Orpheus and the Reinvention of Bucolic Poetry

The anonymous Lament for Bion has been interpreted as a meditation on the end of the Greek bucolic tradition. The poem, however, does not merely receive bucolic poetry as a fixed genre. The Lament brings Orpheus into the genre as a mythical model for its hero, the bucolicized Bion. The poem further reinvents its generic context by figuring all Greek poetry as equivalent or subordinate to bucolic. The Lament thereby advances possibilities for renewing and continuing the bucolic tradition, which Virgil develops as central themes of the Eclogues by way of references to Orpheus and singers with Orpheus-like powers.