The Origins of Daphnis
Proceedings of the Virgil Society 21 (1993) 65-79 ©1993
The Origins of Daphnis
Virgil's Eclogues and the Ancient Near East
Daphnis is a figure of whom it is difficult to find the measure: we have the uncomfortable feeling, wherever we meet him, that the simple card board cut-out shepherds who lament for him from time to time such as Moeris or Lycidas or Thyrsis know far more about him than we do, and that it is difficult to account for him entirely in terms of the scattered Greek and Latin mentions of his name. In trying to trace some coherence behind his enigmatic appearances I hope to restore him to a context where he can shed more light on the background of the Eclogues as a whole. We meet Daphnis in Eclogues 5, 7 and 8 and 9, and he is implied in Eclogue 10. In the first of these Mopsus sings of the lament of the nymphs for Daphnis, the laments of his mother, nature, and the country gods, the wasting of nature, and Daphnis' own epitaph (43 £):
'Daphnis ego in siluis, hinc usque ad sidera notus formonsi pecoris custos, formonsior ipse'.
Menalcas replies with an apotheosis of Daphnis: peace in the country side, Pan, Shepherds and Dryads, country rejoicing, singings and prancings. Daphnis has a more conventional role in Eclogue 7, where he invites Meliboeus to attend the traditional rustic singing-match be tween Corydon and Thyrsis. He also forms the content of Alphesiboeus' song in Eclogue 8: magical rites to summon back an unresponsive lover from the town with the repeated line
ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin.
The ashes, presumably of Daphnis' love, rekindle at last on the altar and Daphnis himself returns. The mourning for Daphnis seems to offer the
65 GRAHAM ANDERSON background to the mourning for Gallus in Eclogue 10, though here Daphnis himself is not mentioned by name. So who was Daphnis? And how does Virgil's handling of him fit into the overall picture? The mentions of his name in classical literature outside Virgil are frustratingly meagre: Theocritus provides further co ordinates, and it is both conventional and inevitable to link Virgil's version with the Daphnis of Theocritus Idyll 1 in particular. Here how ever there is a different dimension that Virgil seems to have ignored or suppressed: here too Daphnis is dying (in a song by Thyrsis), and is attended in succession by Hermes, the pastoral crew, Priapus, and Aphrodite; but the last accuses him (97 f., 100-104):
KeXfTe 'TV QT\V rbv "Epurra Ka.Teixeo< Ad4>vi, Xuyi£etv ?j p' OUK avrbs "EpcoTos" im-' dpyaXew eXuyLx&ns";'— TCLV 8' Spa X" Ad
And she said, 'So you boasted, Daphnis, that you would master love, now have you not yourself been mastered by bitter love?' Daphnis replied to her: 'Oppressive Love, vindictive love, love hateful to mortals, for already do you claim that all my suns have set? Even in Hades Daphnis will be a pain to love.'
Theocritus' account leaves particular ambiguity over the death of Daphnis, and Aphrodite's reaction to it (1.138 ff.)
rbv 8' 'A
Aphrodite wanted to raise him; but all his thread from the Fates had run out, and Daphnis 'went river'.
There seems to be general consensus that Daphnis has drowned, though that is by no means the only possibility. Otherwise Daphnis' appear ances are fugitive: a pastoral drama, Sositheus' Lityerses, in which
66 THE ORIGINS OF DAPHNIS
Daphnis was apparenty rescued by Heracles, a tale of amorous misad venture found chiefly in Aelian's Varia Historia 10.18,2 and perhaps most frustrating of all, Longus' Pastoral Romance Daphnis and Chloe. Aelian's tale gives a glimpse of a larger background:
Daphnis the cowherd some say was the lover of Hermes, others his son: he took his name from the following cirumstances: he was the offspring of a nymph, and was laid at birth in a laurel. They say that the cows he herded were the cattle of the sun, which Homer mentions in the Odyssey. And while Daphnis was grazing them in Sicily, a nymph fell in love with him and slept with him—he was good-looking and young and growing his first beard, ...and she made an agreement that he would sleep with no-one else, and told him that he was fated to lose his sight if he broke it. And they made an agreement over this with one another. Later a king's daughter fell in love with him, and when drunk he broke the agreement and slept with her: hence bucolic songs were first sung and had as their content his suffering over his eyes.
