, an author as self-conscious of
his reshaping of characters from the literary tradition as Theocritus shows
himself to be in his creation of the Cyclops of Idyll 11 is unlikely to have
been unaware of this issue, whether his poems were disseminated piecemeal
or in a collection,13 and the scholia are aware of it too, although they do
not discuss it in any detail.
What we miss in them is any extended consideration of the reasons why
the attributes of the bucolic characters of both Theocritus and his imitators
should be so different from one poem to the next if they are in fact the
same person. For the scholia do not reflect upon the role of impersonation
in the poems, and how this gives the bucolic characters their essential
lability. The Daphnis of Idyll 1 is an impersonation by Thyrsis, while the
Daphnis of Idyll 6 himself impersonates the companion of Polyphemus
in his dialogue with Damoetas. The shifting image we have of Daphnis
in particular points to the self-fictionalizing impulse that is at the heart
of bucolic song: when he appears in his own person in Idyll 6, all he has
in common with his impersonation by Thyrsis in Idyll 1 is the fact of
impersonation itself. Marco Fantuzzi, in an important article, has pointed
out how, in contrast to the scholia, this lability is recognized by Theocritus
first creative imitators, and motivates their own continuing development
of the character of Daphnis. While acknowledging the argument of earlier
critics that the imitation of Theocritus in the post-Theocritean Idyll 8
gave rise to an idealised, sentimental bucolic manner by superimposing
a mythical Daphnis and a living bucolic shepherd Daphnis, Fantuzzi
argues that the author of Id. 8 arrived at this superimposition not only
as a result of an obvious idealising short-sightedness, but probably because
he was authorised by a superimposition of the different characterizations
of Daphnis in two of Theocritus poems (Idd. 1 and 6).14 By contrasting
the two versions of Daphnis in Idyll 1 and Idyll 6, the author of Idyll 8 has
recognized the fictionalizing impulse of both author and character, which
then becomes a model for his own idealizing fiction.
It is only a small step from seeing the bucolic characters as fully fictional
beings inventions of their author who have no reality outside their authors
13
14
As discussed in Chapter 2, n. 7.
Fantuzzi (1998) 6162. The argument that the author of Idyll 8 is responsible for an idealizing bucolic
manner because he lacks familiarity with the realities of pastoral life and labor is advanced by Rossi
(1971b).
153
imagination to seeing them as versions of that author, fictional projections

of his own self-understanding, and this step was taken by at least some
critics in antiquity. The majority of the scholia derive from the work of
Theon who was active in Alexandria between 50 bce and 20 ce, and it
is tempting to ascribe the unsatisfactory synthesis of Aristotelian genre
theory I have outlined above to his belated efforts to combine the work
of his predecessors.15 There is another voice in the scholia, however, that
offers a more interesting solution to the problem posed by the novelty
of the bucolic characters. The critic Munatius is cited eight times in the
Theocritus scholia, three times on questions of prosody (1.110 a,c, 2.100b,
9.14), once for an etymology (7.138a), and once regarding the Arcadian
festival of Pan to which Simichidas refers in Idyll 7 (7.106, 7.108b). With
one exception, where he is chastised for his ignorance of quantity (2.100b),
his suggestions are accepted. On three occasions, however, he is censured
for his identification of characters. In Idyll 3 he identifies the speaker as
Theocritus because the epithet simos, snub-nosed, which the goatherd
applies to himself, suggests Simichidas of Idyll 7.16 In Idyll 7 he names
Simichidas companions on the walk as Phrasidamus and Antigenes, the
hosts of the festival, rather than Eucritus and Amyntas (7 arg. a). In Idyll 17
he identifies the wrong Ptolemy (Philopator) as the recipient of the poem.
The last is simply a mistake, but calling Simichidas traveling companions
in Idyll 7 Phrasidamus and Antigenes so blatantly contradicts the opening
verse of the poem that it is unlikely to be a mere error. It seems instead to
be something like an ancient version of the bucolic masquerade in which
the characters of the poems are seen as Theocritus and his contemporaries
in pastoral disguise.17 Munatius interpretation of Idyll 3 takes this idea a
15
16
17
His commentary on Theocritus was preceded by the work of Asclepiades of Myrlea, his commentary
on Nicander by the work of Demetrius Chloros and Antigonus; see Wendel (1920) 165, Guhl (1969)
3, 17 nn. 1a and 1b. It has likewise been suggested that his commentary on Callimachus resembled
his role in the history of the Pindar scholia: synthesis and summary of his predecessors rather than
original research; see Cameron (1995) 19194.
> 3.1a, 3.8, 3.9a, Wendel (1914) 117, 119. These suggestions are refuted by the scholia with a sharpness
that suggests contemporary polemic. Since the final stratum of original scholarship in the scholia
derives from the work of Theaetetus and Amarantus in the second century ce, Munatius has been
identified with the critic Munatius of Tralles, who is named by Philostratus as one of the teachers
of Herodes Atticus (Lives of the Sophists 538, 564). See Wendel (1920) 75. Intriguingly, at Idyll 14.53
the unhappy lover who is thinking of becoming a mercenary refers to a Simos who sailed off to
Alexandria because he had fallen in love with a hard-hearted girl, and came back cured.
Taking his cue from the assertion of bucolic poetrys ritual origin in Prolegomena B, Reitzenstein
argued that Theocritus and his friends on Cos organized their poetic circle in imitation of a group of
cowherds devoted to Artemis, and that his bucolic poetry originated in this cultic milieu. The group
abandoned a formal connection with cult, at which point the personalities and poetic concerns of
its members became clearly perceptible in the song contests of the Idylls. For his identification of
the historical poets concealed in the Idylls, see Reitzenstein (1893) 22839.
154
stage further, seeing Theocritus himself in the poems nameless goatherd.

The suggestion that the poet has portrayed himself as a rustic is rejected by
the other scholiasts as inappropriate: It is unfitting for Theocritus to be in
love with a peasant girl, going as far as to spend time in the fields.18 They
do not think that it is inappropriate for Theocritus to have represented
himself in his own poems as such. The Hypothesis to Idyll 7 states that
Simichidas is the poet, and that it is Theocritus who narrates how he met
Lycidas on the way to the festival.19 It is acceptable for Theocritus to portray
himself interacting with a herdsman in Simichidas exchange of songs with
Lycidas because he has been clearly identified as a city-dweller beforehand
(7.2). What is unacceptable is for the poet to portray himself as a herdsman,
adopting the language and manners of his own rustic characters.
Perhaps Munatius saw the impossibility of interpreting the goatherd of
Idyll 3 mimetically, as a realistic dramatization of a real-world herdsman.
Perhaps he had also read Idyll 12, and noticed the similarity in the language
of its nameless speaker to that of the nameless herdsman of Idyll 3.20 While
the speaker of Idyll 12 is called Theocritus not just by the scholia, but
also by modern editors,21 it is only a small step from the self-fictionalizing
persona of this poem to the fully fictional self-projection of Idyll 3, and
the line between them is not only difficult to police, but perhaps not
worth drawing in the first place. Likewise, in Idyll 11 Theocritus makes his
fictional Cyclops the means by which he communicates with his real-world
interlocutor Nicias, so that a fictional character is manifestly the projection
of an authorial intention. Finally, in Idyll 7 the ontological difference that
ought to keep fictional character and real-world author apart is removed
entirely, so that the young bucolic poet Simichidas is able to meet the
product of Theocritus own bucolic imagination, Lycidas. This possibility,
that the author of a fiction might appear, in one guise or another, in the
fictional world of his own invention, clearly has tremendous potential as a
means of staging the relationship between the author and his own creative
imagination, and it is indeed seized upon by later bucolic poets as a way of
thematizing both the power and the limits of fictionalizing self-projection.
18
19
20
21
> 3.1a, Wendel (1914) 117.

