1. This paper contains material that originally appeared in my dissertation Narcissism and the Dying Subject in Ancient Pastoral (University of Southern California 2003Google Scholar). I would like to thank Professors Thomas N. Habinek, A.J. Boyle, William G. Thalmann and Heather James, the members of my dissertation committee, for their support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Krissy Ionta and Phillip Horky for their help with this paper. I borrow the term ‘post-pastoral’ from Gifford, Terry, Pastoral (London 1999Google Scholar). Gifford’s reading of Arcadia, the outlines of which I follow, can be found on pages 143-45 at the end of a section entitled The Anti-Pastoral Tradition’. ‘Pre-pastoral’ gestures towards Halperin, David M., Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven 1983Google Scholar). For the distinction between ‘bucolic’ and ‘pastoral’, see pages 118-37. By positioning Stoppard next to Theocritus, I draw on a ludic approach to the issue of bounded performance in symbolically freighted space that is at least implicit in Idyll 1. See Hunter, Richard, Theocritus: A Selection (Cambridge 1999), 11fGoogle Scholar., for discussion of the development of implicit generic traits as bucolic becomes pastoral. The notion of pastoral scene indicates my debt to the reading of the first Idyll in Schenck, Celeste, Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony (University Park PA 1988Google Scholar), in which she identifies a ‘pastoral scene of instruction’; see discussion on pp.97f. below. Calame, Claude, ‘Espaces liminaux et voix discursives dans l’Idylle I de Théocrite: une civilisation de poète’, in Figures grecques de Vintermediate (Lausanne 1992), 59-85Google Scholar, inspired my thinking about creativity, as it undertakes a detailed reading of the poem’s presentation of Iiminal phenomena.

2. Stoppard, Tom, Arcadia (London 1993), 12.Google Scholar

3. Stoppard (n.2 above), 25.

4. Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City NY 1955), 295-320Google Scholar, traces the development of the tag, which originates in a painting (featuring a very prominently placed skull) by Giovanni Francesco Guercino. Later, the phrase evolves from a message to the shepherds from the tomb to a generalised sentiment of nostalgia and personal loss that displaces the specific relationship with death. Hardie, Philip, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge 2002), 20Google Scholar, mentions this article in the context of the fifth Eclogue, and gives a salutary warning about assumptions of pastoral continuity: ‘…the modem reader should beware of too readily projecting back on to the Theocritean originals that wistful yearning for a lost plenitude of bliss summed up in the post-classical tag et in Arcadia ego.’

5. See Winnicott, D.W., ‘The Location of Cultural Experience’, in Playing and Reality (London 1971), 95-103Google Scholar. ‘Tradition and originality’ are dealt with on page 99. For use of Winnicott in another domain of classical literature, see Habinek, Thomas N., ‘Satire as Aristocratic Play’, in Freudenburg, Kirk (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (forthcoming Cambridge 2005).Google Scholar

6. For discussion of the central place of literary filiation in pastoral, see Hubbard, Thomas K., The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton (Ann Arbor 1998Google Scholar). For an illuminating survey of the emerging genre’s manipulation and redeployment of existing forms, see Van Sickle, John, ‘Theocritus and the Conception of Bucolic Genre’, Ramus 5 (1976), 18-44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 22 on the blending of epos and mime.

7. Stoppard (n.2 above), 93. Septimus is Thomasina’s tutor, while Valentine is a modern day graduate student. See Jacobus, Mary, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford 1999), 1-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a reading of Matisse’s painting The Silence Living in Houses in terms of transitional phenomena; this is suggestive for an interpretation of Stoppard’s ‘scene of reading’.

8. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, in Winnicott (n. 5 above), 2.

9. See Segal, Charles, Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral (Princeton 1981), 16Google Scholar, for the basis of a reading that hinges on the different experiences of the two singers, Thyrsis and Daphnis: ‘One answer to the thorny problem of the reasons for Daphnis’ death, I suggest, lies in the contrast between the two singer-herdsmen, Thyrsis and Daphnis, the one connected with the waters of life, the other with the waters of death.’