The background of Daphnis is widened by a note of Servius ad Eel. 8.68: The name of Daphnis' love is given here as Pimplea: when she is captured by pirates he searches the whole world for her and finds her in Phrygia as a slave to king Lityerses, who challenges visitors to a reaping contest and then kills the losers. Heracles frees Daphnis from this danger by beheading the king, restoring Pimplea, and giving them the royal palace as a wedding gift. Longus' novel seems to draw on both these situations—the amorous oath and an episode of (rather more trivial) kidnap and rescue. Daphnis is a foundling, exposed as in Aelian, and suckled this time by a goat and made a goatherd. He makes a compact of everlasting fidelity with Chloe, which he swears by Pan and Chloe's sheep. Again he seems to break the compact by accident, when an older woman initiates him under a pretext of instruction from the nymphs; but there is no punishment by Chloe, who never finds out. And he has an adventure in which Chloe is kid napped by pirates of a sort and Pan, not Heracles, comes to the rescue; the tale ends, not as in Servius' outline with a royal palace, but certainly with a rise in the social world and a marriage of the couple.
67 GRAHAM ANDERSON
What then do we have? A tragic and a comic tradition, which need not be incompatible. Daphnis is the epicentre of the pastoral world: his life is marred by tragic amorous adventure, followed by death and resurrec tion. That Daphnis was indeed a rustic deity in Sicily is also attested: this is not the wishful thinking of Menalcas' ditty, but is reported in both Diodorus (4.84) and Servius ad Eel. 5.20. The tradition also leaves room for a number of episodes in the life of the divine shepherd, and a number of variants of some of them. It seems clear enough that Daphnis should be regarded as what anthropologists would call a culture-hero: he presides over, or in some cases introduces, skills essential to or characteristic of mankind, in this case the art of pastoral song itself;3 and as so often he pays for such precocity sooner or later with a tragic end: one thinks of Orpheus, of the Scythian Anacharsis, or of the account of Aesop's death in the Life of Aesop. Is there any particular culture-hero to which he can be related?
DUMUZI-DAPHNIS? Since the rise of Ancient Near Eastern studies in the nineteenth century it has at least been plausibly suspected that Theocritus' Daphnis did not spring fully-formed from the head of a Hellenistic poet. The religious evidence that the Ancient Near Eastern archetype of a dying pastoral or vegetation-god underlay a cult of Daphnis was easily accepted, if per haps over-confidently elaborated, by students of ancient religion and folklore.4 But the possibility of its application to Virgil was hampered by the literary conviction of ancient authorities and their successors, that Theocritus was the founder of Pastoral and could have no significant predecessor.5 Only in the 'seventies and 'eighties of this century has this conviction been challenged with any real hope of success. We now at least have a sufficiently large battery of Sumerian texts relating to a dying and renewing pastoral god to suggest to us a larger framework for Daphnis and his companions.6 The texts relate the relationships of Dumuzi and his consort Inanna, and the enlarged Dumuzi-cycle goes like this:
Dumuzi and Inanna fall in love and marry in a sacred mar riage rite: Inanna makes a misadventure into the underworld,
68 THE ORIGINS OFDAPHNIS
from which Dumuzi fails to retrieve her; in revenge for his apparent indifference she sends him down to the underworld as her substitute; the resultant mourning of the natural world brings about a compromise: he is to spend half his time in the underworld, and half with his sister Gestinanna. (Other sepa rate pastoral texts seem to fit in to the first part of this pattern, most notably a wooing contest between Dumuzi and the farmer Enkimdu for Innana herself.)
But it is in the details of the mourning of Dumuzi that we come closest to the territory of the First Idyll and the Fifth Eclogue:7
Your small kids weep bitterly in the feeding-pen, Your motherless lambs [utter] bitter cries at the wall's encompassing base. Why does your little sister, overtaken by their weeping, utter supplications in their midst! Your dog utters bitter cries in the desolate steppe. Your spouse, the holy Inanna, weeps bitterly in her house which (descended) from heaven stands on the earth Your noble sister Gestinanna, By the gate of Lugalbanda, By the Boulevard of Ninsun, Rends her rent sinews, rips out her hair... On that day the queen did not save his life, she gave him over to the land of no return as her substitute, The spouse of Usumgalanna (i.e. Inanna) did not save his life, she gave him over as her substitute.
