From the Idylls of Theocritus

Theocritus (mid-third century BC) was famous in antiquity as the inventor of pastoral. We infer from his poems—and ancient biographies agree—that he was a native of Syracuse and spent much of his life on Cos. At some point he may have visited Alexandria, where he obtained the patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and could have met Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes; certainly he knew their work, they knew his, or both. Most scholars believe Theocritus was the youngest of the group, but the chronology is in doubt and priority unprovable.

No one knows why Theocritus’s poems should be the only ones in Greek called “idylls” (eidyllia, “little types”)—“eclogues” (“short pieces, selections”) is the Latin word. What is clear is that his importance, for us as for the ancients, lies in his status as the father of pastoral, or “bucolic” (from Greek boukolos, “cowherd” or “herdsman”). Yet the genre (or mode) he invented is not easy to define, and his own output is more varied than we might at first expect. All of his poems are “idylls,” but not every idyll is bucolic, as Idyll 2 is not. Many of them, including those selected here, are “mimes” (mini-plays), a genre invented by his Sicilian countryman Herodas. Many, like Idyll 11, make use of narrative frames, in the manner of Plato’s dialogues. Like most of the idylls, 1 and 11 are set on Sicily, while 2 (like Idyll 7) takes place on Cos. The temporal setting is similarly varied: 1 and 2 belong to a timeless and idealized landscape, 11 is set in the mythical past, and others (like 7) take place in the present. The poetry simultaneously invites and resists generalization; it was only in the poetry of his epigones that features of Theocritus’s work crystallized to generic conventions.

Pastoral is not a lyric form. It’s a sophisticated literary hybrid, with an epic meter and a dramatic structure wrapped around a lyric core. It’s also a highly stylized representation of a rustic song culture which Theocritus may have experienced directly in the real third-century Sicilian countryside. What he made of it has enjoyed enormous influence, starting in the Renaissance; for centuries, pastoral was a sort of rite of passage for major poets, from Spenser in The Shepheardes Calender to Frost in North of Boston. This is due less to the influence of the Idylls than the Eclogues of Vergil, Theocritus’s greatest imitator. If pastoral’s long afterlife has rendered some of its features a little shopworn, we might remind ourselves that, when Theocritus was writing his idylls, nothing like them existed in Greek. I find his poems no less strange, mysterious, artful, allusive, witty, humane, and moving, for having replaced Archaic nobleness with Hellenistic subtlety.

IDYLL 1

Thyrsis:

It’s sweet, goatherd, this whispering of the pine,musical here by the springs; your piping, too,is sweet. It’s only Pan who could outpipe you.Let’s say he takes the horned goat for first prize;then you, in second place, would get the nanny.Or, if he takes the nanny, the kid’s yours.Before you milk them, kids are tasty eating.

Goatherd:

Well, your songs, shepherd, run sweeter than the waterthat sluices echoing over that rock and down.If the Muses choose the ewe, the stall-fed lambwould fall to you; but if they want the lamb,you could choose next and claim the mama sheep.

Thyrsis:

By all the Nymphs, won’t you sit down right here,on this grass slope under the tamarisks,and pipe us something while I watch your goats?

Goatherd:

No, no, I can’t. All piping is forbiddenat noon. It’s Pan that scares me. Noon is when,hot from the hunt, he rests. And Pan is cranky,with nostrils quick to flare when he gets angry. But, Thyrsis, sing the “Suffering of Daphnis”;you’re a true master of the country song.Come, let’s sit over there, beneath the elms,facing Priapus and the Nymphs, and nearthe oaks and the shepherd...