Response: David M. Halperin

For Pratt C. Remmel, Jr.

	When I was writing my love poems, which sprouted out from me
	on all sides, and I was dying of depression,
	nomadic, abandoned, gnawing on the alphabet,
	they said to me: “What a great man you are, Theocritus!”
	I am not Theocritus: I took life,
	and I faced her and kissed her,
	and then went through the tunnels of the mines
	to see how other men live.
	And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness,
	I held my hands up and showed them to the generals,
	and said: “I am not a part of this crime.”
	They started to cough, showed disgust, left off saying hello,
	gave up calling me Theocritus, and ended by insulting me
	and assigning the entire police force to arrest me
	because I didn't continue to be occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects.
	But I had brought joy over to my side.
	From then on I started getting up to read the letters
	the sea birds bring from so far away,
	letters that arrive moist, messages I translate
	phrase by phrase, slowly and confidently: I am punctilious
	as an engineer in this strange duty.
	All at once I go to the window. It is a square
	of pure light, there is a clear horizon
	of grasses and crags, and I go on working here
	among the things I love: waves, rocks, wasps,
	with an oceanic and drunken happiness.
	But no one likes our being happy, and they cast you
	in a genial role: “Now don't exaggerate, don't worry,”
	and they wanted to lock me in a cricket cage, where there would be tears,
	and I would drown, and they could deliver elegies over my grave.

This is not a personal confession, but Robert Bly's translation of “Carta a Miguel Otero Silva, en Caracas” (Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas), a lengthy lyric poem composed in 1948 by Pablo Neruda.^[1] I have chosen this poem because it articulates a notion of Theocritus that Professor Peter Levi and I can join in repudiating. Theocritus the elegist, the weepy love poet, the metaphysician, caged with crickets behind the bars of his own artistry and self-absorption (cf. Id. 1.45–54)—that is not the poet whom Professor Levi and I admire: Neruda's Theocritus, I think it is fair to say, is not our Theocritus. We do not suppose, to be sure, that Theocritus could easily pass Neruda's test of social engagement. Theocritus is not a revolutionary, a social reformer, or even a militant social critic. But he is not wholly immersed in the world of his own sentiments. I doubt that anyone could come away from hearing Professor Levi's paper without a just appreciation of Theocritus' skill as a social observer, his keen interest in the details of “how other men live,” and his sympathetic engagement with the world around him.

I begin by emphasizing the extent of my agreement with Professor Levi, because I shall have scant occasion to do so again. I hope none of my sweetly reasonable fellow discussants will take offense if I say that to agree with the speaker is a kind of professional betrayal in a scholarly commentator. Even worse, it is alien to the spirit of bucolic exchange, as Professor Levi has described it.

Despite this shameful inability of mine to rise to the bucolic occasion, I can declare that my outlook on Theocritus really does differ from that of Professor Levi; in what follows, I shall try to magnify our disagreement in the interests of scholarly controversy. In fact, I cannot help but suspect that Professor Peter Green, when he invited me to comment on Professor Levi's paper, must have been indulging his own well-known bent as a provocateur, a mischief maker. To engineer an exchange between Professor Levi and myself on the subject of Theocritus was surely to construct an exercise calculated to drive each of us deeper into his own established identity, putting on public display Professor Levi's marvelous and highly personal intuitions about ancient authors, his splendid eye for the significant detail, his incomparable knowledge of the Mediterranean and its inhabitants, and his dazzling hit-and-run tactics as a literary critic, all the while exposing more plainly to view my own hopelessly academic relation to the subject, my tedious concern with literary categories and schemes, and my cautious, perennially dreary interpretative style. I must now give up the struggle against Professor Green's typecasting and submit myself to the inevitable: against necessity, as Simonides said, even the gods do not fight.^[2]