The connexion, if any, between the Dumuzi-cycle and Daphnis has nonetheless been difficult to establish to the satisfaction of everyone. Attempts are still made to marginalise Sumerian texts as remote or barely relevant to classical literature. But this resistance is increasingly misplaced. For we know that Dumuzi is at least closely related to an oriental mystery that had not only already found its way into Western consciousness, but was actually known to Theocritus himself. Dumuzi was the Babylonian Tammuz, a matter of no dispute; Tammuz was in turn identified in antiquity, by St Jerome among others, with Adonis.8
69 GRAHAM ANDERSON
And who but Theocritus presents us with the spectacle of Alexandrian women enthusing over the sacred myth of Adonis {Idyll 15)? Is it merely coincidence that Theocritus also presents us with the first extant texts relating to Daphnis as well? Adonis is mentioned in Theocritus Idyll 1 as separate from but parallel to Daphnis as a victim of Aphrodite; but it is not excluded that he is being made parallel to a doublet of himself.9 Adonis' cult-myth is very similar to that of the Tammuz-Dumuzi deity with which the classical world tends to identify him. The young Adonis has been handed over to Persephone for safe-keeping; because of his beauty she refuses to give him up to Aphrodite, who disputes for him in front of Zeus; the latter determines that he spend a third of his time on his own, a third with Persephone, the rest with Aphrodite. Thus Apollodorus' version based on Panyassis, before adding the contradic tory detail of the killing by the boar as if it were a sequel rather than an alternative {Bibl. 3.14.4). Christian versions beginning with Aristides' Apology 3 put the division of his life after the death in the hunt. This sequence accords in some respects better with the new Sumerian ver sion: in the now near-complete text of Inanna's Descent the goddess goes down to the underworld; having got Dumuzi to go down as her substi tute, then missed him, she decrees that he shall spend half of his time with his sister Gestinanna, half with Ereshkigal in the Underworld.10 There is no correspondence in the Sumerian literature known to me to the boar-hunt episode—for obvious geographical reasons: Southern Meso potamia is not boar-hunting country.
DUMUZI, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, AND SOSITHEUS We can also note two further routes to the understanding of Daphnis. Some years ago attention was drawn to a number of resemblances between Dumuzi and Inanna material and Daphnis and Chloe:11 these cover an assortment of pastoral and not-so-pastoral situations, includ ing kidnap, attempts at sexual initiation, pastoral contests, bridal adorn ment, and even a fleeting allusion in Daphnis and Chloe to death and resurrection (3.4). All such situations thus belong to the larger Daphnis- tradition: combined with the death-resurrection kernel in Virgil and Theocritus, they form a substantial body of common material (see ap pendix below). Such correspondences have struck some classicists not so
70 THE ORIGINS OFDAPHNIS much as implausible but rather as inevitable consequences of marrying a novel plot to a pastoral background. None the less some at least seem very specific, as when there is the prospect of an overnight visit of the swain with the approval of the girl's parents:12
'Come in shepherd, Ishtar's lover, Spend the night here, Shepherd, Ishtar's lover, At your entering my father is delighted with you. My mother Ningal invites you to recline. She offers you oil in a bowl'... the women divided up the mirsu-cake in a bowl .. .loosen, loosen your sandals .. .unpack your fowling-nets .. .we shall eat, o lusty one'...
