Thomas J. Nelson (University of Cambridge)
The pseudo-Theocritean Idyll 23 is a morbid poem: a perverted paraclausithryon which narrates the deaths of both a spurned exclusus amator and the hard-hearted boy who is the target of his love. The poem has been roundly criticized by modern scholars: in the view of Gow, it is “wretched writing” (1952 II:413) and “the least attractive [poem] in the whole Theocritean corpus” (1952 II:408; cf. Kyriakou 2018:122). In this paper, however, I suggest that the poem is in fact intentionally unattractive: it pointedly embraces the murky and the grimy in direct opposition to the sweet and pleasurable aesthetics of Theocritean bucolic.
To make this argument, I first expose the poem’s sophisticated manipulation of its literary heritage to demonstrate that Gow’s accusations of shoddy composition are misplaced. Previous scholarship has noted the Idyll’s adaptation of key paraclausithryon motifs (Copley 1940) and its intertextual reuse of Moschus and Bion (Radici Colace 1971), but here instead I focus on the poem’s engagement with a range of generic paradigms: epic, tragedy and epigram. The opening description of the exclusus amator as an ἀνήρ τις πολύφιλτρος (23.1) positions him immediately against Odysseus (ἄνδρα … πολύτροπον, Odyssey 1.1), an epic model who – as I show – serves as an implicit foil throughout the poem; the deaths of both characters evoke the world of tragedy (the lover’s hanging; the beloved’s marriage to death; the vengeance of love; cf. Sistakou 2016:206-11); and the language at various points recalls that of inscribed, sepulchral, and amatory epigram. The poem is familiar with the common aesthetic strategies of Alexandrian poetics, whose rules it can both follow and break.
After establishing the poem’s aesthetic awareness, I then interrogate what I call its distinctively “stony aesthetic”. The poem is dominated by both the literal and metaphorical language of hardness. The elusive eromenos is a “stony child” (λάινε παῖ, 23.20), who is cruel and harsh (e.g. 23.1 ἀπηνέος…ἐφάβω, 23.48 ἀπηνέα). But the surrounding scenery is also dominated by a strong emphasis on the materiality of stone: the lover writes on his beloved’s stone wall (τοίχοισι, 23.46) and hangs himself from the stone lintel (λίθον, 23.49, 50); in turn, the boy jumps from a stone platform into a pool (λαϊνέας…κρηπῖδος, 23.58–9), and is killed by a stone statue that falls on top of him (τὤγαλμα, 23.60). I argue that this pervasive dominance of literal and metaphorical duritia articulates the stony aesthetic of the poem itself, which is set in opposition to the traditional sweetness of Theocritean bucolic: the boy spurns the lover’s request to do “something sweet” (ἁδύ τι, 23.35), a loaded phrase that echoes not only the opening words of Idyll 1, but also a recurring aesthetic motif of the bucolic tradition (e.g. Idyll 5.89, 8.82; Moschus, Ep.Bion 120; Bion fr.2.2). In an explicit denunciation of mainstream Hellenistic aesthetics, the poem and its author thus reject the very attractiveness that Gow so longed for, and instead embrace the hard, the stony, and the wretched – a very different vision of Hellenistic poetics.