User:Paul August/Theocritus
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Theocritus, born c. 300 BC, is credited with creating the genre of pastoral poetry.[1] His works are titled Idylls. His Idyll 6, and Idyll 11 contain a story of the Cyclops Polyphemus.
Theocritus’ Cyclops derives from Homer, though the differences are notable, for example Odysseus does not appear in Theocritus’ story. Also Homer’s Cyclops is beastly and wicked, while Theocritus’ is absurd, lovesick, and comic. A shared aspect is that both Homer and Theocritus each have a narrator: Odysseus and Polyphemus, respectively.[2] In Theocritus's Idyll 11, Polyphemus has discovered that music will heal lovesickness, and so he plays the panpipes, and sings a comic and sympathetic tale of his woes and of how he is beleaguered and neglected. Polyphemus loves the sea nymph Galatea, but she rejects him.[3]
Polyphemus describes himself:
I know, beautiful maiden, why it is you shun me thus.
It is because from one ear to the other, right across
The whole width of my forehead, one long shaggy eyebrow runs,
With but one eye beneath; and broad is the nose above my lip.[4]
He boasts of his musical talent:
I am skilled in piping as no other Cyclops here…[5]
He shares an erotic fantasy:
Gladly would I suffer you to singe my very soul,
And this one eye of mine, the dearest treasure I posses.
Ah me, would that my mother at my birth had given me gills,
That so I might have dived down to your side and kissed your hand.
If your lips you would not let me…[6]
References[edit]
- Rosen, Ralph, Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire, Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-530996-6.
- Trevelyan, R. C., A Translation Of The Idylls Of Theocritus, Cambridge University Press 1947. Internet Archive.
- Theocritus in Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, edited and translated by Neil Hopkinson, Loeb Classical Library No. 28, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2015. Online version at Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-99644-1.
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p. 122
- Theocritus's Cyclops has an obvious and explicit intertextual relationship with Homer Odyssey 9, although it is common for scholars to stress the stark contrast between the two portraits—Homer's Cyclops as unremittingly savage and "evil," Theocritus's Cyclops, now an absurd unrequited lover, as poignant, comical and bathetic. ... There are as many divergences, therefore, as points of contact between the two portraits of Cyclops, the most glaring being the fact that Odysseus does not figure directly in either of Theocritus's Idylls. One feature they share is a central narrator (Odysseus in Odyssey 9; Polyphemus in Theocritus 11, and part of Idyll 6) ...
p. 160
- Theocritus Idyll 6 and Idyll 11 both concern the love of the Cyclops for Galatea, though they focus on different periods of the relationship. We begin first with Idyll 11, ... and will encounter a Cyclops who has shed most, if not all, of the monstrous qualities ...
p. 161
- Nicias seems to be in love, and, though a doctor himself, is looking for a remedy for the pain of eros. Theocritus offers the example of the Cyclops—a figure he refers to as ό παρ' άμῖν, "one of our compatriots"—who found the best pharmakon against lovesickness to be song. ... but will rather deploy the Cyclops as a sympathetic, positive paradigm.
p. 162
- Polyphemus sings a tale of his own unrequited love. ... All the qualities that mark Odysseus in Odyssey 9 as a satirist figure—his stance of physical and emotional abjection and oppression, the indignation against an antagonist that inspires comic mockery—likewise characterize the Thecritean Cyclops. We find Polyphemus, for example, poignantly, if comically (to the audience anyway), adducing his physique as the reason Galatae flees his advances:
- I know, beautiful girl, why you flee. It's because a hairy brow
- stretches across my entire forehead, in one long length from one ear
- to the other; beneath it there is one eye, and over the lip a flat nose.
- (11.30–33)