| Like other poets in Third-Century (B.C.) Alexandria, Theocritus strove to create a new kind of literature that offered itself as a sophisticated, learned, light, urban alternative to the heroic world of Homer. But instead of turning his back on Homer, Theocritus filled his diverse short poems with Homeric language. Did he simply mean to create a Homeric atmosphere as an ironic backdrop to his innovative pastoral idylls? An intensive study of some 300 Homeric nonce-words in the 31 extant complete poems of Theocritus has shown that the poet often used these distinctive rarities to link passages in his work with highly apposite passages in the Iliad and Odyssey. Not only do these intertexts help define Theocritean bucolic by ironic contrast with heroic epic, they also shed light on the fundamental problem of Theocritus's polymorphic praxis. His contrapuntal reuse of Homer turns out to occur in his urban, mythological and erotic work, as well as in the pastoral idylls. Intermittently, but often, and with a clearly subversive purpose, he sets up an occult Homeric obbligato, signalled by rare words, which calls into question the surface argument of the poem. This procedure allows Theocritus to covertly mock his lovestruck shepherds and even to satirize the Alexandrian royal family while ostensibly singing their praises.;An appendix lists all words in Theocritus that occur in Homer five times or less, with their locations in the Idylls and in the two epics. |
