Idyll VIII, also called Βουκολιασταί βʹ ('The Second Country Singing-Match'), is a bucolic poem by the 3rd-century BC Greek poet
Theocritus
Theocritus (; grc-gre, Θεόκριτος, ''Theokritos''; born c. 300 BC, died after 260 BC) was a Greek poet from Sicily and the creator of Ancient Greek pastoral poetry.
Life
Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from hi ...
.
[Edmonds, ed. 1919, p. 109.]
Summary
The characters of this dialogue are the mythical personages Daphnis a cowherd and Menalcas a shepherd, and an unnamed goatherd who plays umpire in their contest of song.
After four lines by way of stage-direction, the conversation opens with mutual banter between the two young countrymen, and leads to a singing-match with
pipes for the stakes.
Each sings four alternate elegiac quatrains and an envoy of eight hexameters.
In the first three pairs of quatrains Menalcas sets the theme and Daphnis takes it up.
The first pair is addressed to the landscape; the remainder deal with love.
Analysis
The scene is among the high mountain pastures of Sicily:
and far below lies the Sicilian sea.
[Lang, ed. 1880, p. 44.] Here Daphnis and Menalcas, two herdsmen of the
golden age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the ''Works and Days'' of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages of Man, Ages, Gold being the first and the one during ...
, meet, while still in their earliest youth, and contend for the prize of pastoral.
Their songs, in elegiac measure, are variations on the themes of love and friendship (for Menalcas sings of Milon, Daphnis of
Nais), and of nature.
Daphnis is the winner; it is his earliest victory, and the prelude to his great renown among nymphs and shepherds.
Transmission
The last pair of quatrains and the two envoys do not correspond in theme.
The resemblance of most of the competing stanzas has caused both loss and transposition in the manuscripts.
From metrical and linguistic considerations the poem is clearly not the work of Theocritus.
Some critics take the poem to be a patchwork by various hands.
See also
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Idyll VI Idyll VI, otherwise known as Bucolic poem 6, was written by Theocritus in dactylic hexameter. The exact date of its composition is unknown. It references characters that have appeared in other works of literature such as Homer's ''Odyssey'', Ovid's ...
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Idyll IX
References
Sources
Attribution:
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Further reading
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{{Authority control
Ancient Greek poems
3rd-century BC poems