The book consists of four chapters and a “Conclusion”.
Ch. 1 (“The Bucolic and Urban Poems”) deals with the most frequent features of the fictional space constructed by Theocritus to frame bucolic Idylls (5, 1, 7) and urban ones (15 and 2). Ch. 2 explores space in mythological (13, 22, 24) and encomiastic Idylls (16, 17, 14). Both chapters are in a way a follow-up to the 2011 book by the same author: Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism, and conveniently highlight the difference underlying Apollonius’ and Theocritus’ poetics of space: while Apollonius tacks closely to the mythological geography of the Argonauts’ journey, the most consistent of the poem’s structuring devices, Theocritus’ spaces are in most cases fictional re-arrangements of idealized sweet landscapes, in which real places are rarely identified. The “bucolic space” turns out to be a selection of details where “a few props suggest a scene” (p. 6), shunning completeness of description, but highlighting essential recurring features: the distinctive separateness of herding from other activities; shadowy marginality of the city from the shepherds’ perspectives, and thus weak geo-political precision; animal and plant nature is peculiarly always tamer than wild nature, but, still, there is only a vague localization of bucolic physical space as “the mountain” (Thalmann’s investigation of the (im)precise sense of ὄρος is especially persuasive: pp. 13-15). Id. 5 is put to good use as an example of construction of the agonistic space of bucolic, and this space is also populated by objects that belong in the common history of the two protagonists, like the oak which Lacon was holding onto when Comatas penetrated him in the past (Id. 5.41, 117; it is attractive to see that oak—new materialistically—taking on a narrative role as an almost alive witness of lewd sex, precisely like the oaks and the bees of Id. 1.105-7 for Aphrodite and Anchises). Id. 1.1-21 exemplify for Thalmann the well-known harmonious construction of bucolic space in tune with bucolic song and bucolic singers, whereas in Id. 7 Simichidas and Lycidas as presented, innovatively, characters out of place. Indeed, modern scholars often complicate the identities of these two: Lycidas is often thought to be a god in disguise, while he is certainly a goatherd who finds himself walking in the lowlands, not in the bucolic “mountain”; Simichidas likewise is often taken as an alter ego of the author Theocritus, and, like Theocritus, he becomes a paradoxical symbol of an urban poet writing on rustic themes. Like the perception of space by Comatas/Lacon, Daphnis/Thyrsis, and Lycidas/Simichidas, so too the choices of detail in the descriptions of Gorgo and Praxinoa walking the streets of Alexandria in Id. 15 are filtered through the feelings and fears of the two women, who transform the trip into a formidable task, finally compared to Troy’s conquest by the Greeks (Id. 15.61-62), while the luxuriant textiles and furniture of Ptolemy’s and Arsinoe’s palace become the evidence of a centripetal centre of power as women can see it (“as wool flows to Alexandria, so the people within the city converge on the palace”, p. 38), and the ritual space of the tableau of pastoral Adonis, the product of the Ptolemaic court, invites us to see the pastoral poet Theocritus as a resident of Alexandria (pp. 39-40, after N. Krevans)—the result is the imbrication of the space of the bucolic into that of the court. A less innocuous imbrication of spaces applies to Id. 2, where Simaetha, leaving the protected and typically female space of her house, encounters Delphis on the road from the typically male space of the palaestra and tempts him into her house for an encounter of illicit sex.
