Abstract
AbstractIn itself, the bucolic world may be elusive, but it is given shape and definition by what is at its margins. This chapter considers three poems that, in the Theocritean corpus as it has come down to us, perform this function of definition. Idyll 4 is set within the bucolic world but depicts that world as in the process of dissolution. Absence is not productive but destructive. In his absence at Olympia, Aigon’s cattle starve, bucolic song is replaced by racy court poetry and debased epinician, and sexuality is reduced to crude coupling. The contrast points up the values of a thriving bucolic world. Idyll 10 introduces the world of agricultural labor, where bucolic song is confronted with a work song. Idyll 21 features fishermen and the toil and poverty that condition their lives. Both offer contrasts with bucolic values: on the one hand, the necessity of labor to avoid starvation, no time for song except to accompany work, the gritty realities of subsistence; on the other hand, leisure for love and song, fantasy and imagination. Two opposite approaches to life.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Reference211 articles.
1. Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin. 2006. “Bucolic Singers of the Short Song: Lyric and Elegiac Resonances in Theocritus’ Bucolic Idylls.” In Fantuzzi and Papanghelis, 25–52.
2. Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin. 2012a. “Miniaturizing the Huge: Hercules on a Small Scale (Theocritus Idylls 13 and 24).” In Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception, edited by Manuel Baumbach and Silvio Bär, 245–257. Leiden: Brill.
3. Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin. 2012b. “Les Dioscures dans la poésie Alexandrine: Caractère et symbolique.” In Mythe et pouvoir à l’époque hellenistique, edited by C. Cusset, N. Le Meur-Weissman, and F. Levin, 155–169. Leuven: Peeters.
4. Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin. 2012c. “‘Nor When a Man Goes to Dionysus’ Holy Contests’ ” (Theocritus 17.112): Outlines of Theatrical Performance in Theocritus.” In Theater outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy, edited by Kathryn Bosher, 391–408. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.