Local Identity in the Bucolic Idylls of Theocritus Benjamin
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What the Shepherds Sing: Local Identity in the Bucolic Idylls of Theocritus Benjamin Beardsley Jasnow Charlottesville, VA MA University of Virginia, 2009 BA St. John’s College, Annapolis, 2004 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics University of Virginia August, 2014 Acknowledgements It is my great pleasure to thank those who have made this project possible. First and foremost, I owe an enormous and heartfelt debt of gratitude to my advisor, Jenny Strauss Clay. She has been a constant mentor and inspiration to me from my first days in graduate school, and I have benefited enormously from her depth of knowledge and literary sensibility in countless dissertation meetings, seminars and conversations over the years. Her wisdom, aid and encouragement have made my time at the University of Virginia a profoundly fulfilling experience. She has shown me what it means to be a scholar of literature. Coulter George has been a wonderful guide from the beginning of this project, not only for my chapter on dialect, for which his help was essential, but for the dissertation as a whole. He has been a constant fount of sound advice and insight, and his always perceptive feedback has shaped every page. I am extremely grateful to Tyler Jo Smith, who has been invaluable throughout. This dissertation is much better for her constant help and advice. Although she was technically the “outside reader” on this dissertation, that title is hardly sufficient. My great thanks as well to Jon Mikalson, who kindly joined my committee on short notice, and has always been a source of insight and a role model. It was for Jon Mikalson that I wrote my first seminar paper, on Pan in Theocritus. It seems fitting that the guide who led me through that first graduate project is also there at the finish. A number of people have been generous enough to read portions of this dissertation as it developed. I am very grateful to Alexander Sens, not only for his very useful comments on an early draft of Chapter 1, but for introducing me to Theocritus in the first place. It was my great good fortune to attend his seminar on Hellenistic poetry at Georgetown. My great thanks to Richard Hunter for his helpful comments on an early draft of Chapter 1. My thanks as well to John Dillery, who read an early version of Chapter 1 and who has always been an inspiration. I am grateful to all the members of the Classics Dissertation Working Group for their feedback on an early draft of Chapter 1. My time in the Department of Classics at the University of Virginia has been so enjoyable in large part because of my wonderful colleagues. I feel lucky to know everybody here, and I would like especially to thank Courtney Evans, Daniel Moore, Chris Caterine and Georgia Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi. I am so thankful for my family. One of the great benefits of being in Charlottesville has been the chance to stay close to home. I will never be able to repay the kindness, encouragement and support of my parents, to whom I owe everything. I have loved living close enough to my brother Daniel to see him with some frequency, and I cherish our conversations. My uncle Richard has been a role model from the beginning, and it is in large part because of him that I wanted to become a scholar. I will always be grateful to you all. The best thing about my time at the University of Virginia was meeting my wife, Gwen Nally. I am so grateful to you, Gwen, for being my friend, my inspiration, my constant conversational sparring partner, and the source of all my hope. I’ll see you at home. ii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Overview of Chapters 14 Chapter 1: The Near East, Nearby: Daphnis and the Origin of Greek Bucolic Poetry 16 Chapter 2: Idyll 1: Daphnis and the Poetics of Locale 68 Chapter 3: Great Books / Wives’ Tales: Polyphemus, the Idylls and Local Identity 122 Chapter 4: Kunstsprache for the Common Man: Language and Identity in the Doric Idylls 178 Conclusion 231 Works Cited 236 iii Introduction The physical setting of the bucolic Idylls is about as different as could be from the Alexandrian cityscape to which much of Theocritus’ audience must have been accustomed. Hellenistic Alexandria was a bustling port, a city full of people but home to none—everybody was from somewhere else, and there were lots of them; in Idyll 15 Gorgo and Praxinoa barely avoid being trodden underfoot by strangers. If Alexandria is the place where everyone has gone, the world of the bucolics feels like the place that everyone has left. But if you do come across one of the few others who are out in the pastures, they belong there, because their work ties them