Id. 7 arg. b, Wendel (1914) 7677; cf. arg. c: Theocritus speaks the introduction.
Gutzwiller (1991) 18081, by contrast, argues that Munatius is reading the analogy between herdsman
and poet that is established only in later bucolic poetry back into the Idylls.
Cf. Gow (1952) II.221: This Idyll is a monologue addressed by the poet to a boy whose two days
absence has seemed all too long. Gow refers to the speaker as T. throughout his commentary on
the poem, deploring its conspicuous deficiencies of tact and taste, though noting the opinion of
Wilamowitz that its bucolic elements are not to be taken quite seriously when applied to the poet
himself.
155
The transformation of this idea, present in Theocritus in a suggestive,

embryonic form, into a central feature of the bucolic poetry of the Lament
for Bion and the Eclogues of Virgil and Calpurnius Siculus will be the subject
of the remainder of this chapter.
The Lament for Bion is the work of an unknown writer mourning in it
the death of the poet Bion who flourished around 100 bce The poem blends
echoes of The Sorrows of Daphnis in Theocritus Idyll 1, most obviously
in its refrain begin the grief, Sicilian Muses, begin with imitation of
the Lament for Adonis of Bion himself. In the latter the goddess Aphrodite
mourns the death of her lover Adonis, and hills, rivers, and flowers, Hymen,
the Graces, and eventually the Fates come to share in her distress. The
extravagant emotional tone of the Lament for Adonis is quite different from
Thyrsis song in Idyll 1, but the narrative premise of the two is similar: a
pastoral hero is grieved by nature and a series of divinities. The novelty
of the Lament for Bion is apparent by comparison; it is a real historical
poet who is commemorated in the poem, and who is mourned in the
lamentation scenes within it. Initially his mourners are mythical beings
Apollo and Aphrodite, as well as Nymphs, satyrs, and a host of lesser gods
and natural phenomena: streams, rivers, trees, flowers, birds, and animals.
So far, then, the poem is in keeping with its models. Next, however, the
poet presents a scene in which the dead Bion is lamented by his own poetic
creations (5863):
; 2 ? @ " A
B3 * - " $
< * C D)7 ;. 1 A%
8 * ? 1 " @ A= @
2 / E ) F
G3 " !; = " A - ).
Galateia too weeps for your song, whom you used to delight as she sat beside you
on the shore. For you did not play like the Cyclops. The lovely Galateia shunned
him, but you she looked upon with more delight than the sea, and now, having
forgotten about its waves, she sits upon the lonely sands, and tends your flocks till
this hour.
In this remarkable scene, the fictional Galateia is portrayed as having listened to the poetry of the historical Bion while he was alive, and, now that
he is dead, as continuing to lament her own inventor. The poem goes on
to claim that Bion, in his own life (8081), piped as a cowherd and sang
while he herded; he made pipes and milked the sweet heifer. Scholars have
noted that this is the first time in the bucolic tradition that a historical
156
poet is called a herdsman.22 Bion can, however, only be called a herdsman

because the author of the Lament has created a world in which the poet
he is commemorating associates with and is lamented by his own bucolic
characters. He lives in the same world as them.23 Finally, in an extension of
the mourning scene unprecedented in the poems models, the poet presents
a series of Greek sites that lament the death of Bion more than they did the
deaths of their own native poets: Ascra, Boeotia, Lesbos, Paros, and Mytilene grieve more than they did for Hesiod, Pindar, Alcaeus, Archilochus,
and Sappho respectively (8697). Having created a poetic world in which
gods, fictional beings, and historical cities can lament together, the poet
turns to gnomic reflection on the nature of his own grief men, unlike
plants, will not spring again from the earth once they are buried in it
(99107) recalls Bions mysterious death he seems to have perished by
consuming a poison (pharmakon) that he had asked to be prepared for him
(10912) and concludes by claiming that if his song had the same power
to charm the underworld divinities as Bions had, he would have sung the
present poem to them in Hades (11326).
The author of the Lament for Bion emphasizes his own, and the dead
Bions, allegiance to the bucolic poetry of Theocritus. He calls himself no
stranger to bucolic song, which I learned from you [Bion] as an inheritor of the Doric Muse, and perhaps refers to Bion as a Theocritus to
the Syracusans (9396).24 However, in making the bucolic poem a world
in which ontologically problematic contact between the realms of myth,
bucolic literature, and historical reality can be staged, he clearly moves well
beyond the model that authorizes his experiments in this regard. In doing
so, he foregrounds the power of the bucolic poet as fiction maker to appropriate entities from all of these worlds to create the world of his bucolic
poems.25 In the actual world, it is impossible for a poet to meet a character
22
23
24
25
Van Sickle (1976) 27, Alpers (1996) 153.

