This companion to Theocritus is a useful and very full guide with much to offer experienced readers as well as those new to the poet. The three editors deserve thanks for what must have been enormous efforts, disrupted (as they point out, ix) by the recent pandemic.
It is also huge, even by the standards of Brill companions: pp. xix + 832, 1590 g and cumbersome to read (but many will doubtless read it via online subscriptions). There are 33 chapters (by 32 authors: co-editor Poulheria Kyriakou contributed two chapters), each with its own bibliography, organized in six parts. My comments are necessarily selective, and many good chapters go unmentioned.
The introduction is by Alexandros Kampakoglou (also the author of Chapter 10, on Theocritus and lyric): a useful and learned introduction to the recent history of Theocritean scholarship which would be an excellent read for a doctoral student beginning to work on Theocritus (and for many others).
The first part is ‘Author and Text’. Tom Phillips’ ‘A Poet’s Lives’ is excellent on how and why Idylls 1, 3 and 7 provoke biographical readings (but there is little to tell a less-informed reader about what ancient sources say about Theocritus’ life). The gist of Claudio Meliadò’s chapter on text and transmission can be illustrated by a memorable section heading ‘Hyperarchetype, Archetypes, and Hyparchetypes: An Almost Incoercible Chaos’; Olga Tribulato, in a useful chapter, is similarly cautious about transmission of dialect. Jan Kwapisz on ‘Forms of Theocritean Poetry’ considers the meaning of the term eidullion (‘Idyll’) and the real or apparent unity of the collection, anticipating concerns of the following section on ‘Genres and Models’.
Given the complexity of the topic this second part is extensive, with seven chapters (and room for more: Richard Hunter’s chapter on Theocritus’ Homer treats only the bucolic poems, with an engaging focus on ancient responses to Polyphemus’ ram as the first section, while tragedy is shoe-horned in at the end of Christophe Cusset’s useful treatment of Theocritus and comedy). I found Taylor S. Coughlan’s treatment of the Theocritean epigrams especially strong. Alexander Sens’ excellent chapter on hymns and ‘epyllia’ includes readings of Ptolemaic ideology in treatments of Heracles, the Dioscuri and Dionysus and an interesting section on intertextual readings involving Apollonius of Rhodes.
Part 3, ‘Poetics and Aesthetics’, starts with Lara Pagani’s useful account of what is (and is not) known about ancient scholarship on Theocritus, then moves to aesthetic issues and an account of the contest poems (Karl-Heinz Stanzel) and the ‘programmatic’ Idylls 1 and 7 (Jacqueline Klooster). Evina Sistakou’s paper on Theocritean ‘sweetness’ includes an intriguing account of Theocritean and Callimachean aesthetics and their interaction. The chapter by Évelyne Prioux on Theocritus and the visual arts (with several photographs) is exceptionally useful, rich and intriguing.
The next part is on ‘Narratives and Themes’, while the fifth is on ‘Contexts and Topics’: it did not seem especially clear why, for example, childhood and youth counted as a theme and women counted as a topic. Chapters include A.D. Morrison in a wide-ranging account of myth and narrative, and a sophisticated and stimulating treatment of Theocritean spaces by William G. Thalmann. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes’ chapter on Theocritus and his contemporaries is dense and rich and repays careful reading (note a novel reading of the tree frog at 7.139–40: I am unconvinced that τρύζω (‘mutter, murmur’) represents a pleasant sound, and I think τηλόθεν (‘from far away’) is a key word: pleasant noises are nearby, an unpleasant one far away). Theocritus emerges as an engaged participant in a shared, reactive dialogue between the poets of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Dee L. Clayman’s treatment of rulers and patrons ends with a new reading of Idyll 16 as a satire or parody rather than a true encomium of Hieron. I was not entirely persuaded but every student of that poem will need to engage with this argument. Frederick T. Griffiths’ account of ‘Theocritus’ intercultural poetics’ is a useful guide to the debate on how much his poems engage with non-Hellenic Egyptian culture, but non-committal in its conclusions. Ivana Petrovic is informative and valuable on gods and ritual (including magic) and the movement from this part to the next is effected between the two contributions by Kyriakou: the first on women in Theocritus (interesting readings comparing Simaetha with tragic models), and the second on ps.-Theocritus, starting the final part on ‘Imitation and Reception’.
This sixth part could have been expanded almost indefinitely; we get five papers on ancient and two on modern reception. There is inevitably a list-like, survey quality to some of the writing here, but Joseph D. Reed especially gets past this in a fascinating treatment of Theocritean encomium and the significance of Egypt in Augustan ideology. Thomas K. Hubbard ranges across European tradition in his learned account of ‘simple Theocritus’ from the 16th to 18th centuries, whereas the last chapter by Juan C. Pellicer focuses on English poetry of the 19th century and is thus able to slow down more.
In the (atypical) experience of reading the whole, there is often a sense that the same passages and similar observations about them come up more than once (bound to happen sometimes), provoking the thought that an equally good companion might have been shorter. This need not matter for a selective reader, but cross-references are infrequent where they are present at all, and it would have helped to provide more. There is a useful general index, though I think a better one would help more, and a thorough index locorum.
All papers are in English, and all Greek is translated; some translate Theocritus themselves, some use Neil Hopkinson’s Loeb Theocritus, Moschus, Bion (Cambridge MA 2015) and some use A.S.F. Gow’s Theocritus (Cambridge 1952). In my view, the last should have been avoided. Despite his great scholarship, Gow’s archaicizing English does no favours to first-language anglophone readers and, I imagine, is even more unhelpful to others.
This excellent volume is a great achievement by contributors and editors alike.