Professor Levi's Theocritus is a poet of nature, a Hellenistic Mandelshtam, tuning his verse to the rhythm and cadence of the seasons, capturing in language the sonorities of the classical landscape. My Theocritus is, characteristically enough, “the first academic poet,” as his most recent American translator, Daryl Hine, has called him^[3]—or perhaps I should say, the first great academic poet: a writer whose artful language, lavished on uncouth subjects, creates an effect of deliberate incongruity which is designed to forestall any reader's attempt to wallow complacently in Theocritus' sensuous images.^[4] Rather than dilate further upon my Theocritus, however, I wish to examine more closely that alien creature, Professor Levi's Theocritus, in order to determine what it is about him, exactly, that seems so unfamiliar to me.

Professor Levi's Theocritus is at once a romantic and a realist, whose poetry combines “sensuous concentration” with keen observation of social realities. The Idylls invite us to while away “endless summer evenings…in beautiful places” even as they present to us a window on the life of rural Greece in the Hellenistic period. These two tendencies in Professor Levi's Theocritus—the evocative and the documentary—are not in principle contradictory ones, but I often find them difficult to harmonize in Professor Levi's handling of them. I can never tell in advance which details in Theocritus Professor Levi will take to be simple reflections of contemporary reality and which he will derive from the inherited traditions of Greek poetry, history, and myth; nor have I fathomed the logic that governs his choices in specific instances. And yet it makes some difference to our reading of Idyll 1, for example, whether we consider the fictive “internationalism” of Theocritus' pastoral world (to which Professor Levi rightly calls our attention) purely facetious, a pretty fantasy of performing herdsmen who manage to acquire within the confines of their little society an international prestige, or whether there really was “a shepherd's Olympics,” as Professor Levi calls it, a periodic pan-Hellenic festival for talented rustics. The latter possibility, I think, would have struck a sophisticated Alexandrian audience as hardly less comical than the annual convention of village idiots in Woody Allen's Russian idyll, Love and Death, which is perhaps closer in spirit to Theocritus on this point than is Professor Levi's reconstruction. In any case, what I have difficulty understanding about Professor Levi's interpretation is why he believes in Chromis the Libyan in Idyll 1 (even though Virgil treats Chromis as a standard pastoral persona in Eclogue 6) but in neither Olpis the fisherman nor Amaryllis in Idyll 3, preferring to relegate them to a lost mime of Sophron's and to a lost work of Philetas', respectively. (Philetas seems to have become, since E. L. Bowie's recent essay,^[5] an all-purpose dumping ground, a popular interpretative resort for scholars who wish to dispose of anything in Theocritus for which they have little explanatory use.) Professor Levi's Theocritus, it seems, can be counted on to be a reliable witness to the Hellenistic world whenever documentation is needed, and to be a sensuous and allusive scene painter when it is not.

Similarly, Professor Levi concedes that Theocritus is quite vague about the chronological settings of the idylls: “The sense of a dreamlike confusion of time is as essential to Theokritos as the sharpness of the thorn in the foot and the lazy sweetness of the Italian grazing grounds,” he remarks, apropos of Idyll 4, concluding, “This is certainly a timeless world.” But when we come to geography, Professor Levi delivers a different verdict: “Theokritos' world is the real world,” he says, and he opposes A. S. F. Gow's view that Theocritus' use of geographical names is arbitrary and inconsistent. Far from being casual in his treatment of geographical detail, Professor Levi's Theocritus sets many of the bucolic Idylls in some quite specific locale—though it is difficult, evidently, to say exactly where. Professor Levi places Idyll 1 on Cos, but not very confidently; he admits that a Sicilian location for the poem is possible. Although I agree that in this case Cos is the likelier setting, I find it significant that Professor Levi, an established authority on Pausanias and an expert on the geography of the Mediterranean, is still unable to determine the poem's dramatic setting to his complete satisfaction. Theocritus can surely have had few readers so well informed as Professor Levi; if even he cannot definitively establish the setting of Idyll 1, who can? I am forced to conclude that Theocritus attaches a different sort of value to the place-names he sprinkles throughout his poems, that he chooses them for their literary associations, or their euphony, or their arcane preciosity: the Kalydnian ferryman is surely meant to demonstrate the skill with which Theocritus could lift a relevant detail from the Homeric catalogue—at least as much as he is meant to situate the first idyll on Cos. The epithet “Kalydnian” would indeed seem, though not decisively,^[6] to place Idyll 1 on Cos; but that is not the point.

