This chapter discusses two Theocritean poems. In Idyll 7 it proposes that the change from the unqualified name Amyntas at line 2 to ὁ καλὸς Ἀμύντιχος ‘the lovely dear Amyntas’ at line 132 signals a development in the narrator’s feelings for Amyntas from friendship to sexual desire. Concerning Idyll 6, it suggests that the roles assumed by the cowherds Daphnis and Damoetas in their quasi-competitive songs – that of praeceptor amoris to Polyphemus and that of Polyphemus replying – are used by them to reveal to each other their mutual desire, brought out into the open by their kiss (line 42) and by the ensuing miniature fête champêtre. It notes too that the poem’s address to Aratus leaves it open to him to interpret its exploration of hitherto unconfessed desire as bearing on his own relationship with the poet.

This chapter argues that in Theocritus Idyll 7 Lycidas falls into none of the categories listed by Dover in his 1971 commentary (ostensibly a comprehensive list) but into a category he had overlooked, that of a fictional character from another poet’s work. This other poet, I suggest, was Philitas of Cos, whose very influential early Hellenistic poetry is known only from a few fragments and from later allusions and references. Among the many things explained by this hypothesis (and it remains only a hypothesis) are the Coan setting of Idyll 7’s narrative and the erotodidactic role of Philetas in Longus. The ‘Cydonia’ given as Lycidas’ origin becomes a Cydonia some kilometres north of Mytilene on Lesbos, arguably the hill-flanked coastal plain where Longus asks readers to imagine the estates on which Daphnis and Chloe pastured goats and sheep.

After defining ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ in relation to character or behaviour and to setting, this chapter notes that, whereas the other four Greek ‘ideal’ novelists create a realistic background, whether using personal observation or historiography, Longus draws chiefly on literary texts that themselves present a fictional world (Homer and Theocritus) or one that is semi-fictional (archaic melic poetry). ‘The Country’ explores Longus’ debt to Theocritus’ landscape, especially that of Idyll 1, advertised by his preface as several steps removed from the real world. The chapter then discusses the relation of 2.32 to Theocritus 1; of 1.17.3 to Sappho and Anacreon via Theocritus 11, complicated by the term ἀληθῶς, ‘really’; and of the apple at 3.33.4 to Sappho’s epithalamia, Ibycus, and Theocritus 28. ‘The city’ explores the literary forebears of Longus’ Megacles; ‘The sea’ looks at his ‘Tyrian’ pirates’ origins in earlier novels, especially Chariton’s; and ‘Reality’ considers how his use of Thucydides underlines his own fictionality. Overall it is the chapter’s stress on the fictionality, rather than on the poetic status, of most of Longus’ intertexts that differentiates its writer’s position from those of Richard Hunter and Maria Pia Pattoni.

This chapter observes that Longus promotes an αἰπόλος, ‘goatherd’, to bear the privileged name Daphnis, transferring his canonical role of βουκόλος, ‘cowherd’, to other herdsmen – something easily done, since all play the syrinx. But Longus’ Daphnis does not inherit the capacity of the Theocritean αἰπόλος for singing mellifluous song: whereas Chloe does sing sola, Longus’ males, including Daphnis, do not, except for the cowherd in the inset tale at 1.27 and Philetas in his recollections at 2.3.2: instead they tell μῦθοι, ‘myths’. It suggests that Longus might have envisaged his own, often poetic, prose achieving what song had achieved for Theocritus’ Polyphemus, and that his elimination of male solo song was part of his programme of refashioning Sappho and Theocritus in prose. It is noted that of the three characters to whom, from a Theocritean Daphnis, the status of βουκόλος is transferred, Dorcon twice saves Daphnis, but his understanding of eros does not advance the couple’s; that of the βουκόλος Philetas does, and his advice is important; Lampis’ impact, however, like Dorcon’s, is ephemeral, and his character unpleasant. Despite Philetas’ positive role, Dorcon’s and Lampis’ actions may hint that Theocritus was wrong to privilege βουκόλοι, who in Longus can be boisterous and self-assertive, and that a society which gave cowherds free rein would be rougher than one in which standards of behaviour were set by goatherds and shepherds.