The disjointed impression of this Akkadian text inclines its editor to think that Ishtar is musing on a desirable but highly improbable pros pect—a visit by Tammuz to her parents' house; and that later in the text she can only manage platitudes when she meets him again at the pasture.13 We are certainly in the same territory as the winter scene in Daphnis and Chloe, where Daphnis is quite unexpectedly invited by the delighted parents of Chloe to spend the night, unloads the birds he has been fowling (not with nets, in this instance), then shares in a bowl of wine and a meal of honey-cakes.14 In both texts there is a hint that the swain bearing gifts may be taken as a nuisance;15 Daphnis (not Chloe) this time does the musing about what is likely to happen if he he is too forward, and his courage fails him in the event; in the end it is chance that brings about the meeting. Even if the 'psychological' reading of the Akkadian text proves to be wrong, nonetheless the parallels of situation and content are difficult to argue away. Nor is Daphnis and Chloe the only other point of contact with the world of Sumer and Akkad. The story of Lityerses seems to form an entirely undetected link between the two cultures. In Theocritus he appears as an expert reaper, the subject of a reaping-song (Idyll 10); in Sositheus' pastoral drama Lityerses he has kidnapped Daphnis' lover Pimplea or Thalia ('Plenty', 'Growth': cf. Chloe), and challenges all comers to a deadly reaping contest.16 Only Heracles is able to restore Pimplea to Daphnis by cutting off Lityerses' head and giving them the
71 GRAHAM ANDERSON royal palace (with its considerable wealth, presumably, since Lityerses was a son of Midas). It is a good deal more difficult to replicate this series of relationships by chance than it is to re-invent stereotyped pastoral situations of the normal kind. Yet we have a Sumerian Epic text which appears to do just that. In Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta11 the latter, the villain of the piece, wants Inanna as his patron; her brother Enmerkar, Dumuzi's brother-in-law, wants the wealth of Aratta to adorn her storehouse in Erech, her own and Dumuzi's city. The Lord of Aratta receives grain from Erech, but refuses to pay its people any of his wealth; he then heaps up a grain mountain of his own, and chal lenges Erech to a contest of champions. When the champion at last appears, he is wearing a lion costume; within a few (missing) lines Aratta is forced to pay up with its wealth for Inanna's temple-house in Erech.18 Even without our prior knowledge of a Sumerian Heracles- figure (the god Ninurta with his series of similar labours, for one, and possibly Gilgamesh for another),19 we have here a competition in which a grain-baron is evidently defeated by a lion-coated combatant, with Inanna's principal seat as the bone of contention. Thanks evidently to the lion-costumed champion, her chief shrine and storehouse, furnished at the expense of Aratta, is to be in Dumuzi's city of Erech. It is very difficult to explain such a parallel away, even although the Sumerian text seems to set the whole business as a rational series of diplomatic exchanges over what is really an economic and religious dispute, while the Greek outline is merely another swash-buckling adventure of Heracles. And Daphnis is on the verge of the one, Dumuzi of the other. Two aspects of the family relationships of Dumuzi and Daphnis are also relevant. The Sumerian genealogy which underlines the Sacred Marriage Texts has Dumuzi as son of Enki, the trickster-god who also assigns roles at creation; in Aelian's account Daphnis is son of Hermes, the Greek trickster-god with a similar function.20 Secondly, Dumuzi is brother-in-law of Utu, the sun-god, and at one point reminds the latter that he supplies milk and cream to Utu's mother Ningal's house. Accord ing to Aelian again, Daphnis looked after the cattle of Apollo.21 These functions are not necessarily identical: not all herdsmen need double as milkmen, even in the simplest societies; but they are equally obviously convergent. There is real continuity here, just as surely as there is in Aelian's story of Gilgamos (HA 12.21). On the strength of arguments of some very different kinds of similarity, and the diffusion of the Tammuz-
72 THE ORIGINS OF DAPHNIS
Adonis cult-legends,22 it seems legitimate to accept that Dumuzi really has persisted into the Greek world, and that the pastoral world becomes less original and autonomous the more texts become available and are better understood. There are several consequences for Virgil: that he can be drawing on knowledge of the character of Daphnis outside Theocritus also (just as he seems to know an extra-Theocritean Daphnis cult in Sicily). This seems to be happening at two points. As is well known, Theocritus does not include the apotheosis of Daphnis, which however appears in Virgil Eclogue 5.56 f.:
Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi.. .Daphnis.
