A moment in Tom Stoppard's post-pastoral Arcadia suggests a way into the pre-pastoral scene of Theocritus' first Idyll. Stoppard's play generates two narratives that are divided by almost two hundred years, yet linked by identity of location. The estate of Sidley Park, soon to be ‘gothicised’, houses overlaid stories from past and present that separately inhabit the same room until they finally achieve simultaneous existence on stage. In this exchange from 1809, Lady Croom is looking over the plan to transform her gardens; Thomasina is her ‘pert’ daughter:

LADY CROOM: But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged—in short, it is as God intended, and I can say with the painter, ‘Et in Arcadia ego!’

‘Here I am in Arcadia,’ Thomasina.
THOMASINA: Yes, mama, if you would have it so.
LADY CROOM: Is she correcting my taste or my translation?
THOMASINA: Neither are beyond correction, mama, but it was your geography caused the doubt.

Why does the Propertian speaker include a celebration of Rome, Elegy 3.22, in his third book of love elegies? Why does he address himself to Tullus, a name that appeared the last time in Elegy 1.22, the closing poem of the Mono-biblos? By paying attention to the nature of the elegy's topic rather than to the nature of the elegiac discourse, past and current Propertian scholarship fails to recognise the subtle and, at first sight, hidden links between the praise of Rome, the choice of the addressee, and the Propertian speaker's effort to re-locate himself in the realm of elegiac love and poetry in Elegy 3.22.

Past scholarship has read Elegy 3.22 either as a palinode to Elegy 3.21, the Propertian speaker's decision to leave Rome, or as an indication that Cynthia has been substituted by Rome as another theme. The latter interpretation entailed a discussion about whether Elegy 3.22 should be considered pro- or anti-Augustan or a sincere but unsuccessful elegiac tribute to Rome. All contributions offer hermeneutic readings that stem from a time before the critical tools of the ‘New Latin’ movement provided new possibilities for the re-contextuali ation of Roman poetry. Furthermore, both the past and the most recent interpretations of Elegy 3.22 are theme-centred as they focus on the praise of Rome, and not on the nature of the Propertian speaker's discourse.

The quotation in the title comes from one of Hamlet's famous soliloquies (‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I…’); it expresses his reaction to the fact that the Player reciting Aeneas' tale of the sack of Troy has broken down in tears as he describes the fate of this classical mater dolorosa:

Is it not monstrous that this Player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his whole conceit,
That from her working, all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

The thesis of this paper is that the void, the sense of emptiness, created by some form of loss, is, to a considerable extent, filled and bridged by a number of activities and motifs that pervade the Dionysiaca. Nonnus projects a vision of life so resonant, full and fertile that it mostly overwhelms forces and behaviour that make for sterility and emptiness. However, constant effort is needed by various individual entities to harmonise polarities, and to keep the cosmos orderly and busy spinning cycles of germination, growth, death and reseeding/rebirth. Immortals, especially deities, have a greater capacity to relieve their own bereavements, separations and loss, including the gaining of forms of immortality for favoured individuals. For most mortals, reminders of the nature and power of life's eternal flow is no guarantee of individual post-mortem survival or of the healing of wounds incurred by the loss of someone or something precious. But the intimations of immortality and the resources for solace and recovery are persistent and insistent in Nonnus' narrative.