The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  They owe their glory to a poet, the man of Chios

  Who took for theme Priam’s city, the Achaean ships,

  The battles round Troy, and Achilles, tower of the field.

  I, too, offer tokens of the clear-voiced Muses …

  This idyll relates to the Homeric and later hymns, that unbroken tradition which flowers again in Callimachus’ six poems. In recovering the legendary and archaic, the Alexandrian poets turned to the hymn tradition as an unalloyed source not only of materials but of forms. Such formal appropriation and allusion is integral to their sense of shaping and authenticating matter and tone. “Poems which reconstruct and adapt the past are, in two senses, a kind of historical writing,” says Richard Hunter. “The past, here represented by an earlier text, is seen through the new text, so that both ends of a historical process are displayed.”6 Joining the past poem with the new one is part of structuring, he adds. It is “to some extent their very purpose.”

  The connection between Homeric Hymn XXXIII, “To the Dioscuri,” and the opening of Idyll XXII, is instructive. The earlier poem is a prayer, the later adds narrative, aetiology, and a set of contrasts, or agons, not only in narrative but in narrative style, contrasts which underline the paradox of the poem’s “moral,” that whatever the gods do is right, even when it is wrong. Men and gods have become hard to distinguish: the Dioscuri, the Ptolemies. Comparable moral cruelty marks the end of Idyll XXVI, “The Bacchae,” which tells the same story as Euripides’ play. Pentheus spies on the Bacchantes’ ritual. They catch him and dismember him: his mother wrenches off his head, his aunts his arms; he is torn asunder. Rejecting emotion, rejecting “natural feeling,” the poem declares: Pentheus transgressed, his doom was just.7

  Most of the poems are composed in hexameters, but the hexameter had changed in balance, volume, suppleness, allusiveness. Not only the classical narratives but the new bucolic note that Theocritus strikes, and for which over many centuries he was most celebrated, was original. What would the poetic beginnings have made of these ends: moon-faced Hesiod, peering over the wall into a Theocritean pasture? Theocritus’ rustic world, like that of his imitators Moschus, also of Syracuse, and Bion of Smyrna, and of other urban and urbane shepherds of later ages in Rome and in Europe, was scented with something other than sweat and manure. Here the reader experiences not the awful daily boredom and discomfort of real shepherds, but cultured leisure, subtly metered, with pretty, kempt shepherdesses, fluffy livestock, rich harvests which seem to tumble of their own accord into the barns. And winter? Not this year. Death happens and provides the pretext for a delicious, protracted plangency. And no matter how many pipes and flutes are mentioned, the poetry is not accompanied by literal music. The music is as much a fiction as the pastures, goats and sheep are.

  Hesiod, who spoke plainly to his ne’er-do-well brother Perses, to the Muses and the gods, would have been similarly forthright with Theocritus, though the Syracusan was a type of man remote from any he had ever met. Is this, he might have asked, the last chapter of my once hard-bitten tradition? In early times poets were accosted by the Muses, who filled them with grace by making use of them: poets were vehicles through which the Muses spoke. Now the Muses are at best an archaising trope to serve the poet, the gods have receded along with the actual stones and dust of the fields and the panting, scrawny reality of real midsummer sheep. This is not the end of the Hesiodic tradition but the beginning of something else. Or else agriculture and landscape have evolved beyond recognition in a short five centuries. Theocritus’ idyll is a fantasy of rural life, a travesty of the rural world. The poet is no longer a preceptor, delivering practical and moral wisdom in memorable language, disclosing the mysteries of the origin of the world and the hierarchies of the gods. Now lambing and shearing and milking and herding, sowing and tending and harvesting, binding the vines, pruning the olives, and all the drab, brutish dailiness and nightliness of rural life have been refined away. This is not unlike Paradise, or Eden retrieved.