The episode is known to Sumerian myth, though not in the Dumuzi cycle as we currently know it: in the story of Adapa we have this traveller encountering Dumuzi as one of the guardian-gods of heaven.23 He has ended in the right place. A second resemblance is in Eclogue 8. There a girl is practising magic in order to attract Daphnis back from the town; in Theocritus Idyll 2 on which Virgil particularly closely models this eclogue the young errant lover is called Delphis. In the context of the Dumuzi material Virgil's change is not gratuitous: Dumuzi has magic practised against him by his implacable enemies—sorcerer-shepherds:24
They [the sorcerers of Arali] were seven... They are those who know (how to practise) witchcraft in heaven, who [know] (how to practise) witchcraft on earth, In heaven they stretch for him the gu-bad-Du... On earth they stretch for him the gu-bad-Du. and at this point in his career, just on the point of his death, Inanna herself can be suspected as behind it. Since 1970 we have had available an Old Akkadian version of the Theocritus and Virgil scenario, though one not involving Tammuz: a short composition, probably but not cer tainly in dialogue, in which a magician practises love-magic on an unwilling lover—this time a girl—for a male client; and again by the end of the composition the lover's prospects seem to be improving as the binding magic takes effect.25
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One also notes the tragic pessimistic quality of much of the Sumerian Dumuzi-material; such an ethos is also present in the tragic realism so characteristic of the Eclogues in a way that it is not in Theocritus. One thinks in particular of the plight of Meliboeus in Eel. 1.12-15:
en ipse capellas protenus aeger ago; hance etiam uix, Tityre, duco hie inter densas corulos modo namque gemellos, spem gregis, a, silice in nuda conixa reliquit; or again of the enforced possession of Moeris' small-holding and the threats of military force in Eel. 9. A further attraction of the Dumuzi blueprint is that it gives a number of convenient explanation of Theocritus' puzzling phrase e(3a poou:26 there are several episodes in Dumuzi-literature which give Dumuzi a death by water: the simplest is one in which Dumuzi swims for his life and the frantic Inanna is cheering him on on the bank. But in the end he does not make it; in this version he is explicitly carried down to Hades by the stream.27 In the version implied in Dumuzi's Dream the murderers and kidnapppers come to Dumuzi by water,28 and presumably are ex pected to take him back that way, though the composition ends with their despoiling of the sheepfold and the dairy. On their own merits the resemblances between the Theocritean and Virgilian Daphnis and the Sumerian Dumuzi have much to commend them: in both cases the arch-patron of the pastoral world dies after breaking his fidelity to the sex-goddess or a nymph; a renewal is ar ranged and some kind of resurrection takes place. Theocritus had access at least to a by-form of the Tammuz myth in Alexandria; the extra- Theocritean parts of Longus, the Daphnis vulgate and Virgil also show features which have counterparts in Dumuzi or Dumuzi-related texts, but which are not used by Theocritus. By Virgil's time the channels of communication with Eastern cults had expanded, and the Alexandrian fashion for dealing with aspects of their myths had not abated: as well as Bion's Lament for Adonis the intervening centuries had seen Calvus' Zmyrna, dealing with the legend of Adonis' mother, as well as Catullus' Attis poem, on a cult-legend similar in nature and origin to that of Adonis himself. Against such a background we cannot afford to dismiss these materials as so remote geographically and chronologically from
74 THE ORIGINS OF DAPHNIS the classical world as to be meaningless and inaccessible. Wilfred Lam bert of the University of Birmingham has published a Tammuz lament in Neo-Babylonian of Hellenistic date ('In the reign of Seleucus and Antiochus'), which in effect brings the availability of this material as a living heritage over a millenium forward: it takes up at the topos of the deities mourning the dying god in turn:29
The daughter of Uruk wept, the daughter of Akkad was lamenting, The face of the daughter of Larkar was enveloped in her garment, The goddess of Hursagkamaam wept, who was deprived of her spouse.
Ishtar was still lamenting Tammuz in Akkadian in the age of Theocritus himself.
The prospect of connexion between Virgil's material and the Ancient Near East, then, deserves to be kept under review. It is worth noting two features in Virgil outside the Eclogues which also have Sumero-Akkadian analogues. One of the most memorable moments in Aeneid 6 includes the simile of the birds (310 ff.), as a term of comparison to the occupants of the underworld:
aut ad terram gurgite ab alto quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus trans pontum fugat et terris immittit apricis.
Compare a moment in the tradition ofGilgamesh and the Nether World: 30
He looks at me and leads me to the house of darkness, to the dwelling of Irkalla, To the house from which he who enters never goes forth On the road whose path does not lead back, To the house whose occupants are bereft of light; where dust is their food and clay their sustenance, Where they are clad like birds with garments of wings.
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Compare also the death of Palinurus, Aen. 6.341 f.:
quis te, Palinure, deorum eripuit nobis medioque sub aequore mersit?
Gilgamesh for his part asks Enkidu, his informant at the underworld:31
'He who [fell?] from the mast, hast thou seen him?' 'I have seen him'
'He whose body lies unburied on the steppe, hast thou seen him?' 'I have seen him; His spirit does not rest in the underworld.'
