The modern attitude to ancient pastoral — that is to say, the attitude of the contemporary reader of ancient poetry, in which I naturally include the contemporary teacher of ancient poetry — is in need of reformation. Misformed by the preciosity of eighteenth century bucolic and the reductive strictures of Johnsonian rationalism, misshaped by the nineteenth century's post-Romantic aversion to ‘imitation” and ‘artifice” (the aberrations of Conington and Page — ‘The Eclogues idealise reality and render it artificial” — are still in evidence) and by its limited conceptions — ‘misconceptions” would be more accurate — of ‘originality’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘sincerity’, ‘reality” and ‘truth’, misfashioned by the hierarchical imperatives of the theory of literary kinds, the prevalent contemporary attitude (there are distinguished exceptions) to ancient pastoral poetry is distancing, trivialising, condescending and cosy — ‘cosy” because unaffected by the spiritual life of the poems themselves, their intellectual, moral and aesthetic stringency, determination, significance.

The title of Thomas Rosenmeyer's book, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, points to a conception of the pastoral as a closed world, set off from the real world outside, despite the author's disclaimer that the title is a misnomer.

In seeking to define the essence of pastoral, Rosenmeyer strips off later accretions and sets the pastoral in sharp contrast to Hesiodic peasant poetry, drama, lyric, romance, and the poetry of Horace and Tibullus. He concentrates on a small number of passages from a limited number of texts to show what he regards as central in Theocritean pastoral: a restricted world of simplicity, freedom, and leisure (otium) that finds its closest corollary in the garden of Epicurus.

Yet, even in Rosenmeyer's view, the pastoral ‘pleasance’ is not entirely isolated from the real world. There are, he admits, ‘intimations of a sterner and more hurtful life ostensibly excluded from the arbor’. (23)

On the surface, Propertius 1.2 seems to propound a traditional thesis, the superiority of unadorned beauty to artifice, and to scold Cynthia for not living up to this ideal of the natural. I believe that the ideal actually asserted is more complex than mere natural beauty and in fact paradoxically entails a large measure of artifice. Artifice itself becomes the central theme of the poem as its value is radically reinterpreted.

Part of the complexity comes from the fact that the ideal embraces more than physical appearance, whether adorned or not. A Catullan Parallel will illustrate. Propertius is here building upon and rivalling a Catullan poem, in a manner which has the effect of emphasizing the non-physical elements in his definition of ideal beauty. A poem on the nature of true female beauty in which the beloved is contrasted with other women and which attempts to define what is truly formosus (‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’; cf. the insistent repetition of: forma 8 and 24, formosa 9, formosius 11) would immediately be recognized by the Roman reader as a challenge to Catullus 86, which centers on the word formosa.

Aischylos wrote Agamemnon for exhibition in a theatre. A theatre whose conditions of production almost defy our imagining — how, in particular, were the chorus able to convey the verbal richness and complexity of their lyrics, while at the same time singing and dancing? To a music and choreography of which we know little and nothing respectively, but which yet, however stylized, however unobtrusive, added something to the complexity of the drama. We are left with a mere script. But a stage script, designed to be heard, performed with the phrases emerging in a prescribed order. The audience cannot refer back or leaf forward as in a book. They are — as the parodos is performed — witnesses of a lyric narrative. At any one point, they can only know what they remember of what has been heard already. About what is going to happen, immediately or later, they have only conjecture. We presume the majority to have been acquainted with some or many versions of the history of the house of Atreus; they are, then, aware of a range of possibilities. Aischylos can use any or none of the traditional versions, move from one aspect of the story as he imagines it to another as his purpose demands. And so, as the drama unfolds, the audience's range of expectations can be narrowed, or widened, at will by the emphases given to what they are hearing, the ways in which it adds to what they have heard already.

