Idylls

This is an air-tight edition of the bucolic poet. The introduction has everyone the reader wants to know, and the Greek translation is an excellent read. I wish they would have included all of the extant poems, and used footnotes, but even so, this was a pleasure to use.

These bucolic poems (bucolic = sung by a herdsman) constitute an important link in the history of literature, as Robert Wells notes in his excellent introduction. They influenced directly the pastoral tradition created in the Renaissance by poets like Ronsard. Besides proper herdsman stories about song contests or love laments, Theocritus treats well-known subjects in his poems: `The Bacchae': `no tears must fall for the transgressors, grown men or young boys.' `The Cyclops': `Galatea, you are whiter than ricotta, gentler than a lamb, livelier than a calf, firmer than an unripe grape ... and when sleep lets me go, then you slip away as if you were a sheep and I the great grey wolf.' `The Passion of Daphnis': `Let the stag hunt the hounds, let the nightingale attend to the screech-owl's cries.' `The Graces': `Let the armoury be shrouded in cobwebs, the war-cry become a forgotten song.' `Helen': `A race-bound filly, a cypress tree that rears its dark adornment over field and garden.' `The Dioscuri' (Castor & Pollux): `rescuers of horses panicked in battle's bloody turmoil'. `The Childhood of Heracles': `two monstrous snakes ... The steel-blue scales stood up as they rippled their coils.' Theocritus's poems shine through their freshness and innocence, their alternation of elegiac and ecstatic tones, their evocation of street and pastoral noises, their images and comparisons and their candid (bi)sexuality. Not to be missed by all lovers of classical texts.

Theocritus was a bucolic poet and native of Syracuse who has often been credited, by both ancient and modern critics, as being the inventor of the genre of pastoral poetry. However, there are also those who argue that while there are poets attributed to Theocritus the bucolic poems in question are from another ancient edition of dubious authorship. Today, Theocritus is primarily of interest to those looking for the historic antecedents of homoerotic poetry; the poet wrote the 14th, 15th, and 17th Idylls in honor of his patron, Ptolemy Soter. There is also a poem to a beautiful youth that is considered from that perspective. My interest in his "Idylls" stemmed from Theocritus being one of only two other classical writers to talk about the murder of Pentheus depicted in Euripides's tragedy "The Bacchae," the other being Ovid in the "Metamorphoses." This particular poem is neither pastoral nor part of the bucolic tradition, so it may well have been written by the actual Theocritus. For those interested in pastoral poems about shepherds and their ilk, the most famous Bucolics are: I, where Thyrsis sings to a goatherd the story of Daphis, the herdsman who died rather than yield to the power of Aphrodite; VII, "The Harvest Feast," which features a gathering of poets on the island of Cos; and a set of Idylls, VI and XI, which has Polyphemus, the cyclops from the "Odyssey," in love with the sea-nymph Galatea. There is also a marriage song for Helen that will be of passing interest to teachers and students of mythology. The rest of the poems are of lesser interest both from the perspective of mythology and, I would think, of those who study ancient poetry, although several are interesting in that they were apparently commissioned by rather ordinary folk for loved ones. Such poems are of a dramatic or mimetic nature, offering poetic pictures of the ordinary life of the common folk of Sicily in the 3rd century B.C. Consequently, although a minor classical poet all things considered, there are several elements worthy of note in his work.

With Homer, you can still appreciate the Iliad and the Odyssey in English -- indeed, the recent translations of Robert Fagles capture the movement and energy of Homeric verse quite well. With Theocritus, however, a translation is a wretched substitute for the Greek, since the exquisitely refined beauty and charm of his poems simply cannot be reproduced in English. What makes Theocritus such an enjoyable experience in Greek is the Doric dialectic in which he writes, his manipulation of the hexameter verse (the same 6 beat verse used by Homer), the echoes of Homer and other authors, and similar curiosities. Theocritus wrote in the 3d century BC, during the so-called Hellenistic period which arose after the demise of the classical Greek city-state. This era was, in many respects, the first "modern" world. Theocritus was a Sicilian who wrote around 270 BC. He was highly original -- he invented pastoral or "bucolic" poetry, a genre which had a very long and distinguished run in subsequent Latin and European literature. Appearing in the works of this poet for the first time are the cowherds, goatherds, and shepherds playing the pan pipes under the shade of spreading trees, bantering with each other as they sing their rustic songs. If you wish to appreciate Vergil's Eclogues, Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar, or Milton's Lycidas, to name a few of the more well known examples of the form in later literature, you must at least have a taste of the master who invented this important genre. In this Penguin paperback edition, Robert Wells offers up straightforward, readable translations of the 22 "Idylls" (meaning "short sketches") which are commonly attributed by scholars to Theocritus. Accompanying the translations is an excellent 52 page Introduction which provides the general reader with important background information about the poet, his art, his era, and his compositional techniques. WARNING!!! The poems of Theocritus are not intended for poorly educated or unsophisticated readers. Do not attempt to read these poems if you lack imagination, curiosity, and an appreciation for the delicate craftsmanship of a sensitive and learned poet