10. I deal with the status of the objet a on pp. 90f. below.

11. Rudnytsky, Peter L. (ed.), Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott (New York 1993Google Scholar), in his editorial introduction (xvi-xvii), discusses the work of Christopher Bollas, a British psychoanalyst working in the tradition of Winnicott, as follows: ‘Bollas thus subsumes a theory of language, the alpha and omega for Lacanians, within an object relations framework, which recognises that nonverbal affects precede linguistic representations.’

12. The most useful summaries of the evidence as to Daphnis’ mythic origin are Gow, A.S.F., Theocritus, Vol. 2 (2nd ed. Cambridge 1952Google Scholar), If., and Hunter (n.l above), 64-67. As Gow demonstrates, the story of Daphnis as related in the late sources of Aelian and Diodorus Siculus (involving blindness after infidelity to a nymph) bears no immediate relation to the situation in which our Daphnis finds himself. Meanwhile, lines 72-77 of the seventh Idyll, where we are told of Daphnis’ love for one Xenea, shed no light on the nature of the love he bears, but again stress his suffering and dissolution (κατετάκετo, ‘melted away’, 76). That Daphnis is represented as loving Xenea does not seem to me to cause great difficulty for my reading here because his love in Idyll 7 is not specified and may well be read in terms of ‘a passion to which he refuses to yield’ (see Gow, op. cit., 2). The treatment of Daphnis in Idyll 1 deliberately casts into question any neat explanation that might be furnished by a pre-existing mythical paradigm, and thus leaves the reader in an unusually open position of providing aetiological explanations. See Halperin (n.l above), 79, for discussion of the place of Stesichorus’ Daphnis in bucolic. Halperin (80) makes the following point about Diodorus’ ‘aetiological tale’: ‘Diodorus’ narrative seems to be shaped in part by an unspoken question: “How did the sort of poetry exemplified by the First Idyll come about and how did it get its name?’”

For particularly nuanced readings of the interactive system of the Idyll, see Gutzwiller, Kathryn J., Theocritus’ Pastoral Analogies: The Formation of a Genre (Madison 1991), 83-104Google Scholar, and Goldhill, Simon, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (Cambridge 1991), 240-46Google Scholar. This paper engages Gutzwiller’s reading of Thyrsis on page 104 as ‘the self-absorbed poet of memory, who has no awareness of self because of that delicious inattention that results in poetic creation, or re-creation, of the lost, the forgotten, of Daphnis come back from the dead.’

13. See Goldhill (n.12 above), 246-61, for discussion of framing in the pastoral, and the complex interplay of centre and periphery involved in such poetic production.

14. Zimmerman, Clayton, The Pastoral Narcissus: A Study of the First Idyll of Theocritus (Lanham MD 1994).Google Scholar

15. Aelian VH 10.18; see Hunter (n.l above), 65. Also see Hunter on line 77 for Hermes as ‘god of margins’.

16. For discussion of the attributes of Priapus, see Hunter (n.l above) ad loc. I follow the text of Theocritus in Gow, A.S.F. (ed.), Bucolici Graeci (Oxford 1952).Google Scholar

17. See discussion of this passage in Zimmerman (n.14 above), 52f.

18. Segal (n.9 above), 16.

19. For discussion of the interplay of presence and absence in the pastoral world, see Hardie (n.4 above), esp. 121-28.

20. Hunter (n.l above) ad loc.

21. See, for example, David Willbern, ‘Phantasmagoric Macbeth’, in Rudnytsky (n.11 above), 101-34, at 110: ‘In psychoanalytic terms, violent aggression and the maintenance of difference through repeated enactments of violated union may be a defense against a basic fear of undifferentiation or the state of no-difference….’

