Vergil's Pastoral Modes

Abstract

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.