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)

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.

‘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.

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.