Professor Levi's positivism becomes more intrusive when he moves from geography to social forms. Speaking of Idyll 10, for example, he notes that Boukaïos' love song is “more artistic [than Milon's reaping song], probably because love songs were like that.” Similarly, in the course of discussing the ivy cup in Idyll 1, Professor Levi enumerates a number of possible surviving artistic models and wonders whether Theocritus intended the cup to represent a contemporary work or an antique. I believe that Professor Levi has been taken in by Theocritus' ability to produce what critics nowadays call “an effect of the real”: the ivy cup is modeled, surely, not on any of the artifacts Professor Levi mentions, but on the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad and on the Shield of Heracles in a poem which Theocritus' contemporaries, such as Apollonius, ascribed to the authorship of Hesiod.^[7] Theocritus secures the epic descent of his ivy cup by reweaving in his own hexameters the verbal texture of those earlier poems. The vineyard scene on the goatherd's cup, which apparently frustrates Professor Levi's search for a model among the plastic arts, is actually an amalgam of the Homeric and the pseudo-Hesiodic sources, as he is well aware. I therefore stand by my previous interpretation of the cup as a complex literary symbol designed to advertise to the learned reader Theocritus' characteristic modus oper- andi—namely his elaboration, in a humble material, of insignificant but poignant and hitherto neglected details from the great archaic epics.^[8]

Professor Levi's positivism crops up again when he treats the exchange of insults between the two herdsmen in Idyll 5. Taking those herdsmen at their word, Professor Levi assumes that, as he puts it, “Lakon used to be buggered by Komatas.” That inference is particularly puzzling to me, because Professor Levi clearly understands the convention governing the exchange of abuse between herdsmen—“antiphonal song on impromptu subjects involving a conflict of wit and to some degree of poetry” is how he describes it—and he can claim to have heard it himself. I, of course, cannot make the same claim, sticking close to my desk as I do while Professor Levi is off exploring the wilds of Afghanistan, but—like the good academic I am—I can claim at least to have read about these rustic contests, specifically in the oral histories from Sicily collected by Gavin Maxwell in the 1950s and published by him in a marvelous book entitled The Ten Pains of Death. In chapter 3 of that book, Maxwell interviews a shepherd boy who describes the song-form known as botta e riposta, alternating couplets of challenge and reply, thrust and counterthrust, which are sung by adjacent herdsmen at night. These herdsmen can hear but not see, let alone bugger, one another: they are too far separated, pasturing their animals in different locations. Maxwell's informant, speaking of the sexual abuse that is an integral part of these exchanges, explains, “We don't take offense at what we sing to each other—if we did we wouldn't sing them, or else we'd go and beat each other up.” ^[9] Here, then, is another point at which Professor Levi's documentary approach to Theocritus' realism leads him astray.

When T. S. Eliot writes, “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many” (The Waste Land, 61–63), he is not simply describing London but is alluding, as he helpfully informs us in his Notes, to Dante. We should not draw firm conclusions from his verses about the size of the crowd that traveled across London Bridge during the winter of 1921, although I do not doubt that it was indeed sizable. My Theocritus is closer to Eliot than is Professor Levi's Theocritus; I like him that way. But if the real Theocritus could hear us wrangling over him, in our lamentably unbucolic fashion, I shouldn't be surprised if he remarked, in the words Neruda used to fend off the ambiguous compliments of his own overenthusiastic interpreters, “Yo no soy Teócrito” (I am not Theocritus).