The nature of Theocritean otium (hasychia) is not a new topic in the general field of Theocritean studies; sooner or later those critics who wish to come to terms with the poetic intent of the major Greek bucolic poet will have to arrive at some definition of the precise significance of that movement towards peace, harmony, and spiritual and intellectual fulfilment which provides the overriding impetus in pastoral. Rosenmeyer has done much, possibly more than most, towards a complete description of this ideal (yet enigmatic) state, and he is right, I think, to stress not only the centrality of otium to the bucolic Idylls (‘Otium is a keyword in the discussion of the pastoral’), but the unmistakable Epicurean bias of the work. This affinity with certain fundamental goals of Epicureanism suggests that one is to regard otium as signifying a considerable amount more than that which can be deduced merely from the sum of its physical parts — shade, peace, music, sex. These aspects of existence are undoubtedly present in the poems, but ultimately they tend towards a definition of a more abstracted state, one which touches not simply pastores, Daphnis, and Lycidas, but the lot of man in general.

As Catullus and Horace are invariably thought to be Rome's two supreme lyric poets, it is cause for some comment that, in all his writings, Horace mentions his predecessor only once, and then in an indirect and, to all appearances, uncomplimentary aside. In the tenth satire in the first book, recommending that those who would write well first immerse themselves in the literature of the past, Horace refers with plain contempt to a contemporary litterateur as ‘that ape who was clever at reciting nothing but Calvus and Catullus’:

simius iste

nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum.

(Satires I.10.18-19)

How are we to explain this startling passage? We can say, with some older writers, that Horace is singling out for criticism only insensitive imitators of Catullus and Calvus; about Catullus himself he says nothing and, in the context, need say nothing. But more recent writers on the passage feel that it bears an at least implied criticism of Catullus and Calvus and the rest of the neoterics. Reasons why Horace need not have liked them are not hard to seek. The earlier poets paraded their learning (while Horace, in the ninth satire, tries to avoid a bore who is similarly doctus). They were ready to improvise in any meter (while Horace, in the Ars Poetica, insists the meter must fit the theme). They were handy with purple patches (and the two panni Horace objects to — Diana's altar smoking and a rainbow on the Rhine — sound like references to poems by neoterics Valerius Cato and Furius Bibaculus). Above all, they chose for lyric models the blasé Alexandrians (when they might have striven, as Horace did, to equal the much older, fresher, and more accomplished Aeolians, most especially Alcaeus and Sappho).

‘I no longer look upon Theocritus as a romantic writer,’ wrote Lady Montagu to Alexander Pope; ‘he has only given a plain image of the way of life amongst the peasants of his country … I don't doubt, had he been born a Briton, but his Idylliums had been filled with descriptions of thrashing and churning.’ Thanks to greater sophistication about the nature of pastoral and a better knowledge of Hellenistic poetry we have probably left behind forever the notion of Theocritus as the conveyor of a ‘plain image’ of rustic life. The alternative is not, of course, the ‘romantic’ Theocritus, but a poet of consummate literary artistry, wit, and irony.

Besides the critical commonplace of rustic realism the other stumbling block to a satisfactory appreciation of Theocritus has been the inevitable comparison with Virgil. Critics who have viewed Theocritus through lenses adjusted to Virgil have tended to emphasize the emotional complexity, inwardness, and seriousness of the Latin poet over against the outward-facing playfulness and lightness of the Greek. Theocritus certainly lacks the tension between historical reality and poetry which gives the Eclogues their special depth and poignancy; but he has a seriousness of a different sort. The simplicity and trivial realism which are sometimes attributed to the bucolic Idylls are in fact themselves part of the poetic fiction and often stand in deliberate self-contradiction with mythical elements in the form and structure of the work.

The Metamorphoses of Apuleius is now generally agreed to be much more than the collection of amusing stories in the Milesian vein that the author proclaims it. Current scholarship sees it as ‘a fable about the journey of the soul through life’, ‘the story of a soul which fell, and which suffered by reason of that fall, and which the merciful hand of Isis raised up and saved’. The eleventh book effects the metamorphosis which transforms the tales of Books 1-10 into such a fable; the kev to the interpretation of the novel in Isiac terms is seen to be the Priest's speech at 11.15, where the events leading up to Lucius' transformation (the ‘fall’ of Festugière's summary) are described as follows:

Although there can be little doubt that Theocritus invented the pastoral genre, it is not at all clear that he regarded the pastoral poems as distinct from the rest of his idylls in anything but their rural setting. The narrative-dramatic form kata lepton (‘on a small scale’), the Doric dialect and the hexameter metre, which characterize the eight authentic Pastorals — I, III-VII, X and XI — are also exhibited in the urban mimes II, XIV and XV and in the mythological pieces XVIII and XXVI.