  Bowra insists that Theocritus loved “the country,” unlike, he says, Callimachus.8 If he loved the country, why is there not more weather? The very expression “he loved the country” is a sentimental anachronism. In the bucolic idylls, the duties of men to one another and to the gods are more or less forgotten. The skies are blue, the grass green. Such conflicts as exist are staged and resolved. What starts with Theocritus, not with the didactic literalist Hesiod, is a pastoral tradition, and we tend to look back at his bucolic poems and distort them through lenses he ground in the first place. “Bucolic” is a term Theocritus introduces in Idyll I to describe the kind of poem he is writing. It derives from the word for cowherd. The sense came to include sheep herds and goatherds as well. In Idyll VII, the most complex and rewarding of the bucolic poems, Simichidas, whom critics take to be the voice of Theocritus himself, invents a verb: to bucolicate, or make herdsmen’s songs.9

  The emergence of bucolic poetry as a distinct genre marks a “dissociation of sensibility,” the break between a fundamentally urban and a rural, or rurally informed, imagination. Once a city reached a certain size, a break was inevitable and transactions between city and countryside necessarily and fundamentally changed. The bumpkin, the rural innocent, the melodious and romantic herdsman all come of age in a poetry which is more escapist than nostalgic, since it reflects not a lost order but an idealised one. Theocritus’ best modern translator, Robert Wells, insists too much on the poet’s “realism,” as though acknowledging invention would somehow devalue the verse. He repeats the seventeenth-century view that Theocritus “keeps too close to the clown.”10 Is it realism to portray rural people as hicks? Only from a resolutely urban perspective. How much banter, wit and verbal humour occurred in actual meetings between shepherds?

  Proximity to the clown is a negative aspect of Theocritean idealisation. We do not pretend that caricature is realistic when it emphasises a nose, moles and beetling brows, displacing the natural balance of a face. Idealisation can lead to sentimentalism and, as the urban sensibility takes hold, to the intolerable condescension from which Wordsworth decisively delivers the countryman and the tradition two millennia later. What Wells calls the “paradox of graceful clumsiness” is part of the problem of pastoral: the grace belongs inevitably to the language and is attributable to the poet; the clumsiness belongs to the subject he is describing—or whose stereotype he is invoking. It is less a paradox than a natural divorce, as in all parodic forms, between the delivery and the thing said. A decorative anguish can be great poetry, but it is not to be confused with actual anguish. Daphnis in Idyll I is no more grieved for than Milton’s Lycidas: elegy is a pretext, the text is something else. “Even when Theocritus takes up an ancient legend about Daphnis, who must have been a kind of year-god”—why must?—“he scales it down to a touching and not too disturbing pathos.”11 There is an aloof unkindness in making death a pretext, or the pained lover risible, however “scaled down” the tragedy or the passion, however genteel and forgiving the laughter. In the end bucolic poetry and its pastoral legacy patronise intimate feeling because they are inherently parodic. They contribute to the sceptic’s and the stoic’s cause: disbelieve it, or control it.

  Idyll I, of all Theocritus’ poems, has the clearest legacy in Greek, Latin and European poetry. It stands behind Bion’s “Adonis” and Moschus’s “Bion,” it marks the poetry of Virgil and Catullus, it prefigures “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adonais” and Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” The theme is less Daphnis’ death than elegy itself: Theocritus’ conceit is that one shepherd begs another to recite a favourite song. The poem proposes a kind of hierarchy: at the bottom a nameless Coan goat-herd, suppliant and willing to pay for the performance; and above him the talented sheep-herd Thyrsis, from far-off Aetna in Sicily (he may be another stand-in for Sicilian Theocritus). The dialogue between goatherd and shepherd frames the elegy. Each enjoins the other to perform and the goatherd prevails, inducing Thyrsis to sing the old favourite the “Passion of Daphni
s.” He has offered Thyrsis a very good fee: a nanny goat producing copious milk and a wooden cup richly sculpted.

  The cup itself is an interesting artefact. Carved ivy runs around the rim, and below it three panels are arrayed: a woman courted by two lovers, her “kindly indifference” to both; an aged fisherman with a heavy net; beyond him, a vineyard in which a boy stands guard and two foxes circle, one to steal his quarter-loaf, while unaware he fashions a cricket cage. The cup is brightly coloured. Poets may not receive payment from tyrants and rich patrons, but here in the pasture a simple goatherd is willing to part with his all for a few minutes’ exquisite song. Wells compares the descriptions of the cup, with its discrete panels, to the structuring of the sequence idyll by idyll: each a separate sections, yet relating to the poems before and after.

