Abstract
AbstractThis chapter discusses absences from the spaces Theocritus constructs and their constitutive role in the production of song within the poems and of Theocritean poetry itself. Absence arouses eros, which by definition cannot be fulfilled and remain desire. And so herdsmen sing to their beloveds whom they cannot possess. Idyll 1 portrays the founding event of bucolic poetry as the death of its archetypal singer-hero, Daphnis, from unfulfilled love and the concomitant loss of complete harmony between humans and nature. Thyrsis, who sings about his death, seems to be trying to reconstitute Daphnis’s song without fully doing so, and the audience or reader is told that Thyrsis’s singing is sweet but cannot hear it because it is mediated by Theocritus. So the bucolic world and its music can never fully be grasped. The dynamics of absence and desire are also examined in Idylls 3, 7, and 6 and in the non-bucolic 2 and 13.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Reference211 articles.
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