Ch. 2 investigates the different strategies through which some non-bucolic and non-urban poems appear to pursue their own special program of space. In fact Thalmann conveniently avoids labelling non-epic poems in hexameters as anti-epic, and prefers to consider them, with A. Sens, as “exploring a range of alternative perspectives on heroic and divine behaviour … they are not hostile to epic but rather call into question the privileged authority of that genre in the tradition”. On this view, Id. 13 does not destabilise the epic heroism of Heracles, as it has frequently been interpreted, but is an innovatively epic poem on the power of eros, where the whole Argonautic voyage from Iolcos to Phasis is compressed or rather implied in a few lines (Id. 13.16-24)—in obvious contrast with the poetics of geographic space in Apollonius’ Argonautica (see above)—and its rustic (but not specifically bucolic) narrative space pivots around the meadow of the spring at Cios, populated by the Nymphs who will seize Hylas. Similarly, the boxing match between the Argonaut Polydeuces and the monstruous pre-civilized host-killer Amycus takes place in Id. 22 in the frame of a bucolic environment which demonstrates how bucolic “can contain the grotesque and make it at home” (p. 59) just as the Polyphemus of the Odyssey could be moved into the more delicately grotesque character of Id. 11. Again, in Id. 24, as baby Heracles strangles the snakes sent by Hera to kill him, the female space of the house is the main focus, with matrilinear emphasis on the contribution of Alcmena to the first glorious deed of Heracles the son of Zeus (not the son of Amphitryon), and with an intriguing intertextual parallelism between Alcmena and two other mothers of glorious sons, Danae and Thetis: Perseus as a baby is saved by Danae from the waves of the sea in the confines of a small chest, Heracles is initially protected in the hollow of a shield when the snakes attack him; Achilles the child of Thetis is also comparable, although the case of Thetis is more ambiguous than Danae’s and Alcmena’s, since Achilles is destined for glory but also premature death. Id. 16 receives a most detailed and innovative analysis, not as a practical promise to gain the patronage of king Hieron II of Syracuse (after Pindar and Bacchylides had been commissioned by kings and tyrants such as Hieron I), but as an almost utopian program of how to restore the utility of poetry, for rulers and subjects in a world which had dramatically changed from the time of the polis or the kings and patrons for whom Pindar and Bacchylides had worked. The space of this idealizing vision of the affluence that poetry may help to celebrate again is in fact most often bucolic or connected to rural prosperity in Idd. 16 and 17, as if “bucolic” and “rural” spaces were in Theocritus’ mind the ideal teeming spaces of happiness and the heterotopia to be constructed for the well-being of rulers and subjects. In Thalmann’s suggestion, following S. Stephens, Id. 17 and in part also Id. 14 would be the concrete instantiation of the project outlined in Id. 16—both Idylls emphasizing the centripetal attraction of Alexandria and the idea of extreme and profitable mobility provided by the new city and the new Ptolemaic empire, with Ptolemy’s generosity as the focus of that attraction.
Ch. 3 concerns a recurrent aspect of Theocritean love—bucolic (Id. 1, 6, 7), urban (2) and mythological (13): the distressed perception of an absence that precludes plenitude and fulfilment, not as the exception but as the rule. This feature pervades most of the fictional world constructed by Theocritean poetics; accordingly, the constitutional importance of desire of the absent to the mind of the lover and complaint about absence had already been emphasized by D. Konstan, but Thalmann systematically surveys the structural relevance of the songs of unfulfilled desire in Idd. 3, 1, 7, 6, 2, 13, and 11.
The goatherd serenading in front of the cave of the beloved Amaryllis in Id. 3 is an appropriate opening to this survey (surprisingly, Id. 11 is never investigated at length by Thalmann; see below). Amaryllis never appears and seems, like Galateia of Id. 11, the perfect missing object of desire, whose main function is to provoke the kômos, the song in front of the closed door of the beloved, by the delusional goatherd. As brilliantly suggested by K. Gutzwiller and elaborated on by Thalmann, Amaryllis of Id. 3 may even be not a real girl-Nymph but a statue or something in between (a personified metaphor for “hard-hearted person”), so that her designation by the goatherd at Id. 3.18, τὸ πᾶν λίθος, might not simply be a reference to her stony hardness, but also endorse a literal meaning. Likewise, both Pan and the Spring-Nymphs at Id. 1.16-18 and 1.21-22 seem to be ambiguous between actual gods and statues, and in the latter of these passages “Priapus” and the “Spring-Nymphs” seem to be just statuesque sunshades, like the elm (πτελέα) which the goatherd also points out to Thyrsis alongside them. They initially appear as inert components of the bucolic space along with the “seat” (θῶκος) and the “oaks” (δρύες) of 1.23, but become “animated” through the activity of the goatherd and Thyrsis. In the wake of the recent attention for the poetics of the material objects pursued by New Materialisms, it is plausible and attractive to surmise that bucolic poetry, with its exceptional care for a semantic construction of its spaces, “humanises” objects which are part of them, and may have ascribed an almost human nature to the ambiguous objects/characters Pan and Amaryllis, who have such an important role in the narrative to interact as quasi-characters with its main human characters.
