Excellent book!!!!

Theocritus’ Idylls--summaries of individual poems

1-A goatherd asks Thyrsis to sing him a song; in return, the former promises to give the latter an elaborately decorated drinking vessel (ekphrastically descibed). Thyrsis sings a tearful tale of Daphnis the cowheard’s unrequited “bitter love.” Venus mocks Daphnis; Daphnis tells Venus to take a hike and then drowns, possibly of his own volition.

2-The first “mime.” Simaetha, a city-dwelling spurned-lover-turned-sorceress, tells the story of how she fell in love with Delphis, a gorgeous wrestler who spends most of his time at the gymnasium: how she saw him walking by one day at a parade and nearly fainted with lust; how she ordered her slave-girl, Thestylis, to invite him to her house; made love to him on their first meeting; and was later deserted by him for another woman. Determined to avenge herself on his alleged treachery, she mixes a magic potion that will “draw her lover home to [her]” again.

3-a drunken goatherd serenades his lover from outside her “cave.” He seems to be trying to coax her into forgiving him for some fault he’d previously commited.

4-idle shepherd’s conversation.

5-A goatherd (Comatas) and a shepherd (the younger Lacon) battle it out in a kind of insult match, seeing who can come up with the sharpest insults. They recruit Morson the woodsman as a judge and referee, and after bandying back-and-forth the Ancient-Greek equivalent of increasingly belligerent yo’-mamma jokes, Morson awards Comatas the prize: a fat lamb.

6-Daphnis and Aratus sing contrasting versions of Polyphemus’ love for the nereid Galatea. Daphnis depicts him as a lovelorn moaner; Aratus, as as a mischievous tease.

7-Simichidas meets a celebrated singer, Lycidas, on his way to a festival and invites him to compete with him. They each sing a song, and then Simichidas heads over to the festival.

10-Stricken with unrequited love and unable to focus on his work, Bucaeus can’t stop thinking of the “Beautiful Bombyca.” Milon, the chief shepherd asks Bucaeus to take a break and sing him a song about his love, which Bucaeus then proceeds to do.

11-Here we have another unrequited lover: Polyphemous, who’s extremely distraught about Galatea’s indifference to him. He begs her to join him on land and grieves over the fact that he can’t swim down to her in the sea.

12-A pederastic love song from an older shepherd to a younger one.

13-The story of how Hercules lost his beloved squire.

14-The second mime. Here we have yet another unrequited lover (a major theme, apparently, of the Theocritean Idyll). Aeschinas has recently discovered that his beloved, Cynisca, is seeing another man, Wolf, and he’s pissed. He slaps her at a gathering, after she confesses in front of him. Now he’s trying to get over her but having a very hard time.

15-The third and mime in the collection. Gorgo and Praxinoa meet up and head to the palace for a festival being held in honor of Adonis.

16-An encomium to Hieron II.

17-Encomium to Ptolemy.

18-A model example of the ancient Greek epithalamion; this one’s dedicated to Helen of Sparta on the night of her wedding to Menelaus.

22-The “Dioscuri” relates two stories of the twin brothers, Castor and Polydeuces’, valiant character and legendary strength. In the first song, the poet sings of how Castor defeated a rude giant on a remote island; in the second story, the poet sings of how Polydeuces fended off two men who unlawfully stole the fiancées of two other men.

24-This idyll relates the story of Hercules’ childhood: how he clenched two malevolent god-sent snakes in his fists and grew up to be the strongest man in town. Tiresias offers a prophesy of his future: how he will complete the labours, etc.

26-A wonderful supplement to Euripides’ The Bacchae. This poem relates the murder of Pentheus by the Dionysian revelers; he’s murdered for spying on the rights from a treetop.

29-An old man sings of his love for a young boy, although he’s saddened that the boy is beginning to neglect him.

30-Another pederastic poem... this one more morbid. The boy’s elderly lover counsels him not to grow too arrogant and grieves over the fact that he’s nowhere near as important to his beloved than as his beloved is to him. Another poem about unrequited love.

I'm at work, but I finished this on the train in, and it's got me hyped for my Hellenistic lit module, so... Yes.