22. Lee, Jonathan Scott, Jacques Lacan (Amherst 1990), 113.Google Scholar

23. Fink, Bruce, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge MA 1997), 118.Google Scholar

24. Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, tr. Sheridan, Alan (New York 1977), 324.Google Scholar

25. Fink (n.23 above), 118.

26. Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, tr. Grigg, Russell (New York 1993), 179.Google Scholar

27. Fink (n.23 above), 122.

28. Goldhill (n.l2 above), 244: ‘The locus amoenus—represented in the opening exchange of Thyrsis and the goatherd—constitutes a frame for the framed vignettes.’ Also on framing see Calame (n. 1 above), 72f.

29. Alpers, Paul, What is Pastoral? (Chicago 1996), 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see discussion of impersonation in Berger, Harry Jr., ‘The Origins of Bucolic Representation: Disenchantment and Revision in Theocritus’ Seventh Idyll’, CA 3 (1984), 1-39Google Scholar, at 7.

30. Alpers (n.29 above), 141.

31. Hunter (n.l above) ad loc. Also see Alpers (n.29 above), 141 and 142.

32. Winnicott (n.5 above), 102f.

33. Winnicott (n.5 above), 99.

34. Charles Segal, ‘“Since Daphnis Dies”: The Meaning of Theocritus’ First Idyll’, in Segal (n.9 above), 37.

35. See Alpers (n.29 above), 143. Goldhill (n.12 above, 245) discusses the way that these lines can be read as standing outside the song, inside the song, or somewhere in between. Here, I want to stress the way in which line 143 breaks the prospective merging of Thyrsis and Daphnis by reorienting attention to the exchange of cup and song.

36. D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications’, in Winnicott (n.5 above), 86-94.

37. Winnicott (n.5 above), 94.

38. Winnicott, D.W., ‘Fear of Breakdown’, IRP-A 1 (1974), 103-07, at 104.Google Scholar

39. Bowie, Malcolm, ‘Psychoanalysis and Art: the Winnicott Legacy’, in Caldwell, Lesley (ed.), Art, Creativity, Living (London 2000), U-29, at 17f.Google Scholar

40. Bowie (n.39 above), 20.

41. For discussion of the cup, see Halperin (n.l above) 161-89; Gutzwiller (n.12 above) 90-94; Zimmerman (n.14 above) 75-90.

42. D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,’ in Winnicott (n.5 above), 98.

43. Jacobus (n.7 above), 3.

44. Gutzwiller (n.12 above), 93. Also see Cairns, Francis, ‘Theocritus’ First Idyll: The Literary Programme’, WS 97 (1984), 89-113Google Scholar, specifically 104f. on the significance of the cup: ‘…the scenes on the cup are a priamel in which the life of the bucolic poet is compared favourably with two other lives….’

45. Gutzwiller (n.12 above), 91.

46. For an extended reading of Theocritus in terms of Epicureanism, see Rosenmeyer, Thomas, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley 1969).Google Scholar For Daphnis, see esp. 8If.

47. See Halperin (n.l above), 178: ‘Note that (“quarrel with words”) can refer to rivalry in hexameter verses as well as in simple speech and so anticipates the contests of poetic skill which figure in so many of the hexameter Idylls.’

48. Zizek, Slavoj, ‘The Seven Veils of Fantasy’, in Nobus, Dany (ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York 1999), 190-218Google Scholar, at 202 and 210.

49. Schenck (n.l above), 39.

50. Hunter (n.l above) ad loc.

51. Schenck (n.l above), 39.

52. Theocritus, , The Idylls, tr. Wells, Robert (London 1989), 56.Google Scholar

53. Williams, William Carlos, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 2 (Manchester 1988), 273Google Scholar. Williams introduced a reading of his translation as follows in 1956 (quoted at op. cit., 489): ‘…I came upon—searched for and found—a translation of Theocritus in the British tradition, but it was terrible—it had no more Theocritus, feeling of Theocritus, in it—well, it was Oxford not Theocritus. So I took that translation, stole it, took it to make it sound more of as I think Theocritus should sound. So I was led by this interest in the American idiom…to invent a translation, taken from a translation, a transliteration of Theocritus.’