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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
Theocritus' poem on the women celebrating the festival of Adonis (Idyll 15) has received surprisingly little attention over the years, especially when compared with other Theocritean Idylls of like length. Matthew Arnold's notorious rhapsody (‘a page torn fresh out of the book of human life. What freedom! What animation! What gaiety! What naturalness! … When such is Greek poetry of the decadence, what must be Greek poetry of the prime?’) has perhaps done more harm than good, by focusing attention too exclusively on the first hundred lines or so of the poem (and indeed Arnold himself was of the opinion that the hymn to Adonis at vv. 100ff. contains ‘of religious emotion, in our acceptation of the words, and of the comfort springing from religious emotion, not a particle’). And yet the poem is second only to Euripides' Bacchae as a document revealing the ways in which religion in the ancient Greek world could offer women an escape (however temporary) from the drab banalities of their everyday existence. And the central contrast between the eternal and idealized glamour of the world of myth and the time-bound existence of Praxinoa and Gorgo (a contrast which is crucial for the above-mentioned role of religion) is absolutely characteristic of one essential aspect of Hellenistic poetry, an aspect that looks back to the world of Euripides and forward to that of Roman poets like Catullus or Propertius. In this paper I shall examine both these features of the Idyll. Also, inspired by those scholars who have illuminated facets of the Dionysiac religion by adducing comparable (if secular) twentieth-century material, I shall try to achieve something similar for Theocritus' poem by drawing on comparative material from late twentieth-century Japan relating to a phenomenon that allows Japanese housewives temporary escape from a tedious and restricted way of life.
1. The best recent treatment is by Hutchinson, G. O., Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford, 1988), pp. 150–2Google Scholar. But perhaps it is still possible to place the poem in a slightly different (and wider) context, which is what I attempt here.
2. In his essay ‘Pagan and medieval religious sentiment’ (Essays in Criticism, 1st series, (1900) p. 205). A serious shortcoming of this approach to the poem is that it overlooks the crucial contrast between reality and the ideal world of myth which gives the whole idyll its unity: thus ‘Gorgo and Praxinoe, within the enchanted bounds of Theocritus’ poem, never will be sick and sorry, never can be sick and sorry. The ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan life is not sick or sorry' (p. 206: italics mine).
3. See especially Griffiths, F. T., Theocritus at Court (Mnemos. Suppl. 55 (1979)), p. 116fGoogle Scholar.
4. I think, e.g., of Bremmer, J. N., ‘Greek Maenadism Reconsidered’, ZPE 55 (1984), 267ff.Google Scholar, who closes his article with a comparison (p. 286) between the maenadic ritual which helped woman to endure ‘their dull and isolated existence’ and the ‘integrative’ effect within modern social life of the Saturday night disco.
5. JHS 58 (1938), 202Google Scholar.
6. As cited in the previous note: ‘the hymn is professedly composed as well as performed by the singer, whose forte, we may suppose, is rather singing than composing … [Theocritus] may … have written it not by his standards, but by hers. … The extravagant commendations of “the incorrigible Gorgo”, are more amusing … if they are bestowed upon a work which, to a more cultivated taste, does not deserve them.’
7. Theocritus, Select Poems (London, 1971), pp. 209–10Google Scholar.
8. See Bulloch, A. in Cambridge History of Classical Literature i (Greek), p. 580Google Scholar, Hutchinson, (op. cit. [n. 1], p. 151)Google Scholar.
9. Op. cit. [n. 7], p. 198. We may perhaps compare the effect of Soph, . Track. 402ffGoogle Scholar. where the colloquial exchanges of Lichas and the herald set off by contrast the elevated and dignified tone of Deianeira's, rhesis at 436ffGoogle Scholar. (see my note ad loc).
10. Hutchinson, (op. cit. [n. 1], pp. 152–3)Google Scholar, who associates it (p. 150) with other passages in Theocritus where ‘we find the juxtaposition of beauty with low or grotesque rustic elements’. Similar juxtapositions were taken over by the Roman poets (e.g. Vergil who in Eel. 6 sets the poignant story of Pasiphae in the mouth of fat, old Silenus and achieves something similar in Georg. 4 with Proteus and the story of Orpheus).
11. Op. cit. [n. 1], p. 153.
12. Pomeroy, S. B., Women in Hellenistic Egypt (New York, 1984) p. 36Google Scholar.
13. I owe my initial knowledge of the phenomenon in question to a remarkable television documentary first shown on BBC2 on June 26 1994.
14. That Adonis represents (like Daphnis, in Idyll 1Google Scholar) a new kind of hero from popular sources, contrasting with Epic and Tragic counterparts, may explain the nature of vv. 137ff., a passage variously denounced as e.g. ‘clumsy and perfunctory’ (Gow op. cit., n. 5), or ‘a clumsy rampage through mythology’ (Dover op. cit., n. 7). The heroes in question, who are being unfavourably compared with Adonis since (unlike him) they did not conquer death, are also the traditional heroes of earlier literature (Agamemnon, Ajax, etc.) and one expects their perfunctory dismissal in order to emphasize their inadequacy (compare the effect of Ibycus S 151 with the comments of Barron, J. P., BICS 16 [1969], 119ff)Google Scholar.
15. I may mention in passing (there is neither time nor space for a full treatment here) that the notorious effeminacy of Dionysus (see e.g. Dodds' commentary on Eur, . Bacch. 453–9Google Scholar) may be partly explicable in terms of a similar androgynous attractiveness to female followers.
16. It is characteristic of Theocritus' more bourgeois treatment of the issue of women's participation in religious rites that the practical question of what to do with the children is specifically answered at w. 40 ff, whereas in Euripides' Bacchae it is not made clear that (as Bremmer, op. cit. [n. 4], 285 observes)Google Scholar ‘the maenads were upper-class women who undoubtedly had slaves to look after the children that were left behind”.
17. On the likelihood that ‘In Theocritus bride and bridegroom [i.e. Aphrodite and Adonis] are already united, but … the couch on which they recline is not at the moment their bridal couch, though when the spectators depart and the tables are cleared it will become so’ see Gow, (op. cit. [n. 5], 200)Google Scholar.
18. See above n 16.
19. For the importance of the act of leaving home and moving on to the rigours of the mountain side in Bacchic worship see Bremmer, (op. cit. [n. 4], 285 f)Google Scholar.
20. For the journey to the palace as representing a distinct threat to the individuality of Gorgo and Praxinoa see Griffiths (op. cit. [n. 3]).
21. Arnott, W. G., G&R 28 (1981), 181Google Scholar.
22. Badly misunderstood by Barlow, S., The Imagery of Euripides (London, 1971), p. 20 as a ‘classic case of pictorial irrelevance’Google Scholar.
23. Oxford, 1939, p. xxxii.
24. By Andersen, Øivind in Homer: Beyond Oral Poetry (Amsterdam, 1985), p. 3 (cf. p. 11)Google Scholar. His treatment is a useful introduction to the whole issue of paradigmatic myth, which cannot be gone into here.
25. See e.g. Wilamowitz, , Hellenistische Dichtung ii 282Google Scholar, and now Albert, W., Das mimetische Gedicht in derAntike (Beitr. zur kl. Phil. 190 [1988Google Scholar]), passim, esp. pp. 1 ff. and 105 ff.
26. On which see, for instance, Macleod, C., ‘A Use of Myth in Ancient Poetry’, CQ 24 (1974), 82ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. = Collected Essays, pp. 159ff.