This made sense within the context of my class, but it's nothing something I would have ever picked up of my own accord.

Come for the famous pastorals, stay for the poem of a girl performing witchcraft to gain back the affections of her lover.

Poetry is really not for me, but I'm glad a sampled Ancient Greek poetry anyway ;) I liked how different themes were touched throughout the 30 'idylls' in this book.

Beautiful poetry however I feel as if some of the beauty has been lost in translation.

My study of "The Role of Rhetoric in Theocritus' Idyll V" is posted on my blog at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/201....

"Sitten Damoitas suuteli Dafnista ja antoi tälle syrinksinsä. Vastalahjaksi hän sai Dafniksen hienon huilun. Niin alkoi Damoitas soittaa huilua ja lehmipaimen Dafnis puhalsi syrinksiin ja hiehot tanssivat nuoressa heinässä. Eivätkä he voittaneet kumpikaan, vaan olivat taidossa tasavertaiset." (Paimenpojat I)

Paimenidylliä, mytologiaa, homoerotiikkaa ja rakkautta ilman vastakaikua.

lempparit:

2. Taiantekijät: Kaupunkimiljööhön sijoitettu miimi, joka kuvaa nuoren naisen (mahd hetairan) yrityksiä voittaa magian voimin takaisin haluamansa miehen kiinnostus.

6. Paimenpojat I: Kahden nuoren paimenpojan vuorolaulu Polyfemos-kykloopista.

10. Elonleikkaajat: Maalaismiljööhön sijoitettu runo elonkorjuusta. Henkilöinä kaksi maamiestä: toinen paimenrunoista tuttu naiivi, rakastunut, vähän sentimentaalinen maalaispoika, toinen arkisessa karuudessaan yksi Theokritoksen realistisimmin luonnehdituista henkilöhahmoista.

13. Hylas: Koskettava kuvaus siitä, miten Herkules menettää Hylaksen, rakastamansa nuoren pojan, jonka lähteen nymfit hukuttavat.

15. Syrakuusattaret: Kaksi syrakuusalaissyntyistä keskiluokkaisrouvaa matkaavat Aleksandrian Adonisjuhlaan.

The bucolics are the most characteristic and influential of Theocritus’s works. They introduced the pastoral setting in which shepherds wooed nymphs and shepherdesses and held singing contests with their rivals. They were the sources of Virgil’s Eclogues and much of the poetry and drama of the Renaissance and were the ancestors of the famous English pastoral elegies, John Milton’s “Lycidas,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” Among the best known of his idylls are Thyrsis (Idyll 1), a lament for Daphnis, the original shepherd poet, who died of unrequited love; Cyclops, a humorous depiction of ugly Polyphemus vainly wooing the sea nymph Galatea; and Thalysia (“Harvest Home,” Idyll 7), describing a festival on the island of Cos. In this the poet speaks in the first person and introduces contemporary friends and rivals in the guise of rustics.

Up to this point in reading ancient Greek poetry, I’ve encountered verse that has struck me as interesting and beautiful, but the idylls of Theocritus are the first that I can say I’ve truly loved. These are lusty songs of life, desire, love, and loss. Anthony Verity’s translations are so vibrant that I felt at times as if I were reading slices of real life, even when the topics included mythical gods or ancient folk tales. I think what draws me to Theocritus more than other Greek poets is his bucolic poetry -- the focus on salt-of-the-earth goatherds, shepherds, laborers, and common men and women. These are not (for the most part) celebrating epic warriors or goddess-like women. As a scholar of American literature, I am reminded of everything from Whitman to William Carlos Williams to the short fiction of regional writers.

And I think that’s the other reason I enjoy these poems: they have the narrative thrust of fiction. (In fact, one of the books on my library reading list is Mark Payne’s Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction, which explores these connections.) Even when Theocritus moves to more mythic topics in his later idylls, he gives us brief, powerful vignettes that again have the feel of short stories: Heracles killing snakes as a baby, the fight between Polydeuces and Amycus from the Argonautica, etc. For me, this pastoral verse is the epitome of Greek poetry and, more so than even the lyrical poets, the model of so much Western poetry to come.