Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry

303 Pages·1983·4.886 MB·English

by  David M. Halperin

Before Pastoral

BEFORE PASTORAL:
Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition
of Bucolic Poetry
DAVID M. HALPERIN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
Published with assistance from
the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund
Excerpt from Wallace Stevens’ poem “Of Modern
Poetry” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,
copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens, Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc. is reprinted with permission.
Copyright © 1983 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole
or in part, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by sections 107 and 108
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by James J. Johnson
and set in Bembo Roman by
The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by
Halliday Lithograph, West Hanover, Mass.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Halperin, David M., 1952-
Before pastoral, Theocritus and the ancient tradition
of bucolic poetry.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Theocritus—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Pastoral poetry, Greek— History and criticism.
I. Title.
PA4444.H33 1983 884'.01 82—10879
ISBN 0-300-02582-3
Io 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
IN MEMORIAM
S. WILLIAM HALPERIN
t1.I].1905-15.1V.1979

Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION. Bucolic Poetry and Pastoral Poetry
PARTI The Evolution of Pastoral Theory
CHAPTER ONE. The Problem of Definition
CHAPTER TWO. Early Modern Concepts of Pastoral
CHAPTER THREE. Pastoral Theory since Schiller
CHAPTER FOUR. The Modern Concept of Pastoral
Part II The Originality of Theocritus
CHAPTER FIVE. The Invention of Bucolic Poetry
CHAPTER SIX. Pastoral Origins and the Ancient Near East
CHAPTER SEVEN. Bucolic and Pastoral in "Theocritus 118
Part ΠῚ The Thematic Structure of Bucolic Poctry
CHAPTER EIGHT. Rules of Evidence 141
CHAPTER NINE. Three Scenes on an Ivy-Cup 161
ParT IV The Formal Structure of Bucolic Poetry
CHAPTER TEN. Meter and Genre 193
CHAPTER ELEVEN. The Bucolic Epos 217
CONCLUSION. The Ancient Definition of Bucolic Poetry 249
APPENDIX. Bucolic Diaeresis and Bucolic Genre 259
Bibliography 267
Index to Passages Cited 275
General Index 279
vii

Preface
What kind of expectations should a modern reader bring to an encounter
with the text of Theocritus? All too often the answer to this question has
been automatic and, it would appear, self-evident: in Theocritus a modern
reader may expect to discover the first true pastoral poet in Western litera-
ture. So strong is the force of this interpretative habit, so crisply defined the
placed assigned to Theocritus in the pageant of classical literary tradition,
that the poet's numerous deviations from what is normally expected of him
have not been able to check the prevailing critical tendency. It is the purpose
of this book to demonstrate the inadequacy of the pastoralist interpretation
of Theocritus and to offer a new theoretical perspective from which his
poetry can be viewed with greater coherency and historical precision.
The poetry of Theocritus, or a certain portion of it at any rate, pos-
sessed in antiquity a distinctive literary character. Ancient readers of The-
ocritus accordingly tended to group some of his works together and to treat
them as members of a single class. The literary category to which these
poems were thought to belong was called bucolic, a term invented by the
poet himself and employed in his text to refer to several of his own com-
positions (or to parts of them). The meaning of this term and the nature of
the literary category it once served to designate are obscure, despite the
survival of the word in the modern European languages. Any attempt at a
fresh and accurate historical understanding of Theocritus must begin with
an investigation into the ancient significance of bucolic and the original
meaning of the category represented by it. This task requires little new
research: most of the sources on which my work is based have long been
familiar to students of Hellenistic poetry. Rather, I offer this study as a kind
of conceptual housecleaning intended to sweep aside the network of false
expectations which have impeded a more profound appreciation and critical
understanding of Theocritus and his imitators.
There is no clear evidence that Theocritus understood the word bucolic
and its derivatives in a formal, generic sense. It is possible that he employed
the word merely as an occasional or descriptive term appropriate to con-
texts featuring cowherds or other pastoral figures. (Such, in fact, is the
implied consensus of the Greek scholia.) Perhaps Theocritus did not even
conceive himself to have invented a new kind of poetry—perhaps he re-
garded his own oeuvre more informally, leaving it to subsequent genera-
tions to discover in aspects of his various and multifaceted work a unified
artistic achievement. The search for the ancient meaning of bucolic may
ix
x PREFACE
ultimately unearth a literary concept devised by Theocritus’ followers, and
the results of this investigation may tell us more about the way Virgil read
Theocritus than about how Theocritus viewed his own poetry.
The justification for the strategy outlined above is twofold. Regardless
of his specific (and by now unfathomable) intentions, Theocritus somehow
endowed a portion of his work with a sufficiently distinctive literary profile
to impress its unique qualities on later generations of readers. It is legitimate
to inquire into the nature of those qualities. Second, even if Theocritus was
content to leave nameless the class or classes comprising his most brilliant
and innovative poetic experiments, we still need a means of referring to
them under their common aspect, and bucolic need stand for nothing more
than the peculiar set of characteristics which distinguished some fraction of
Theocritus’ work from the literary productions of his contemporaries as
well as from the monuments of the past. Whether or not bucolic poetry as
such was a deliberate and conscious invention of Theocritus, as I believe it
was, is a question which every reader of this volume is entitled to answer in
his or her own fashion.
Ancient bucolic poetry is a field of study in which one is counted lucky
to have convinced oneself, and successful if one is able to persuade one’s
friends, of the essential rightness of any particular hypothesis. No wider
agreement is to be hoped for. | am aware that many of the arguments
employed in my discussion could be made to demonstrate the opposite
point if they were to be wielded by someone hostile to my approach—one
need only glance at the first fifty-odd pages of E. A. Schmidt’s Poetische
Reflexion (1972) or at Susanne Wofford’s 1980 Yale dissertation, "The
Choice of Achilles: The Epic Counterplot in Homer, Virgil, and Spenser,"
for a ready illustration. I feel no compulsion to insist that the definition of
bucolic poetry offered here is the only possible or correct one, simply that it
is plausible and can account for the evidence as well as or better than the
currently prevailing critical concept.
I have for the most part refrained from engaging in scholarly contro-
versy in the text and have confined detailed consideration of technical mat-
ters to the notes and appendix. I have tried to restrict the scholarly apparatus
so as not to distract the historical student of literature, to whom this book is
addressed, from the general argument, and I have often presented what I
take to be the current state of knowledge in classical studies without at-
tempting to credit all the scholars responsible for it; to them and to others
whose views I may have unwittingly incorporated in my own exposition I
offer thanks and apologies. Specialists who find a favorite conjecture, hy-
pothesis, or line of argument passed over in silence or summarily dismissed
are invited to consult my 1979 Stanford dissertation, "Theocritus and the