Manakidou (1996) 48 observes that in this poem a poetic creation of Bion is presented mourning
for his loss, but does not comment further.
The text is very problematic here. At line 93, the manuscripts of the poem have 1 >;
H, and Gow (following Musurus) prints a lacuna before it. The line marks the transition
from the lament of the Greek cities that mourn their native sons less than they do Bion (who is
referred to in the second person) to the continuation of bucolic poetry by his successors. Wilamowitz
accordingly proposed 1 >; H, you, Bion, are [a, another] Theocritus to the
Syracusans. The suggestion is difficult, however, and it is perhaps easier to imagine an omission
that claimed something like even Theocritus was mourned less among the Syracusans than you
were, Bion. In either case, the poem stresses that Bion exemplifies bucolic poetry as well as, or even
better than, its inventor, Theocritus, and so the poet himself hopes to live up to the tradition as its
inheritor.
For an exemplary demonstration of this point that draws upon Dolezel (1998), see Kania (2004).
Cf. now the discussion of the Lament in the conclusion to the section entitled Myth in Bernsdorff
(forthcoming).
157
from his own poetry if this character is invented, although, as the prologue
to Hesiods Theogony indicates, his encounters with gods whose stories are
told in myth may be recorded in his poems in a way that eludes definitive
redescription as either literary trope or autobiographical testimony.26 For it
is generally believed that some kind of interaction between these beings and
ordinary mortals is possible. Contact between actual and fictional entities
is not, however, conventionally accepted, although in bucolic poetry it can
be staged. As I have argued, Theocritus, in Idyll 7, masks the ontological and cognitive difficulties of such contact by inventing the heteronym
Simichidas to stage his own encounter with the fictional being Lycidas.
The author of the Lament for Bion is far less reticent in this respect. He
quite unabashedly asserts Bions coexistence with his fictional creations,
and leaves his readers to work out the consequences.27 One answer to the
problem of their sharing a world is to reply that this world is fictional;
all its agents are therefore equally fictional, and the Bion it portrays has
a nonessential relationship with his historical counterpart.28 Yet the poem
presents itself as a lament for a real-world poet, with whom its composer
has a real-world relationship as apprentice and successor. Moreover, it is
not just the author who laments the poet but a series of real historical cities
that are more grieved by his death than they were by the deaths of their
most celebrated native authors. Like Theocritus Idyll 11, the poems bucolic
fiction is intended to produce a real-world effect in this case, grief for
the dead poet which it could hardly do if the Bion who appears within
it could not be identified with his real-world counterpart. The poem calls
into question the ontological separation of the purely fictional even as
it revels in its own ability to create a world we can only understand as
such.
In this respect, the Lament for Bion is a worthy successor to Idyll 7. In
that poem Theocritus bucolic fiction comes full circle, and the heteronym
of its maker is shown to emulate his invented characters, aspiring to a
purified version of a pastoral world he himself has inhabited, just as they
26
27
28
See the discussion in the previous chapter. Lowe (2000) 263 notes the permeability of the boundary
between myth and reality as crucial to the operation of myth in Old Comedy.
The Lament poets extravagance is clear when one compares him with Hermesianax in this regard;
while, as we saw in the previous chapter, Hermesianax invents imaginative stories in which the
narratives of well-known poems are read as fictional analogues of events in their authors lives, he
never attempts a scene in which an author is in love with one of his own creations. Cf. Caspers
(forthcoming), who imagines just such a possibility on the part of Hermesianax only to dismiss it
as inconceivable in practice: It would have been an absurdity unparalleled even in fr. 7 to have
suggested that the historical poet Philoxenos was in love with the nymph Galateia.
So Kania (2004) 13, who also observes, however, that the poet is not unaware of the irony entailed
in using a carefully constructed fiction to sing the praises of a real poet and real poetry (21).
158
do. Here too entry into the bucolic world is presented as the attainment of
the bucolic poet who has been able to emulate his predecessors successfully.
As Theocritus is no longer simply the historical poet of that name but a
bucolic archetype that has been successfully emulated by his successor, Bion,
so Bion in turn has become such a model for the author of the poem, who
is no stranger to the bucolic song that he learned from him as his pupil
(9397). As the majority of the bucolic Idylls imagine the transformation
of the herdsmen in the image of their own song, so this poem, like Idyll 7,
imagines the transformation of the historical poet in the image of his own
fiction. The emulation that is characteristic of bucolic poetry is not just
poem-internal.29 Rather, the problematic contact between historical and
fictional worlds makes it clear that bucolic poetry is the place where the
recursive relationship between literary fiction and historical reality may be
staged and investigated. As the bucolic poets are assimilated to their own
fictional creations, they become models for bucolic imitation in much the
same way as the fictional beings their poems contain. If, therefore, in the
Lament for Bion the dead poet is represented as a herdsman, he has simply
experienced the same transformation as Theocritus fictional characters: by
singing of bucolic singers he became one himself.30
The ease of this transformation is taken for granted in the bucolic poems
of Theocritus; while the goatherd of Idyll 3 may have some difficulty in convincing himself (and us) of his resemblance to his self-elected models, the
majority of the herdsmen blend without difficulty into their imagined doubles, Thyrsis with Daphnis, Lycidas with Comatas, Daphnis and Damoetas
with Polyphemus and his friend. Their self-transformation is as effortless as
the act of singing, the imitation as convincing and compelling as the staging
of Polyphemus that Theocritus offers his friend Nicias in Idyll 11. Likewise,
in the Lament for Bion the freedom to have whatever kind of imaginative
life one desires is simply taken for granted as the premise of the bucolic
fiction. As we shall see, it is the very ease of the bucolic assimilation of self
to model, the free extension of selfhood through fictional self-projection,
that will be questioned in Virgils version of pastoral.
The bucolic Idylls demonstrate in exemplary fashion the process by
which, through identification with the products of the imagination, the
29
30
As in the intertextual approaches of Hubbard (1998) 37 and Berger (1984) 39.

Cf. Schmidt (1972) 111: Es ist ein u berprufbares Faktum, da die antike Bukolik die einzige literarische Gattung ist, die durchgehend von Dichtern handelt und zwar gerade sowohl insofern
sie selbst Bukolik ist als auch insofern diese Dichter Dichter sind. Diese Dichter sind als Hirten
Hirtendichter, d. h. Bukoliker. Der Dichter, der sie dichtet, ist ebenso ein Bukoliker, also dasselbe
wie seine Dichter. Schon das ist in keine andere Gattung moglich. Zwar sind Homer und Phemios
beide Aoden, Homer ist dies aber nicht insofern, als er von Phemios singt.
159
fictional becomes the real.31 As the herdsmen sing their songs, they freely
identify with the bucolic heroes of their own imagination, and so transform
themselves in their image. In Idyll 7 Theocritus stages the same process in
the autobiography of his young poet Simichidas, and in the Lament for
Bion this identification of the bucolic poet with the products of his own
imagination is made explicit. The first poem in Virgils collection of bucolic
poetry opens with a famous image of pastoral leisure that encapsulates this
conception of bucolic poetry as imaginative freedom (Eclogue 1.12):
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena.
You, Tityrus, lying beneath the covering of spreading beech, meditate your woodland Muse on slender reed.
This poem looks as if it will begin like Theocritus Idyll 1, with a contemplation of bucolic song by two accomplished musicians. Here too neither herdsman is presently engaged in music, and the verb of reflection,
meditaris, which replaces ;, you pipe, of Idyll 1, makes its contemplative character clearer still.32 However, what develops in Idyll 1 into
a leisurely meditation as the herdsmen compliment one anothers musical
skills, here immediately takes a quite different turn (1.35):
nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva.
nos patriam fugimus: tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.
We are leaving the boundaries of our homeland and its sweet fields; we are exiles
from our homeland; you, Tityrus, relaxing in the shade, will teach the woods to
echo sweet Amaryllis.
The careful chiastic structures, brought over from Idyll 1, no longer express
the contrasting styles of two herdsmen who inhabit the same landscape and
whose only threat in the pursuit of their chosen art is the possible incursion
of the god Pan, if they should awaken him with their music. Instead, this
is a landscape that belongs to human landlords; it has boundaries and
fields, and what one thinks of as ones home may belong to someone else
tomorrow. The fictional world of Idyll 1 is, in a single stroke, circumscribed
by a larger world of history and politics, within which its pleasant fictions
are permitted to continue only at the discretion of the current owners.33
By juxtaposing Tityrus woodland Muse with the realities of contemporary
31
33
32 Alpers (1979) 74.