In the latter case the unburied corpse and drowned sailor seem to be separate figures, and such motifs in isolation one would be only too willing to explain away, if only as Virgilian invention. But in the light of what has gone before we should perhaps be a little more cautious.
It seems that Inanna does not make the journey all the way to Virgil: vindictive love is missing from Virgil's Daphnis. But vindictive ladies sometimes with underworld connexions threatening their lovers with deadly companions do appear in Alexandrian-influenced Latin poetry. When Inanna comes up from the nether world looking for a substitute, various deities give her deference, but Dumuzi sits on his exalted throne in indifference; she tells the galla-demons to take him down to the world below; he pleads ineffectually for his life.32 One remembers the errant Propertius arrested by the Cupid-police (2.28), and threatened with death till he submits to returning to Cynthia. Or Cynthia herself in 4.8, back unexpectedly from the katabasis-ritual at Lanuvium, raging and ready to impose her will once more on the cringing Propertius, caught on the couch with the competition. The first is of course a fantasy, the second has the authentic touch of a realistic stormy relationship. But their ancestry may yet turn out longer than we think.
University of Kent at Canterbury GRAHAM ANDERSON
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APPENDIX: DUMUZI AND DAPHNIS
The following table is intended only as a brief and convenient synopsis of some relevant parallels between Dumuzi and Daphnis. As far as possible it follows the order of Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, by far the longest continuous Daphnis-text.
Dumuzi: Daphnis: Son of trickster-god Enki (Kramer- Son of trickster-god Hermes (Aelian) Wolkstein xi)
Shepherd Shepherd/herdsman
Brother-in-law of Utu the sun, whose Looks after cattle of Apollo (Aelian) mother Dumuzi supplies with milk (Inanna's Descent)
Contest for marriage with Inanna Contest for affections of Chloe (D&C 1.16) (Dumuzi and Enkimdu)
Captured by demons arriving by water Captured by pirates arriving by sea {D&C (Dumuzi's Dream) 1.28)
Rapist Shukalletuda killed but commemo Chloe's would-be rapist Dorcon killed, but rated in song (Inanna and Shukalletuda) his music lives on in Chloe's piping (D&C 1.29 f.)
Attempt to remove Inanna to Aratta Attempt to remove Chloe to Methymna (Enmerkar and Ensukeshdanna) (D&C 2.20-30)
Deposit of two grain-heaps in Aratta, one Daphnis' girl Pimplea/Thalia restored af from Erech, the other from Aratta itself; ter reaping-competition by champion quarrel as to whether Inanna is to aban Heracles (Sositheus) don Aratta for Erech; competition settled by champion in lion costume (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta)
Invitation to Dumuzi as fowler to spend Invitation to Daphnis as fowler to spend night at her parents' house (Akkadian night at Chloe's parents house (D&C 3.6- Ishtar-text) 11)
Demonstrates copulating animals to a girl Demonstrates copulating animals to a girl (in this case his sister Gestinanna) (CT (Chloe) (D&C 3.14) 15.28 f.)
Love scene by apple tree (BM 88318) Love scene by apple tree (D&C 3.33 f.)
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Row over parentage (ANET, 3rd edn. 637) Row over parentage (D&C 3.25 f.)
Marriage with Inanna Marriage with Chloe
Victim of erotic magic (New Sumerian Victim of erotic magic (Virgil Eel. 8) death text)
Dies because of indifference to Inanna Dies in circumstances of enmity to (Inanna's Descent) Aphrodite (Theocritus Id. 1)
'Death by water* 'Death by water" (ibid.)
