Leanna Boychenko (Loyola University Chicago)
This paper argues that Theocritus’ Idyll One shows direct influence from the Ancient Egyptian “Herdsman’s Tale,” adding an important dimension to our understanding of Daphnis’ relationship with Aphrodite in the poem, as well as Theocritus’ corpus as a whole. While scholars have acknowledged the political importance of Theocritus’ poetry to the Ptolemies (Hunt; Stephens 2003, 2006), the influence of Egyptian literature on Theocritus’ poems has been neglected. Indeed, Theocritus’ poetry has been traditionally read as almost entirely divorced from Egypt and wholly understandable in a purely Greek context (Asper; Griffiths). In this paper, I first introduce the “Herdsman’s Tale,” before examining Idyll One’s parallel themes, plot, and setting. I then then argue that the “Herdsman’s Tale” can shed light on Daphnis’ interaction with Aphrodite in Idyll One.
The “Herdsman’s Tale,” dated to Egypt’s 12th dynasty (1991-1778 BCE; Vernus 185), is highly fragmentary, but the basic story is clear: a cowherd tells his fellow herdsmen the story of his encounter with a seductive, awe-inspiring goddess. After urging the men to move their cattle across the river, he sings a protective “water song.” The main fragment ends with a second divine encounter, in which the goddess has taken a gentler form (Escolano-Poveda). The goddess likely represents the two sides of Egypt’s Wandering Goddess, the vengeful, dangerous eye associated with the lion-goddess Sekhmet, and the protective, maternal goddess associated with goddesses like Isis and Hathor (Darnell 25; Goebs, Baines 664).
Many parallels to the “Herdsman’s Tale” can be found in Idyll One: a cowherd protagonist, divine epiphany, embedded song, a watery setting, and most importantly, a fateful encounter with a goddess. The Egyptian herdsman is both drawn to and repelled by the goddess, just as Daphnis has a complicated relationship with Aphrodite, who may be the object of his fatal love (Anagnostou-Laoutides, Konstan), but is at least in some way tied to his death (95-141). I argue that Aphrodite’s conflicted attitude toward Daphnis, long the subject of scholarly debate (Gow 2.21; Vaughn; Crane; Hunter), echoes the two aspects of the Egyptian goddess.
Thyrsis, the singer of Daphnis’ tale, identifies himself as Sicilian (65) and the embedded song is unambiguously set in Sicily (67-8), but Theocritus alludes to a broader bucolic tradition in which the “Sorrows of Daphnis” are frequently sung (19-24; Hunter) and Thyrsis has competed against at least one singer from Libya (24). While Cyrene, in Libya, was long part of the Greek world, the mention of “Libya” reminds the reader of the larger Hellenistic world encompassing both Libya and Egypt. There is a long Greek tradition of singing herdsmen in poetry, stretching back to Hesiod’s initiation by the Muses in the Theogony, but that may be, in fact, only one side of the story. Given how essential Idyll One is as a programmatic poem and introduction to the Theocritean corpus (Hunter 60-61), it would be irresponsible to ignore the influence of the culture and literature of the land in which Theocritus was writing and Egypt’s literary tradition of goddesses and herdsmen.