Cf. Iser (1993) 2286.
On Virgils historicizing of the bucolic world, see Otis (1963) 13536.
160
rural life, Virgil allows the bucolic world to manifest itself as an image
of imaginative freedom under threat, while at the same time suggesting
that, under such circumstances, continuing commitment to the poetics
of pure fictionality in which this world originates can only be a form of
self-deception; Amaryllis, we will recall, is the beloved of the goatherd of
Idyll 3, the one character from the bucolic Idylls who conspicuously fails to
achieve the identification with the products of his own imagination that is
elsewhere the defining characteristic of the bucolic singers.
As the poem progresses, more details about the exile of the speaker Meliboeus emerge. While Tityrus has a protector in Rome, who has preserved
for him the tenure of his land, Meliboeus fields are to become the property
of an impious soldier, a barbarian, his dispossession a result of discord
amongst the wretched citizens (1.7072). Once again a political register,
the language of civil war, makes its appearance in the bucolic world. The
threat that has hovered at the edges of the poem since its opening verses
now takes on a recognizable historical shape; what threatens the herdsmen
is expulsion from their land so that this property may be awarded to military veterans, just as land was in fact expropriated for such veterans in
the aftermath of the battles of Philippi and Actium. How then are we to
combine this pointed reference to historical reality with the equally pointed
literary reference to Idyll 3 in the poems opening lines? For if these verses
identify the fictional herdsmen of Eclogue 1 as subjects of real Roman history, the initial verses pick out Tityrus as an imitator of Theocritus, and
it is as an adaptor of Theocritean bucolic that Virgil himself is making his
appearance as poet of the Eclogues.
The poem offers a series of analogues between its bucolic fiction and the
world in which that fiction is published that cannot easily be worked into
a single equation. If Tityrus is an imitator of Theocritus whose land was
preserved for him through the agency of a powerful figure at Rome, Servius
suggestion that Tityrus is a figure of the poet, whose own land was preserved
for him by some such person, seems natural enough. Yet modern scholars
have pointed to the impossibility of this identification in other respects
Tityrus, at verses 2730, is a white-haired ex-slave, and, more tellingly,
his conception of bucolic song falls far short of the complex mediation of
historical reality and bucolic fiction in Eclogue 1 itself.34 However, it is all
too easy to claim that biographical readings of the kind offered by Servius
34
Cf. Putnam (1970) 6475, who points out the impossibility of regarding Tityrus as the representation
of Virgils own poetics of bucolic, as exemplified by Eclogue 1 as a whole. For a recent summary of
the long debate regarding the identity of Tityrus, see Martindale (1997) 11617, who concludes that
it is because [Tityrus] in Eclogue 1 is different from Virgil (or Daphnis in Eclogue 5 from Julius
Caesar) that he can be (as Servius supposed) an allegory of him. On the tradition of biographical
161
are an illegitimate projection from the poem itself; the poem in fact makes
such projections inevitable even as it undercuts the possibility of sustaining
them at length.35
Before returning to the question of how to read the particular kind of
fictionalizing self-projection that appears in Eclogue 1 as compared to that
of the Idylls, I want to look briefly at how the problem of identification
this poem presents is compounded by the formal variation of the collection
as a whole. The order of the poems that is consistently observed in the
manuscript tradition and which is generally held to reflect an edition made
by the poet himself 36 shows a clear alternation in the mode of presentation;
the odd-numbered poems are dramatic, with two (Eclogues 1, 5, 9) or three
characters (Eclogues 3, 7) in conversation, while the even-numbered poems
are non-dramatic: they begin with a brief narrative introduction, which is
followed by a monologue by a character (Eclogue 2), a song by Silenus in
indirect discourse with embedded direct speech (Eclogue 6), a pair of refrain
songs by characters (Eclogue 8), and a dramatic scene in which Gallus sings a
lament (Eclogue 10). Eclogue 4 is spoken entirely by the poet, apart from the
brief citation of the Fates at verse 46. While there is considerable variety
in both dramatic and non-dramatic poems, Virgil has, over the course
of the collection, given a consistent pattern to the diversity of form that
characterizes Theocritus bucolic poetry: poems that are purely dramatic
alternate with poems that are narrated.37
35
36
37
allegory in the interpretation of the Eclogues more generally, see Van Sickle (1984) and Starr (1995).
The revisionist reading of Servian allegory, firmly rejected by Rose (1942) 11738 and Jenkyns (1998)
16970, in Patterson (1987) 1959 will be discussed below. Schmidt (1972) 121 rejects the biographical
allegory of the ancient commentators on the Eclogues even as he argues for a reading of Virgils bucolic
poetry as metapoetic allegory, poetische Poetik von Poesie (118).
Iser (2006) 7879 discusses just this problem in relation to the allegorical identifications of Spensers
Shepheardes Calender. Noting that Colin Clout, the central figure, is sometimes a poet, sometimes
Spenser himself, sometimes just a shepherd, and sometimes the English people as a whole, and that
the shepherdess Eliza at different times embodies the beloved, Queen Elizabeth, and the grieving
Dido, Iser suggests that the multiplicity of identifications ends up working against the independence
of levels of meaning that the allegorical mode is intended to impose: We obtain a host of semantic
adumbrations that impinge on every meaning of every situation in each eclogue. Consequently, when
the shepherds foreshadow certain political figures, the resemblance becomes increasingly complex,
and ambiguities begin to proliferate.
Coleman (1977) 18.
Coleman (1977) 2021. Van Sickle (1978) 1920 discusses this principle of alternation among the
many plans of formal and thematic variation that have been proposed for the Eclogues. Rumpf
(1996) 203 considers it in relationship to the question of narrative framing within the poems. There
is little consensus regarding the order of Theocritus poems in the bucolic collection known to
Virgil. Moreover, none of the three manuscript families, nor any papyrus, preserves the Idylls in an
arrangement in which dramatic poems alternate with poems in other forms; see Gutzwiller (1996)
14748, Tables I and II. It seems likely therefore that Virgil himself made a pattern of formal alteration
in the Eclogues out of the simple variety of the Idylls.
162
However, the distinction between narrative by the poet and direct speech
by his characters that such an alternation would seem to mark is suspended
as the collection unfolds. Eclogue 2 begins with narrative: The shepherd
Corydon loved the fair Alexis. Eclogue 3 opens with a dialogue between
Menalcas and Damoetas: Tell me, Damoetas, whose flock is this? Is it
that of Meliboeus? The reader naturally assumes that, since Eclogue 2 is
narration, the speaker who introduces the long speech by Corydon in Idyll
2 is the poet himself, while in Eclogue 3 the dialogue between the characters
is a dramatic fiction; we do not particularly reflect on the poet who created
it. In Eclogue 5, however, the character Menalcas offers to give to Mopsus
the reed pipe which taught me Corydon loved the fair Alexis, and Whose
flock is this? Is it that of Meliboeus? (5.8687). The narrator of Idyll 2, we
discover, was not in fact Virgil but the shepherd Menalcas, and the dramatic
illusion of Idyll 3, to which we succumbed without thinking of its creator,
was in fact authored by the same bucolic character. The moment has been
noted by scholars,38 but the unsettling effect of this sudden erasure of the
difference between author and character has hardly been fully accounted
for: is Eclogue 3, to which we responded as if it were an autonomous fictional
world, in fact the creation of a character in Eclogue 5? If so, is a fictional world
that is itself the creation of a fictional character somehow less grounded,
less ontologically sturdy than a fiction that resides more immediately with
the imagination of its real-world creator? Do we blame ourselves for falling
victim to what is now revealed to be not a primary fiction but the fiction
of a fiction? Conversely, how are we to understand this self-identification
of the poet with his fictional creation, both more explicit and more fleeting
than anything we have seen in Theocritus? And, finally, if Menalcas is
Virgil in Eclogue 5, how are we to read him in Eclogue 3, in which he
appears as a dramatic character? And where does this leave Tityrus? As the
questions multiply, we face the same dilemma that we face in Eclogue 1:
rather than offering the option to see the bucolic characters as instances
38
Williams (1968) 323, Putnam (1970) 192, Jenkyns (1998) 155. Hardie (2002) 21, by contrast, is much
more attuned to the surprise of this impossible conflation: At the end of the poem Menalcas
quotation of the openings of the second and third Eclogues breathtakingly collapses the fictional
world of Virgilian shepherds into the world of the poet and his readers. See, now, the interesting
discussion of the diffusion of authorial presence in the movement between author and character
roles in Section 4, Constructing Unity, of Breed (forthcoming). Samuel Becketts Trilogy offers the
only comparable example of retroactive reauthoring within a serial collection that I know of. In its
second book, Malone Dies (1951), the narrator, Malone, claims to have been the author of the first,
Molloy (1951), while in the final volume, The Unnamable (1953), its anonymous narrator claims to be
responsible for all of Becketts characters from Murphy to Malone. Cf. McHale (1987) 1213, who
discusses the effort on the part of Becketts characters to imagine, and escape, their dependence on
their author.
163
of authorial self-projection, a possibility we may freely accept or reject in