General mourning General mourning
Stands at entrance to heaven (Adapa-Text) Stands at entrance to heaven (Virgil Eel. 5)
NOTES 1. The following titles are referred to by author's surname only: W. Berg, Early Virgil (London 1974); D.M. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven 1983) 85-117; id., The Forebears of Daphnis', TAPhA 113 (1983B) 183-200. For the Eclogues I have used the text of R. Coleman, (Cambridge 1977), for Theocritus that of Gow (Oxford 1958). 2. Aelian relates his evidence at least in part to Stesichorus; similar tradition probably from Timaeus' Sikelika in Diodorus 4.84 and Parthenius 29. Cf. Dover (commentary, Basingstoke and London 1971) ad Theocritus 1.64-145. 3. A particular feature of culture-heroes is that they tend to establish or show knowledge of the calendar, seasons, stars and the like. Aesop solves a calendar riddle for the Pharaoh in the so-called Life of Aesop; soon after he is killed. We perhaps have a hint of such a situation in Eclogue 9.46, Daphni, quid antiquos signorum suspicis ortus?, suggesting that the master-shepherd Daphnis is a student of the constellations. 4. Notably in the celebrated treatment in Section IV of Frazer's The Golden Bough (Adonis, Attis, Osiris), 3rd edn 1912. On the problem of Dumuzi/Adonis in terms of religious history, see now the excellent discussion in W. Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley 1979) 105-11. 5. E.g. Quintilian 10.55: admirabilis in suo genere Theocritus, mentioning no others; cf. for example on Daphnis and Chloe, C. Gill in B.P. Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley 1989) 285 still refers to pastoral as 'the genre of pastoral poetry created by Theocritus'. 6. See especially Berg 12-22; Halperin 1983B. For translations of Sumerian texts, see in particular S.N. Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Bloomington, Indiana 1969); id., History Begins at Sumer, (3rd edn, Philadelphia 1981) 305-24; a popular version of Inanna's Descent by Kramer and D. Wolk stein in Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth (London 1984) 52-89. On Dumuzi also Th. Jakobsen, Towards the Image of Tammuz
78 THE ORIGINS OFDAPHNIS and Other Essays in Mesopotamian History and Culture (Cambridge, Mass. 1970); id., The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven 1976) 25- 73. 7. S.N. Kramer, 'The Death of Dumuzi: A New Sumerian Version', Anatolian Stud ies 30 (1980) 9 f. (of 5-13). 8. For testimonia, K. Preisendanz in RE s.v. Tammuz. 9. Cf. Halperin (1983B) 187. 10. Kramer-Wolkstein 89. 11. See my Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Graeco-Roman World (London 1984) 5- 14. 12. So J.A. Black, 'Babylonian Ballads: A New Genre', in J.M. Sasson, Studies in Literature from the Ancient Near East by Members of the American Oriental Society dedicated to Samuel Noah Kramer (New Haven 1984) 30 f. 13. Ibid. 30 14. Longus 3.6-11 passim. 15. Black 31 lines 15-18; Longus 3.6. 16. Testimonia and two fragments in Nauck TGF 2nd edn 821 ff. 17. Editio princeps by S. Kramer, (Philadephia 1952); revisions in S. Cohen (Diss., Pennsylvania 1973). 18. The course of the story seems to make it inevitable that the man in the lion costume is acting on behalf of Dumuzi and Enmerkar, and brings about the immediate submission of the Lord of Aratta; it is the latter who has specified how the champion should appear (lines 458 ff.: "not black, not white, not brown, not x, not yellow, not dappled", i.e. in a [tawny] lionskin). 19. The former in the great eulogy of Ninurta, Lugal ud me-lam-bi NIR-GAL ed. J. van Dijk, (Leiden 1983) 17 f. and text lines 128-33. 20. Kramer-Wolkstein xi; Varia Historia 10.18. 21. Kramer (1981) 164 f.; Aelian, ibid. 22. Cf. Burkert (above n. 4). 23. Tr. in Kramer, Enki: The Crafty God (New York 1989) 114. 24. Kramer (1980) 10, lines 61, 66, 67, 69. 25. Text and discussion in J. and A. Westenholz, 'Help for Rejected Suitors: The Old Akkadian Love Incantation MAD V 8', Orientalia 46 (1977) 198-219. 26. Theocritus 1.139. For the phrase, R.M. Ogilvie, 'The Song of Thyrsis', JHS 82 (1962) 109 f.; Dover ad 64-145 takes the scenario to imply that Daphnis starved himself to death. 27. Cf. Halperin (1983B) 193 f. 28. Dumuzi's Dream tr. B. Alster (Copenhagen 1972) 63 lines 79 f. 29. W.S. Lambert, 'A Neo-Babylonian Tammuz Lament', in Sasson (1984) 212 f. lines 3-5; the catalogue continues in the same vein for some twenty lines on end. 30. Gilgamesh tablet 7.33-38 (tr. A. Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels [2nd edn, Chicago 1949], 60). 31. Gilgamesh tablet 12.144; 150 f. (Heidel p. 101). 32. Kramer (1981) 164 f.; Kramer-Wolkstein (1984) 71 f.
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