Tori Lee (Duke University)
The bucolic landscape as we know it is a peaceful paradise far from the troubles and toils of city life—for men. Our prevailing notion of the pastoral is based on a scholarly tradition that is almost as male as the ancient authors themselves. From the perspectives of women, I argue, the pastoral world is a much darker place, where sexual violence is the rule, not the exception. In this paper, I focus on instances of sexual assault and violence in non-Vergilian pastoral poetry—in particular, work by Theocritus, Calpurnius Siculus, and Nemesianus—that range from crude sexual humor and vulgar language to domestic violence, emotional abuse, and rape by multiple offenders.
As Fantuzzi and Papanghelis observe at the opening of their companion to Greek and Latin pastoral, “it is hard to think of pastoral without conjuring up a vision of idyllic landscape, idealized nature and musically idle shepherds” (vii). Yet if we shift our focalization from those shepherds to the women with whom they interact, a question emerges: the pastoral may be idyllic, but for whom? In 2020, Paraskeviotis undertook the first study to focus solely on the women characters in Calpurnius Siculus, arguing that Calpurnius uses them as tools of generic innovation in order to distinguish his work from previous pastoral poetry. In this talk, I take the next step, focalizing bucolic poetry from the perspective of its female characters so as to show how limited these women are in their speech and bodily autonomy.
The Theocritean corpus features instances of crude humor (Idyll 4), sexual invective (Idyll 5), and rape (Idyll 27). In Idyll 27, a pseudo-Theocritean bucolic idyll, the maiden Acrotime fights off advances from the shepherd Daphnis by spitting out his forced kisses (ἀποπτύω τὸ φίλαμα, 5), directing him to remove his hands from beneath her clothing (τεὴν πάλιν ἔξελε χεῖρα, 51), and telling him simply to stop after he strips off her garments (μίμνε, τάλαν… εἰμὶ δὲ γυμνά, 57-59). As for imperial pastoral, Calpurnius Siculus’s third eclogue depicts domestic violence against Phyllis and emotionally abusive threats of suicide leveled at her by Lycidas; Phyllis is not given the direct speech that Acrotime enjoys, so her male attacker controls the entire narrative of her assault and abuse. The girl in Nemesianus’s second eclogue, Donace, similarly lacks a voice, so that readers must watch her silently endure gang rape.
Clear as these depictions of sexual violence are, it is still thought that “sex is both pastoral and elegiac, but there is a very clear sense in which rape or near-rape is an elegiac rather than a pastoral motif…” (Fulkerson 32). By shifting the focalization of these non-Vergilian pastoral poems from male to female and critically reexamining our discipline’s androcentric scholarship on pastoral literature, I argue for a new understanding of the pastoral world that is anything but idyllic. This paper brings visibility to pastoral women and explores the generic and scholarly constraints that have allowed their abuse to remain hidden for so long in plain sight.