Theocritus, Virgil simultaneously confronts us with both the necessity and
the impossibility of this identification.
The relationship between Menalcas and the poet is explored at greater
length in Eclogue 9, a dialogue between the tenant farmers Moeris and
Lycidas. In response to Moeris eviction from his land, Lycidas recalls his
erroneous belief that your Menalcas had saved everything with his songs
(9.10). After he has been corrected by Moeris, the two herdsmen exchange
fragments of Menalcas songs that look back over the Eclogues as a whole,
and trace their resemblance to, and divergence from, the bucolic poetry
of Theocritus. Lycidas cites a song of Menalcas that recalls Idyll 3 (9.23
25), and in response Moeris cites lines that address Varus and recall the
theme of land appropriation in Eclogue 1 (9.2629). Lycidas then echoes
Simichidas boast in Idyll 7 (unless this is another citation of Menalcas), that
the Muses have made him too a poet, though as yet he cannot rival Varius
and Cinna (9.3236, cf. Idyll 7.3741), and Moeris in reply remembers
a song by Menalcas on the theme of Galateia. Finally, Lycidas recalls a
song in which Menalcas had Daphnis contemplate the star of Julius Caesar
(9.4650), thereby combining the political optimism of Eclogue 4 with the
Daphnis theme of Eclogue 5. Having completed half their journey, as the
tomb of Bianor comes into sight (cf. Idyll 7.1011), the speakers cease their
exchange of songs and go on in silence.
Eclogue 9 acknowledges Idyll 7 as a matrix for Virgils thought about
the representation of the poet as a character within the bucolic world.39
However, while Idyll 7 stages an encounter between the figure of the poet
and one of his own bucolic inventions in the form of an autobiographical inspiration narrative, Menalcas, the fictional character who lays claim
to authorship of Eclogues 2 and 3, appears only indirectly in Eclogue 9, in
the dialogue of Lycidas and Moeris and their citations of his songs. While
Moeris and Lycidas credit him with compositions that sound inescapably
like the Eclogues themselves, he is not present for this review of Virgils
bucolic themes, having been evicted from his land. Moreover, this prospectus of bucolic poetry is a prelude to its renunciation in the last poem of the
collection. In Eclogue 10 the narrator describes his poem as a final labor, a
tribute to Gallus, who, like Daphnis, is wasting away from unrequited love
(10.110). Yet while Gallus suffers like Daphnis, and sings like Daphnis, he
remains, throughout the poem, Gallus; unlike Theocritus Thyrsis, he does
39
Cf. Williams (1968) 327: Some of the poetic pleasure of Eclogue 9 resides in the riddle of its
relationship to Idyll 7.
164
not become Daphnis as he sings. Nor does he, like other bucolic singers,
find relief from desire in his engagement with bucolic song. By remaining himself, merely visiting the bucolic world rather than endeavoring to
become one with it through song, he makes his final declaration love
conquers all virtually inevitable.40
Among the herdsmen and pastoral divinities who visit the suffering
Gallus and ask him about his love is Menalcas, and Gallus invites them all,
as Arcadians, and hence true singers, to sing of it in the future (10.3133).
If we think of Menalcas here as the Menalcas of Eclogue 9, whom Lycidas
and Moeris credit with the themes of the Eclogues as a whole, then this
request made within the fictional world of Eclogue 10 is fulfiled by the very
poem in which it appears. Moreover, to have fulfiled this promise in a
poem worthy of Gallus consideration will be the last act of the poet of the
Eclogues, who closes the book by telling us that, if he has done so, then he
will have sung enough in the pastoral vein (10.7072). As Gallus fails to
identify with the bucolic world, so Virgil disengages himself from it. The
Menalcas of Eclogue 5, who claimed authorship of Eclogues 2 and 3, could
hardly be more strongly identified with the poet himself; the Menalcas of
Eclogue 9 gains strength as a figure of the poet by his absence from the
poem, as Lycidas and Moeris identify the themes of his songs with those of
the Eclogues themselves; the Menalcas of Eclogue 10, who, we are told, was
one of those entreated by Gallus to sing of his love, is a minor character in
the narrative, and distant from the narrative voice of the poem in which he
appears.
The possibility, and the degree, of identification between Virgil and
his herdsmen shift therefore as we make our way through the Eclogues. For
Servius, Virgils self-representation as a herdsman in the character of Tityrus
is an accommodation to the necessities of patronage at a difficult moment
in Romes civic history. Theocritus, he claims, is always straightforwardly
mimetic (his herdsmen are herdsmen and nothing more), but Virgil needed
to thank the patrons who had saved his land and so there are moments in
the Eclogues when the herdsmen double as figures of the poet himself. We
should not look for such moments everywhere, but only in passages that
deal with this issue. However, the presence of allegory is not to be deplored,
since it is a sophistication (urbanitas) that distinguishes his poems from
40
Cf. Putnam (1970) 38081: Hence the famous line omnia vincit amor is only the terse pronouncement of the predestined. The negative farewell to the woods and to the possibility of forgetting
elegiac love in such a context yields to Amors expected triumph. It is the double victory of that
indignus amor the elegist will always feel for his girl and the insanus amor of war and the affairs of
state.
165
those of Theocritus.41 We would, of course, prefer to give Virgil a more