Nor is it easy to see the emergence of a distinct pastoral genre in the work of his Hellenistic successors. For although the pseudo-Theocritean Idylls VIII, IX, XX and XXVII are clearly in the tradition and the fragments of Moschus and Bion, whatever their context may have been, are markedly pastoral in style and content, the boundaries of the genre remain indeterminate. There is for instance Id. XXIII, an isolated precedent for the Renaissance piscatory Eclogues, and the mythological pieces like Moschus' Europa and Aphrodite in search of Eros, Bion's Lament of Aphrodite for Adonis and the anonymous Bucolic fragment (Page Greek Literary Papyri no. 123). Affinities between the Pastoral and erotic poetry of other genres are confirmed by the non-pastoral Id. XXIII. Finally there are two poems that point forward to subsequent developments within the Pastoral itself. In Bion's Myrson and Lycotas the pastoral setting is but a pretty frame for the tale of Achilles on Scyros and the anonymous Lament for Bion shows the first certain instance (since the precise circumstances of Id. VII are obscure) of the use of the pastoral myth for the treatment of a topical subject, the death of an actual poet. The attribution in this poem of a distinctly pastoral poesy to the dead poet is the one firm testimony we have that a specific pastoral genre was recognized in the Hellenistic world.

The literary historian must value the opening lines of the first eclogue for many reasons but their role in the development of the rhetoric of pastoralism is especially significant. For the first time in ancient pastoral poetry two intellectual worlds are in collision, seen in the characterizations of two shepherds only one of whom is finally settled in a landscape of permanence and continuity. Tityrus remains and Meliboeus is forced to depart. It is the elaboration and significance of Tityrus' setting that I wish to consider here. In a few deft strokes Virgil's Meliboeus creates a landscape of the mind, intellectualizing what Theocritus had left as enticing framework for song and establishing a stylistic principle that proves a powerful influence on all the poet's subsequent creative efforts.

Pastoral is a contemplative form. Created in the midst of social turmoil and political convulsion, the Eclogues constitute a meditation on the emotional, intellectual and moral dislocation of contemporary man. They investigate not only the brute historical fact of the destructive impact of the politico-military world — the world of the city, of Rome — upon the country, but also the psychological chaos and spiritual impoverishment which Virgil sees as the city's legacy and the corollary of technological growth. And within the context of a world dominated by urban values they scrutinise the question of poetry's function and efficacy. They present, in short, a poetic analysis of postlapsarian man measured against the yardstick of his finest ideals and, concomitant with this, a statement of poetry's impotence.

As the third pastoral poet, Calpurnius Siculus was the first to take up the genre fully formed. For all their many differences, Theocritus and Vergil had given bucolic poetry an established frame of reference, a characteristic subject matter, and a self-contained mythology. From a poet in Calpurnius' position whose work would inevitably be measured against that of his predecessors, one would expect a certain amount of generic self-consciousness, taking such forms as an implicit evaluation of the tradition, numerous allusions and specific verbal borrowings, and, ideally, an assurance that the genre had not been exhausted, that is to say, some open-ended indication of the new directions in which pastoral might turn. The first of these elements is clearly present in the poetry, but the last remains elusive. A major imaginative influence upon his genre is something Calpurnius did not provide for antiquity. Unlike his contemporaries, Persius and Lucan, he has no conspicuous literary heir, nor do the Einsiedeln fragments or the slim corpus of Nemesianus give much proof of his having invigorated the tradition. Indeed the effect of Calpurnius upon the pastoral is rather comparable to that often assigned to Paradise Lost upon the epic: he closed it off for centuries. But this fact need not stand in the way of an evaluation of the poet's artistry, nor originality. My argument in this paper is that Calpurnius' originality in adapting the pastoral tradition to his own sense of the temper of the Neronian Age was so extreme as to constitute a reluctant denial of the validity of pastoral mythology for contemporary Rome.