to the land. As often as not, you know their name: they may be strange, but they are not often strangers. The dissonance between the realities of cosmopolitan existence and a remote, idealized countryside is one of the pervading features of the bucolic Idylls, which allows Theocritus to focus on a new narrative space: a local, popular point of view that is far removed from the urbane culture of the day, but at the center of its own sphere. This study investigates the techniques that Theocritus uses to create this local, popular vantage and endow it with cultural meaning, with a special focus on the Idylls that feature the landscape and mythology of Sicily (1, 6, 11). But I would like to begin by discussing Idyll 7, which acts as a guide to Theocritus’ literary audience, since it is about a self-professedly urbane, cosmopolitan man venturing into bucolic territory. The reader follows the poet-narrator of the Idyll, Simichidas, as he leaves the thriving Hellenistic port of Cos and goes beyond the city wall and into a rustic world, with its herders and agricultural festivals, and its way of life that persists more or less as it always has done, even as the nearby city becomes increasingly diverse and globalized, closely linked to the 1 hub of Alexandria not only by trade, but by the personal affection of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was born there. Idyll 7 begins with our narrator Simichidas setting the scene for the story he is about to tell us (1-9): Ἦς χρόνος ἁνίκ’ ἐγών τε καὶ Εὔκριτος εἰς τὸν Ἅλεντα εἵρπομες ἐκ πόλιος, σὺν καὶ τρίτος ἄμμιν Ἀμύντας. τᾷ Δηοῖ γὰρ ἔτευχε θαλύσια καὶ Φρασίδαμος κἀντιγένης, δύο τέκνα Λυκωπέος, εἴ τί περ ἐσθλόν χαῶν τῶν ἐπάνωθεν ἀπὸ Κλυτίας τε καὶ αὐτῶ Χάλκωνος, Βούριναν ὃς ἐκ ποδὸς ἄνυε κράναν εὖ ἐνερεισάμενος πέτρᾳ γόνυ· ταὶ δὲ παρ' αὐτάν αἴγειροι πτελέαι τε ἐύσκιον ἄλσος ὕφαινον χλωροῖσιν πετάλοισι κατηρεφέες κομόωσαι. Once long ago, I and Eucritus strolled out from the city, down to Haleis; and Amuntas came too, our third. For they were giving first fruits to Deo [Demeter], Phrasidamus and Antigenes, Lycopeus' two boys, if aught noble remains of the good men of old, stock of Clytia and Chalcon himself, Chalcon who set the spring Bourina flowing with his foot, having thrust his knee well upon the rock. There poplars and elms wove a shrouded grove, bowing together with flourishing green leaves.1 Simichidas’ journey away from the city (ἐκ πόλιος, 2) to the private harvest festival is also a journey into the bucolic world, as Theocritus indicates by placing the special emphasis upon the the ancestors of Phrasidamus and Antigenes, the brothers who will host the celebration. Not only were Clytia and Chalcon members of the royal family that founded Cos, but Theocritus also appears to connect them to bucolic poetry. It was Chalcon who created the Bourina, a spring that serves as a metaphor for bucolic inspiration, as is clear not only from its etymology (Bourina/boucolicos), but also by the similarity of its aition to that of Hippocrene, said to have been created when Pegasus struck the earth with his hoof. It is near Hippocrene that Callimachus situated Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses.2 The setting of Bourina, as Simichidas describes it, 1 Translations are my own unless marked otherwise. 2 Call. fr. 2 Harder=4 Massimilla; Hunter (1999) 154. Cf. [Asclepiades] Anth. Pal. 9.64. 2 sounds very much like a locus amoenus: a luxuriant grove of flourishing elms and poplars cast their shade upon the new spring. By emphasizing that the family of his hosts was connected from an early date to the bucolic world, Simichidas also implicitly connects the destination of his country walk with bucolic poetry. The narrator’s journey away from the city, through the countryside to the Thalysia is a passage into an old pastoral world.3 What happens next very much fulfils these bucolic expectations. As Simichidas and his friends make their way through the deserted backcountry of Cos, they encounter a goatherd named Lycidas, whose reputation for skill at the syrinx is already known to Simichidas (27-29). Yet our city-dwelling narrator is strangely unintimidated. After all, Simichidas is himself a poet, as he proves by dropping the names of two fashionable Hellenistic luminaries, Asclepiades and Philitas and bragging about his own poetic skill (37-41). What follows is a familiar scene from elsewhere in the bucolic Idylls, in which the two men exchange songs of a suitably (though not purely) pastoral character (52-127). After the singing is done, Lycidas bestows his staff upon Simichidas, in a scene that reimagines the Hesiodic Dichterweihe for a bucolic context (128- 129).4 Now the two bucolic singers, the one of longstanding repute, the other just now confirmed as such, part ways.