universalizing intention in this transformation of his models: the poet did
not introduce biographical allegory into his poems because his particular
situation left him no choice but to vitiate the pure fictionality of the bucolic
world with historical references; rather, he chose to do so in order to reveal
the ultimate dependence of all literary fictions on the social and political
circumstances in which they emerge. Nonetheless, as defenders of Servius
have argued, the principle of discontinuous allegory in his approach to
the poems recognizes that Virgil does, at moments, inescapably identify
himself with his characters in a way that Theocritus does not, and that
these moments make arts social and political commitments explicit.42
Servius contrast between a simple Theocritus and a complex Virgil rests
upon his understanding of Tityrus as, at moments, a figure of the poet.
While he does not explore the more complicated relationship between
Virgil and Menalcas,43 his reading anticipates modern comparisons of the
two poets insofar as it recognizes, and praises, in the Eclogues a departure
from the semantic transparency and innocence of mimetic representation in Theocritus, as a result of which bucolic poetry, for the first time,
becomes a metaphor for something other than itself.44 Such a contrast
ignores the fundamental role of impersonation and mimetic desire in the
characterization of the herdsmen of the Idylls. For this doubleness makes
them immediately legible as figures of their authors imagination, and it is
only if they are used as a foil to the supposedly more complex characters of
the Eclogues that their own complexity disappears. What is different about
them in comparison to Virgils herdsmen is neither their simplicity nor
their realism, but the fact that, except in Idyll 7, their legibility as authorial
self-projection is not connected to particular historical circumstances as it
is in the Eclogues. Reading the self-fictionalizing songs of the characters of
41
42
43
44
The relevant passages are Thilo (1887), p. 23, 33. Cf. the discussion in Schmidt (1972) 12830 and
Patterson (1987) 3233.
Patterson (1987) 34; cf. Martindale (1997) 119, who argues that if the poems are discontinuously
allegorical, they must also be discontinuously mimetic.
Cf. Patterson (1987) 45.
Patterson (1987) 34, who does not perpetuate the comparison between the two poets in these
terms herself. Cf. Alpers (1979) 204209, who notes how the traditional comparison of Theocritus
and Virgil so often replicates, with various degrees of explicitness and sophistication, Schillers
antithesis of nave and sentimental poetry. Alpers is well aware of the difficulties in contrasting a
nave Theocritus with a sentimental Virgil, but thinks that the terminology of Schiller (who does
not discuss Theocritus) remains valuable insofar as the poetry of Theocritus (especially the Sorrows
of Daphnis in Idyll 1) represents with remarkable directness some of the essential feelings of epic
and tragic poetry. I hope that my first chapter has demonstrated how far we in fact are from such a
world in Idyll 1, and that the discussion here demonstrates how unhelpful it is to compare Theocritus
and Virgil in these terms.
166
the bucolic Idylls as analogous to those of their author is thus a possibility

rather than a requirement, though the emulation of the fictional herdsman Lycidas in the autobiography of the bucolic poet Simichidas in Idyll 7
nudges us in this direction. The Eclogues, by contrast, make inescapable,
though fleeting, identifications between poet and character, so that we have
no alternative at those moments but to read the bucolic world as a figure
of the poets own circumstances. The question with the Eclogues is not, as
it is with the Idylls, whether we should read the bucolic world in this way
or not, but rather for how long, and to what extent.45 While it is clear that
Menalcas, or Tityrus, at certain moments is Virgil, what is insolubly unclear
is the nature of this is. As the Aeneid fuses myth with annalistic history,
so the Eclogues fuse contemporary reality with fiction, drastically increasing both the number and the transparency of the connections between the
bucolic world and the history of the poets own times: in Eclogue 1 Tityrus
remains within the pastoral world while Meliboeus is leaving it because
his lands have been appropriated for veterans of the Roman army; Menalcas is absent from the world of Idyll 9 for the same reason; in Eclogue 10
Gallus is playing the part of Daphnis because his lover Lycoris has accompanied a Roman soldier on a military campaign. Because real historical events
frequently motivate the presence or absence of a particular character within
the bucolic world, this world appears to be a way of thinking about history
in the guise of fiction. While Theocritus, in Idyll 11, uses the bucolic world
as a means to investigate real-world problems, this worlds ability to function as an example rests upon its crisp separation from the actual world; the
power of Polyphemus song is the allure of pure fictionality. The Eclogues,
by contrast, fashion for this purpose a bucolic world that partially merges
with the historical world, and whose legibility as an image of contemporary
reality rests upon the visible presence of its author and his contemporaries
within it.
The identification of poet with character negates the heuristic value of
the Platonic distinction between modes of presentation that lies at the
origin of Western literary criticism. If the narrator of Eclogue 2 turns out to
be not Virgil but Menalcas, it cannot be assumed that, in a narrative poem,
the poet conceals himself nowhere, or, conversely, that, in a dramatic
work, the poet himself is nowhere to be found (Republic 3.393b10d1).
Rather, all literature, regardless of its formal characteristics, may be read
as the fictionalizing self-projection of its authors inner life. As we have
seen in Hermesianax, it is already possible by the early third century bce
to read the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod in this way, and the status
45
Cf. Jenkyns (1998) 155, who notes the instability of the fictional world of the Eclogues.
167
of literature as self-expression is examined from a variety of perspectives in