Theocritus’ Syrinx is one of the Technopaegnia, a corpus of Hellenistic and Roman calligrames with an intricate and enigmatic vocabulary. The Palaiologan scholars Maximos/Manuel Holobolos and John Pediasimos rediscovered this poem and composed commentaries for didactic purposes. The first part of this chapter delves deeper into the teaching of Holobolos, who has not received as much attention as other Palaiologan scholars. With a particular focus on his commentary on the Syrinx, it analyses Holobolos’ work on the Technopaegnia and addresses questions such as: Why was Holobolos interested in these poems? Which sources did he employ and how did he adapt them to his didactic needs? What literary competence did his students acquire by reading the Technopaegnia? The second part of the chapter explores Pediasimos’ detailed commentary on Theocritus’ Syrinx by addressing the same questions. It also deals with the scholarly context and dating of his exegetical work on the poem. The last part presents a comparative study to explore how Holobolos’ work influenced Pediasimos’ commentary. In this framework, the chapter also examines the manuscripts preserving the Technopaegnia in order to shed light on the scholarly milieu and production of these copies as well as the commentaries by Holobolos and Pediasimos.

The celebrated scholar and literatus Maximos Planoudes (ca. 1255–ca. 1305) was a leading exponent of the study of ancient literature in the late Byzantine world. While best known for this engagement – embodied in his collection of epigrams, the Planoudean Anthology, in his critical editions of, and scholia for, classical texts and in his translations of Latin literature – he also composed an undeservedly little-known poem in the tradition of the ancient Greek idyll. A humorous piece, drawing on numerous ancient sources, particularly on bucolic poetry in the tradition of Theocritus and on Lucian’s satires, it exhibits a refreshing jocularity not usually evident in his other literary activities. This chapter offers a close reading of the Idyll, highlighting its themes of love and homoeroticism, the alterity of otherworlds, and magic and the marvellous. It investigates its connections to other literary traditions and to Planoudes’ scholarship as a whole, and considers the reception of the poem in Byzantium. In composing an idyll – unprecedented in Byzantine poetry – Planoudes creates a parody of ancient texts and authors that is both entertaining and instructive, while being unique in its setting and context.

In “Pastoral,” Terry Gifford traces the development of pastoral literature from the classical genre established by Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues to its broader use as a literary mode by writers like Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth. He also examines modern iterations of the “post-pastoral” by writers like Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich. Attentive to its ideological valences, Gifford examines the persistence of the pastoral mode in literary representations of the relationship between nature and culture, even as authors resist pastoral idealization. The chapter concludes with an overview of what Gifford calls the “prefix-pastoral” (e.g., postmodern pastoral, Black pastoral, feminist pastoral, etc.) in order to capture the diversity of contemporary pastoral literature and theory.

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.

Chapter 2 focuses on the idylls of Tennyson and Landor as they explored in verse the conversations of friendship, responding to the difficulties of social relations with other beings by figuring and configuring voices other than themselves to put them – and their readers -- in dialogue with one another. Romantic and Victorian poets turned to the example of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, whose poetic fictions of conversation and song helped the later poets to imagine something like a Levinasian ethical social order amid political disorder. Following Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, Tennyson’s English Idyls and Landor’s Hellenic Idylls took up the ethical and political challenges of conversing across deepening divisions they perceived around them, not only between persons but also between persons and the non-human natural world. Implicit in their efforts is an optimism that later poets, not least an older Tennyson, would find difficult to sustain.

This chapter explores the complicated relationships between visual, verbal and textual wonder in the Greek literary tradition. Thauma is shown to be an important term of aesthetic response by the beginning of the fourth century BCE. The place of thauma in Greek traditions of poetic ekphrasis is examined. The transition from the conception of a marvel as a purely visual object or as an oral report to the sense of a marvel as something which is written down is explored through texts from Plato, Alcidamas, Homer, Theocritus and Posidippus.

Catullus 61 is an epithalamium, celebrating the wedding of Catullus’ friend Manlius Torquatus to Vibia Aurunculeia, and the chapter gives a close reading of the poem. The tradition of epithalamium is very rich in similes and comparisons, from the world of nature and the world of myth. The chapter argues that similes are particularly at home in wedding-songs because they highlight issues of similarity and difference which are apposite in a wedding context: marriage brings together two people who are similar but not identical, just as similes bring together terms which are similar but not identical.

Chapter 20 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho looks at Sappho’s significance for the rich poetic culture of the Hellenistic world, including Apollonius, Theocritus, and Posidippus, as a parallel development to the scholarly discourse surrounding the editing of her work during this period.