  If the poem is taken as a whole and compared with other idylls, the Pindaric strophe, antistrophe and epode structure of the epinicean odes comes to mind. Many of the idylls divide into three or six natural sections, and the form, though attenuated and subtilised, seems to integrate the poems. In the second part of this idyll, Thyrsis performs his “Lament for Daphnis,” a song which feels familiar to English readers because of “Lycidas” and other elegies. Daphnis dies of unrequited love. Hermes comes, then Aphrodite. She teases Daphnis and he taunts her in return with Anchises, Adonis, her mortal loves. He bids farewell to Aetna (because, like Thyrsis, he too is a Sicilian shepherd) and urges Pan to leave Greece for Sicily. He envisages a nature turned topsy-turvy with his death, and then he dies, and even Aphrodite cannot rouse him. The lament is lovely and light, with a charmed refrain.

  After dialogue and lament, the third part of the idyll, the epode as it were, consists of Thyrsis peremptorily demanding his fee. The plangent notes have hardly died down before he declares, “Now give me the goat and the carved cup.” And the goatherd gratefully and promptly obliges. We have been party to a simple, graceful, unclumsy poetic transaction.

  Theocritus’ bucolic poems—just under half of his surviving corpus—inhabit a world designed by sentiment on a kind of Platonic template. Inevitably, for all their elegance of expression, even the vivid recollection of open-air buggery in Idyll V, “Goatherd and Shepherd,” has a designer feel. The poem is set in the south of Italy, in the instep. Comatas looks after the goats and Lacon the sheep. They start arguing, then gamble a kid against a lamb in a singing competition. It is dialogue-cum-debate, like the famous contest of Hesiod and Homer, with an equally dubious outcome. Comatas, the elder, claims to have taught Lacon to sing. What kind of singing? How did he teach him?

  When I buggered you I taught you to moan and groan

  Like a nanny bleating when the billy shoves it in.

  After more insults or home truths are exchanged, Morson, on his way from town, turns up and both contestants accept him as judge. Now that they have an audience, the second section begins. Lacon clearly inclines to lad love (Cratidas being his particular favourite) while Comatas likes girls. But Comatas recalls, a second time, buggering Lacon.

  Remember the time I bent you over that tree,

  How you wriggled, grimaced and pushed back hard on me?

  In the third section, the time for prizes arrives and Morson rewards Comatas, requesting a slice of lamb when the time of sacrifice arrives. Morson all along has had his mind more on the eventual feast than on the actual contest. The judge has been pre-emptively corrupted.

  Such writing beguiles and persuades, but what it contains of rusticity, real in context, is not realistic. Critics who love Theocritus but are uncertain of his legacy insist on the actuality of his geography and try to tease out an answerable, literal world. Conditioned by a poetic tradition in which—hitherto—word has answered deed and object, even though in increasingly attenuated ways, they are reluctant to accept that in Theocritus, who suffers less acutely the formal strains and stresses of Callimachus or Apollonius, a crucial shift has occurred: the poetry exists in and for the illusions it creates in a language no longer necessarily earthed in contingencies.

  Behind the deliberately coarse Doric diction and forms Theocritus devised from his native dialect for the bucolic poems there are, some critics affirm, echoes of actual “folk” material, rural song, traditional rhymes.12 Such elements are detected at the root of Stesichorus’ Sicilian verses, too. In Theocritus, “The effect is perfectly calculated, and derives not least from a three-way incongruity between the speaker and subject-matter, linguistic register, and literary form.”13 If indeed a long battle between mythos and logos was in progress, however, bucolic poets removed themselves from the battlefield into a buzzy, breezy parallel universe.14 Sir Kenneth Dover tells us that Theocritus delighted in building “a sophisticated construction on a popular foundation.”15 Would his poems have appealed to a shepherd or a common seaman? No, they are intended for readers rather than for popular recital. Would peasant or sailor have recognised their contribution to the “sophisticated construction”? If so, they might have resented the implicit condescension.