the work of Callimachus. It is, however, the bucolic poetry of Theocritus
that poses this question in its most compelling form. By creating a world
whose characters are self-evidently fictional, yet engaged in activities of
poetic composition that mirror those of their author, Theocritus makes
fictionality immediately legible as a form of self-projection. Moreover, by
staging his characters desire to belong to the bucolic world that, from the
readers point of view, they already inhabit, he demonstrates the recursive
effect of literary fiction, the desire that it creates in its readership to belong
to the worlds that it invents. This desire is thematized with particular clarity
in Idyll 7, where the narrator Simichidas, himself a bucolic poet, concludes
his autobiographical narration by attempting the imaginative gestures of
the fictional shepherd Lycidas. It is celebrated in the Lament for Bion,
where a central portion of the commemoration of the dead poet describes
his successful self-assimilation to the world of his own bucolic poetry. It
is given a critical turn in the Eclogues of Virgil and Calpurnius Siculus,
who introduce themselves as characters within the fictional worlds they
have created, but use this possibility to explore the limitations of a purely
fictional world for the development of selfhood when confronted with
the pressing demands of social and historical reality.46 In this way, bucolic
46
As in Virgils Eclogues, Calpurnius Siculus bucolic characters refer openly to contemporary events:
Ornytus in Eclogue 1 looks forward to an era of civic peace under Nero, who has just successfully
pleaded a case for the inhabitants of Troy (1.45), and Corydon in Eclogue 7 gives Lycotas his impressions of the vast wooden amphitheater he has witnessed at Rome (7.2372), and of the god-like
ruler in attendance (7.7984). Corydon elsewhere discusses with Meliboeus the appropriate style in
which to celebrate the present golden age and the god who rules over peoples, cities, and toga-clad
peace (4.58). Under a ruler favorably disposed to song, he hopes he may rival the divine Tityrus
whose pipes he has inherited (4.5872), and Meliboeus advises him to press the reeds which sang
woods worthy of a consul (4.7677). This citation of Virgils fourth Eclogue makes it clear that
Calpurnius reads Virgil himself in the Tityrus of Virgils first Eclogue, and he positions his own pastoral double as a successor to this courtly tradition: as Virgil sang of his patrons in pastoral disguise,
so Calpurnius will praise Nero in the guise of Corydon. Unlike Virgils fleeting identifications with
his characters, the figure of Corydon remains stable as a figure of the poet from one poem to the
next. However, as Newlands (1987) 21831 has shown, there is more to Calpurnius Eclogues than a
courtly masque in which the poet addresses an appeal for patronage to Romes current rulers. Rather,
the changing fortunes of a single major character allow Calpurnius to develop a subtle but sustained
critique of poetrys dependence upon courtly patronage, and of the pastoral fiction in which that
dependency is figured. In particular, the ambivalence about the countryside itself that appears in
Corydons extravagant praise of the amphitheater at Rome points to the limitations of the pastoral
world even as it reveals the value of the pastoral mode; the rustic poets innocent eye allows us to
once again see the city for the wonder of culture it truly is. The four Eclogues of Nemesianus (late
third century), transmitted with the text of Calpurnius, exhibit a formal variety that ranges among
the familiar types of bucolic poem, and so, at the end of the bucolic tradition, give its salient forms
in miniature. However, the poems make no reference to contemporary history, and their poet does
not appear in them in bucolic disguise. The two Einsiedeln Eclogues are too fragmentary to judge in
this respect.
168
poetry becomes a medium in which political developments hostile to the

free development of political subjects may be imagined and confronted.
This aspect of Roman bucolic poetry will particularly appeal to Renaissance pastoralists; the world of their poems offers a counterimage of the
times in which contemporary politics can be explored in bucolic costume,
and so perhaps resolved to the benefit of the society in which their bucolic
fiction is published.47 However, alongside this ability to function as a kind
of critical discourse, pastoral continues to register its appeal as a literary
paradise that is uniquely amenable to recreation in reality. For if its fictional
world looks attractive to us, we need look no further for a plan of action
than the fiction itself, as the herdsmen we encounter in its pages transform
themselves before our eyes in the image of the same bucolic fiction to which
we ourselves aspire. Pastoral sustains the hopes of mimetic desire more readily than other fictions, and it is as such that it finds its place in Cervantes
great reflection on this theme. For Don Quixote, acknowledging, at the
end of his adventures, that the world of the chivalric romance is beyond
him, appeals to Sancho with the image of a future life he has conceived in
a quite different genre:
As they pursued their journey talking in this way they came to the very same spot
where they had been trampled on by the bulls. Don Quixote recognised it, and said
he to Sancho, This is the meadow where we came upon those gay shepherdesses
and gallant shepherds who were trying to revive and imitate the pastoral Arcadia
there, an idea as novel as it was happy, in emulation whereof, if so be thou dost
approve of it, Sancho, I would have ourselves turn shepherds, at any rate for the
time I have to live in retirement. I will buy some ewes and everything else requisite
for the pastoral calling; and, I under the name of the shepherd Quixotize and thou
as the shepherd Panzino, we will roam the woods and groves and meadows singing
songs here, lamenting in elegies there, drinking of the crystal waters of the springs
or limpid brooks or flowing rivers. The oaks will yield us their sweet fruit with
bountiful hand, the trunks of the hard cork trees a seat, the willows shade, the roses
perfume, the widespread meadows carpets tinted with a thousand dyes; the clear
pure air will give us breath, the moon and stars lighten the darkness of the night
for us, song shall be our delight, lamenting our joy, Apollo will supply us with
verses, and love with conceits whereby we shall make ourselves famed for ever, not
only in this but in ages to come.48
47
48
Iser (1989) 75: This massive incursion of shepherds into the literature of the Renaissance cannot be
explained simply by a humanistic predilection for a rediscovered antiquity though this certainly
played its part; of far greater significance is the fact that Arcadian fiction offered a highly efficient
means of presenting contemporary problems in the reflection of their possible solutions. Patterson
(1987) traces the ideological afterlife of the Eclogues from Petrarch to the modern period.
Don Quixote II.67, Ormsby translation.
169
The knight who misses the object of his quest has failed to embody the
ideal to which he aspired, but the lover whose love has been rejected has
earned his admission to a world where suffering is merely the prelude to
pleasurable self-invention. The names that Quixote invents get the bucolic
project just right: they are fictionalizing, yet transparently so, so that the
transformation of the empirical self can be recognized in its fictional double.
Good cheer prevails here, because the pains its inhabitants have endured
in the real world are what allow them to imagine themselves as inhabitants
of a better one. Their delight in their imaginary existence outweighs the
misfortunes that provoked it, so that these latter-day pastoralists are worthy
successors of Theocritus and his fictional herdsmen.
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Index
Antimachus
Lyde 57
Apollonius of Rhodes 84
direct speech in 58
Aratus 14, 82
Archilochus 138, 148
Aristotle
and fiction 6, 91
Poetics 68, 12, 16, 21, 5658, 150,
153
Rhetoric 65
autobiography
form of 117, 137
poetics of 1921, 115, 138, 141
in bucolic poetry 149, 154
in Callimachus 14649, 167
in Theocritus 149, 167
in Theocritus scholia 15052,
154
deixis
in Callimachus 5355
in Euripides 5153
in Idyll 1 2628
in Menander 5153
Demetrius
On Style 51, 73
desire
erotic 18, 100, 105, 108, 123, 140
mimetic 18, 22, 114, 118, 127, 128, 141, 145,
16568
didactic poetry 14
truth claims in 14
drama
literary 1015, 16, 67, 92, 119
performed 10, 5053, 92
dramatic mode 11, 38, 49, 5357, 60, 72, 76, 82,
86, 114, 144
direct speech and 13, 17, 24, 5758, 72, 82
fictionality and 11, 8283
Callimachus
Aetia 12, 13, 14749
Epigram 2 14647
Hecale 12, 13
Hymn 1 (To Zeus) 58
Hymn 2 (To Apollo) 16, 5355
Hymn 4 (To Delos) 11
Iambi 147
narration in 13
Calpurnius Siculus 167
Cervantes
Don Quixote 16869
Chambers, Ross 16, 9596
ecphrasis
imagination and 2940
Euripides 56
Ion 5051
fiction
ancient theories of 69
bucolic and pastoral 2, 14, 21, 117, 141, 160,
168
comic 8, 13, 21
fantastic 2, 8, 1112, 21, 11516
postmodern 5, 21, 69, 142
realist 2, 8, 1215
fictional world 13, 9, 15, 17, 21, 54, 72, 81, 83, 91,
92, 118, 156, 158, 162, 16768
building of 28, 69, 156
ontology of 5, 15, 2021, 67, 70, 72, 142, 149,
15457, 162
presence of 46, 10, 11, 49, 60, 67, 72, 81, 91,
92
Dallenbach, Lucien 127