Thalmann’s analysis of Idd. 1 and 7 (and 6) confirms the strong difference that may exist in the programmatic goals of the pastoral songs. In Thyrsis’ song of Id. 1 bucolic poetry “is constructing a history for itself” (p. 101), as his performance stages the original bucolic performance—Thyrsis’ song is on the (erotic) pains of Daphnis, which were at the origins of the bucolic song according to what can be derived from Id. 1 and the ancient commentators of Theocritus. Thalmann convincingly highlights a space dominated by absence for the “original” bucolic song. Daphnis is irremediably separated from a (his?) girl at Id. 1.82-85, and his natural spectators, the Nymphs, are absent from the spectacle of his disappearance at Id. 1.66-69, as well as Priapus at Id. 1.123-130; in the farewell of Id. 1.115-121 Daphnis also states his definitive separation from the wild animals and geographical landmarks with which he had been living and which he has now to leave.[1] Differently from Id. 1, Id. 7 enacts a bucolic song by Lycidas, a typical “contemporary” bucolic performance (as opposed to the reperformance of mythical Daphnis of Id. 1), where a different program of eros is also formulated: for the singer Lycidas, the departure and absence of the beloved appears to be the cause not of despair but of recovery from erotic despair. Embedded in Lycidas’s song, another sample of bucolic song is sung by a contemporary shepherd, Tityros, this time concerned with mythological figures of bucolic poetry, Daphnis again and Comatas. Likewise, the song of Id. 6, that presents the two singers Daphnis and Damoetas affected by fulfilled reciprocal homosexual desire in their irenic exchanges of kisses and pipes, harks back to the story of Polyphemus’ desperate love for Galateia, as a theme that must have felt like part of the traditional repertoire of mythical-bucolic song, but in its more relaxed implications—Galateia seems not inattentive to Polyphemus—it develops a precarious balance between presence and absence, delusion and reality.
Ch. 4, with a most original approach in Theocritean studies, investigates how a few Idylls thematize loss and insufficient integration into their world, so that they are situated on the margins of bucolicity itself and their bucolic character is in a way destabilized. Practically, they thematize the fragility of bucolic and its dissolution by displaying the limits or the malfunctioning and eclipse of a bucolic imaginary world in contact with the imaginaries of other literary genres or the world outside the systematic reality fictionalized by bucolic poetics (Idd. 4, 10, 21). In Id. 4, Battus and Corydon enact their agony for the absence of Aegon, who has left the company of the other herdsmen to go to Olympia (perhaps to enter athletic contests), thus corrupting his bucolic duties and abandoning his pipes and his cattle; besides, Amaryllis is dead (and not through a “heroic” death à la Daphnis, and without receiving an appropriate bucolic lament). Idd. 10 and 21 interweave the ideology of bucolic song with hard work: in Id. 10 through the opposition of the two songs of the reapers Milon and Boucaeus, the former a work song and the latter a love song (the poem may have a metapoetic dimension, as “Theocritus is defining his own bucolic poetry by contrasting it with what it is not” p. 180); Id. 21 depicts the harshness of the fishermen’s work (vs the shepherds’ usual indulgence in singing pleasure).
This book surveys the vast majority of Theocritus’ bucolic and erotic poems and will deservedly become the definitive work on the varieties of spaces depicted in Theocritus’ poetry, in particular the “space of absence” of the absent beloved. Readers may find it inconvenient that Id. 11 receives no specific analysis but only a handful of quick references, since it has received the most attention as the exemplar of a close intersection of bucolic and eros. However, Thalmann provides a detailed reading of Id. 3 (Amaryllis and the goatherd), which shares with Id. 11 many of these exemplary features and instantiates an eloquent and less overworked paradigm for the delusional solitude of the bucolic lover. Other readers will perhaps find that the analysis of Theocritus’ literary space may need to be implemented by specific attention on the non-human “agents” of bucolic space—animals, trees, stones, and other material objects—who populate the space of bucolic poetry with their quasi-human narrative agency more than in any other literary genre in Greek poetry. But these are very good times for Theocritean scholarship, and L.G. Canevaro’s Theocritus and the Things: Material Agency in the Idylls, which also came out last year, shows that the lens of the New Materialisms has already begun to identify bucolic poetry as a most promising object of analysis.
Notes
[1] Thalmann pp. 107-112 is in debt to the idea of “apostrophe” elaborated by J. Culler to define the pathetic fallacy through which material objects may become potentially responsive forces to human interlocution and acquire agency in the human world: in fact, although in this book Thalmann never quite seems to adopt the methods of New Materialisms, he however avails of this more limited conceptual framework of “apostrophe” to interpret Daphnis’ apostrophes as a key to “the whole notion of the presence of the human and natural orders to each other” (p. 112).