  It seems unlikely that, in anything other than an allusive way, the bucolic idylls drew upon a rustic rural or oral tradition. They are poems based upon earlier poems, in a language deliberated not on a hillside but among the twists and coils of books in a library or on a terrace among professional men—doctors, lawyers, public officials—with a view of pastures and fields, livestock and herdsmen, about whom the poems purport to be. The transposition of polite dialogue from terrace or library on to these common figures was a pleasant task: what was particular became characteristic, the occasion moved from a contingent to a universal world. The point of bucolic poetry is that it is fiction, and as in all fiction the aim is to make it credible rather than literal. What might be realistic is the “courtesies of speech” which occur in the dialogue poems,16 but such courtesies belong to the “polite” classes. “The truth in his poems,” says Wells “lies between the speakers rather than with any single voice.”17 The use of proverbs grounds the poems in seeming folk wisdom, but the proverbs occur in a context which translates, and a dialect which refines them, assuming they were proverbs in the first place. It is possible that they are Theocritus’ invention or are sourced not in the fields but in preceding poems, including Hesiod’s.

  Much is made of the actuality of Theocritus’ paths and landmarks. The long walk the shepherds take in Idyll VII is as readily traceable on Cos, pedestrian critics declare, as Leopold Bloom’s way through Dublin. The shepherds’ voices are credible, they add, even though the Doric dialect is synthetic and no one ever spoke it. There are no texts of folk-songs to corroborate the critics’ argument. Would folk metres have resembled the metres of the idylls (do popular Scottish and English ballad metres resemble blank verse?), would the spoken or sung diction relate in any way to the refined diction of the poems? Theocritus has left us writing, not song. Verse and music had been moving apart: the greater the weight of “meaning”—in the theatre, in the victory ode—the more the volume of the music had to be turned down, until it survived only in the patterning of verbal sounds, in metre, in repetitions and the formal rounds of the language itself. The divorce from music in written poems is complete, though they remember and acknowledge one another by fond allusion. A deliberate, walker’s reading of an idyll, following the very route the poem follows, hardly makes voices and incidents more actual. Even the pipes are, in a literal sense, silent: readers must conjure from the language another music, another world.

  Such conjuring is pleasurable, nowhere more so than in Idyll VII, “The Harvest Festival.” Richard Hunter compares its form to Plato’s Lysis and Phaedrus, notes that the meeting with Lycidas is modelled on Homeric meetings, and draws attention to echoes of the proeme of Hesiod’s Theogony.18 It is a poem made of earlier poetry, and no less valid for that. Simichidas declares that his words have got through even to Zeus, who might be taken to be the divine Ptolemy Philadelphus addressed in Idyll XVII. If Zeus is Ptolemy and Simichidas is Theocritus, identities may be sought for ot
her characters in this leisurely idyll. Some scholars argue that it provides evidence for a Coan school of poets.

  The narrator Simichidas and two friends are walking to Haleis, where other rural friends are to offer first fruits at the festival of Demeter. En route they meet with rustic Lycidas. Simichidas in the nicest of terms challenges Lycidas to a singing contest. Lycidas declares his settled dislike for overreaching poets and for those who feel they must compete with Homer. He agrees to the contest and delivers his poem first. It is about wishing an absent friend well and it is also about Daphnis’ hopeless love for Xenea. And about Comatas, locked in a box and fed by bees for a whole season because of the sweetness of his musical lips.

  Simichidas declares that he too has been a shepherd and begins his song. He chooses Myrto, trots after her, but his friend Aratus is in love with the lad Philenus; and just as Lycidas has prayed for his friend’s deliverance from the box, so Simichidas prays that Philenus may lie unresisting beside Aratus. Should Pan fail to answer his prayer, Simichidas will invoke terrible punishments on the god and on the disobliging lad. It is a heated poem, and Simichidas wins the contest. Lycidas gives him his crook and exits, cheerful in defeat. The others continue on to Demeter’s feast and find a lush and relaxing scene, hardly ceremonial, strewn about in the grass, with fruit at every hand. They join in. The wine is especially rewarding. The poem ends with a prayer for next year’s ceremony, just as Idyll XV does.