Daphnis 14, 15, 17, 152
as object of impersonation 100
in Idyll 1 4046
in Idyll 6 9697
Darger, Henry 18
In the Realms of the Unreal 35
181
182
Index
fictionality 9, 11, 22
degrees of 7
selfhood and 99100, 109, 11113, 115, 118, 128,
139, 14245, 154, 158, 16569
Genette, Gerard 59
genre 7, 9, 23, 46, 118, 150, 153
Girard, Rene 18, 127, 145
Heracles 8290, 13536
Hermesianax
Leontion 57, 11416, 118, 145, 148, 166
Herodas 13
Mimiambus 4 13
ecphrasis in 3435
Hesiod 14
Catalogue of Women 57, 115
Theogony 6, 117, 131, 13739, 141, 148, 157
Works and Days 82, 85
Homer 6, 8, 72
Longinus on 58, 114
Muses in 135
mythological examples in 65
Odyssey 12122, 137
representation of performance in 4748
rhapsodic performance of 49
scholia to 78, 59
Shield of Achilles in 38
Homeric Hymns 53, 58
imagination
and identification in bucolic song 68, 9394,
118, 128, 130, 140, 144, 150, 15859, 162
in dramatic performance 5053
in Idyll 1 2728, 3136, 40, 46
in Idyll 3 63
in Idyll 7 135, 140
in Idyll 11 7273, 7677
in Idyll 12 105, 107
impersonation 46, 67, 9394, 96100, 111,
14445, 152, 165
inspiration 14143, 14849
intertextuality 3, 9
Lament for Bion 21, 15558
fictional world of 15657
history in 15658
presence of poet in 15558
Longinus
On the Sublime 5859, 114, 148
Lycidas 1720, 87, 117, 12028, 13940, 154
Menander 8, 56
Dyskolos 5153
metafiction 21
mime 2, 11, 13, 54, 118

mimesis 2, 8, 9, 18, 21, 49, 57, 111, 16465
mise en abyme 38, 64, 12627
Munatius 21, 15354
myth 13, 6, 8, 1112, 1415
in Idyll 3 6566
in Lament for Bion 156
Nicander 14, 82
non-fiction 11, 14, 82
orality 4647
imagination and 4647
Palaikastro Hymn
mimesis in 49, 56
performance
of tragedy and New Comedy 50
representation of in bucolic poems 4142,
4448, 67, 80, 98, 124
Pessoa, Fernando 2021, 119
heteronym and autobiography in 20, 14144
Phanocles
Erotes 57
Pindar 6
Plato
Ion 49
Phaedrus 118, 127, 139
Republic 16, 5556, 82, 90, 11113, 166
Polyphemus 1417, 6882, 154
bucolic imagination of 79
comic tradition and 7071
in Idyll 6 96100
in Idyll 7 13536
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 39
Sophron 13, 118
Theocritus
Idyll 1 1417, 123, 12627, 131, 140, 151, 155, 159
dialogue in 2528
ecphrasis in 2840, 4548
song in 4048
Idyll 2 62, 110
Idyll 3 1618, 6067, 110, 129, 136, 151, 153, 160
deixis in 61
theatricality in 6163, 67
fictional world of 6264
myth in 6566
Idyll 4 151
Idyll 5 17, 22, 131
Idyll 6 17, 76, 94100, 152
framing in 94
interpreting dramatic situation of 95, 9899
Index
Polyphemus in 9596
impersonation in 96100
Idyll 7 1719, 87, 111, 11645, 151, 153, 157
and Virgils Eclogues 163, 166
as autobiography 11618, 13845, 167
description in 13234
fiction in 123
heteronyms in 14445
history in 117
imagination in 12426, 135, 14041
inspiration in 117, 119, 139, 141
Lycidas in 117, 12028, 139, 144, 145
miniaturization in 12627
mythical examples in 13436
presence of poet in 145, 154
Simichidas in 118, 12838
unique form of 119, 136
Idyll 8 22, 100, 152
Idyll 9 22, 100, 151
Idyll 10 7476, 87
Idyll 11 16, 6782, 109, 152, 166
framing in 68, 7273, 78
naming in 69
fictional revisionism and 6971
imaginary vision in 77, 79, 8082
Idyll 12 18, 22, 10011, 129, 154
comparisons in 10103
temporality in 10304, 10607

fantasy in 10708
speaker of 10910
world of 10910
Idyll 13 16, 22, 8290
framing in 82
narrative distance in 83, 8990
representation of speech in 8688
Idyll 14 13
Idyll 15 13
ecphrasis in 3435
Idyll 16 121
Idyll 22 58
Idyll 24 1112
Idyll 27 100
scholia to 21, 24, 2931, 33, 59, 15054
Theon 153
truth and falsehood
in early Greek poetry 6
Virgil
Aeneid 137, 166
Eclogues 22, 150, 15966
form of 16162
history in 15960, 166
presence of poet in 16067
Servius on 160, 16465
183

Mark Payne Theocritus and The Invention of Fiction 2007

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The bucolic Idylls of Theocritus are the first literature to invent a

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo

978-0-511-27408-4 eBook (EBL)

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

1 The pleasures of the imaginary

2 The presence of the fictional world

4 From fiction to metafiction

Conclusion: The future of a fiction

An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as Ecphrasis and Song in

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

No, shepherd, nothing doing.1

William Carlos Williams translation of Idyll 1.15; Williams (198688) II.268.

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

bucolic poems is not the least of these. By demonstrating so clearly in these

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

situations can be transported from preexisting fictional worlds into new

5 On the sources, see Bonesteel (2000) 29.

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

This is fictions version of creations primal scene. The invented world

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

to strict rules of possibility and necessity, they allow us to recognize general

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

literature simply works better as mimetic fiction, because there is so much

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

Direct speech is central to the production of fictional presence in ancient

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

held to be the mimes of Theocritus fellow Syracusan Sophron, and ancient

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

fabulous world of myth, even as particularly fabulous episodes from that

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

the interstices of mythical narratives the shield of Achilles in the Iliad,

Id. 1 arg., Wendel (1914) 23.

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Chambers (1984) 211, cf. 23.

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

alongside its reality effects that it is true creative autobiography (Pessoas

42 In particular, Lejeune (1989) and the essays collected in Olney (1980).

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Van Sickle (1976) 27, Alpers (1996) 153.

Hardie (2002) 21.

See Rossi (1971b).

Introduction: In the realms of the unreal

these elements are thematic, some formal, some ontological, and in no

The pleasures of the imaginary

Id. 1 arg. b, Wendel (1914) 23.

The pleasures of the imaginary

The repetition of , sweet, gives a clear structure to Thyrsis thought:

Donnet (1988) 160.

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction

Pans potential participation in the herdsmens musical exchanges marks

The pleasures of the imaginary

above then matches Thyrsis vision of harmonious musical rivalry with

The repetition of , sweet, gives a clear structure to Thyrsis thought:

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9, 5 6

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