Sea Shells

 

     Who as a child did not prize among treasured possessions a collection of sea shells?  Many were souvenirs, gathered along the shore during vacations, others may have been gifts or curio shop purchases.  Many of us were undiscriminating; while fancying the novel and colorful, we prized ordinary specimens hardly less.  We may have in fact been developing a subtler taste.  A receptive eye will find magic in every broken sand dollar!  Somehow a good many conch shells had been carried far from the Caribbean; those that had escaped the indignity of being made into lamps could be used for the meditative purpose of “hearing the ocean.”  Wordsworth, receptive always to commonplace profundities, describes a “curious child” listening to a shell and experiencing thereby a “Mysterious union with his native sea.” As if this were not enough, he explicates: “Even in such a shell the Universe itself/ Is to the ear of Faith.” [1]

     But that calming mantra proceeding from the pink and pearly threshold of the conch’s extraordinary home is hardly the only appeal of shells.   A handful of commonplace shells, in a box in the back of a drawer, sitting amid a few grains of sand, can renew the wonder of an encounter with the immensities of the sea.  Though hard and calcareous, there is something in the unique opalescent cream-tones so common in malacological collections reminiscent of milk and semen and the bright heart of things. 

     Even to a child, shells might be in many ways instructive apart from their beauty.  I once collected a pailful of living Pacific mollusks and left them outside my motel door, expecting to play with them again as I had on the beach, but found the heap a sad and stinking mess of death the next day, a disturbing elemental revelation of mortality.  

     The wonder such objects inspire is evident not only in memories of childhood, but also in the earlier days of our species.  Large architectural shells have been fashioned into trumpets since palaeolithic times, though the details of their original uses must remain obscure.  We know, however, about Poseidon’s son Triton, usually represented as a merman, his lower half a fish, who, in his role as herald or messenger for Poseidon blew a large shell, perhaps a conch (though today the Charonia, a large sea snail, is commonly called Triton's trumpet).  After the flood that left only Deucalion and Pyrrha surviving, Triton manifests at Neptune’s behest to sound his shell-trumpet, and the waters only then take heed and begin to retreat.  According to Ovid Triton was draped “in purple shells,” and the fact is that the Murex snail’s shells were used to produce the very prestigious Tyrian purple dye, called also royal purple and Phoenician red. 

     Shell trumpets were in fact used in battle just as bugles are today. [2]  To the Greeks of Classical times, they already seemed a sign of a primitive people.  Thus in Euripedes [3] it is used by the backward Taurians, while Theocritus describes its use a Bebrycian in  Bithynia. [4]  In Vergil Misenus played his concha like a virtuoso and dared the gods to outdo him whereupon Triton threw him to the rocks to drown. [5]  Even in antiquity’s sunset, Nonnos tells us that Dionysos can be heard, blowing a shell trumpet amid troops of bacchantes and satyrs as he speeds into battle against the Indians. [6]The Indians would have recognized the consch as an emblem of Vishnu.  The Japanese similarly used shell trumpets, called jinkai, in war, as did the Aztecs who called theirs quiquiztli and many South Pacific peoples, including Fijians (davui), and Maoris (pūtātara). 

     War is not the only theater in which the dramatic sound of the shell trumpet plays a role.  Shell trumpets are used in in the Japanese Buddhist goma ritual of the Shingon and Shugendo sects.  In Polynesia, South America and the Caribbean, they have been used for calls to prayer, funerals, and in apotropaic rituals.  In Malta such instruments are called bronja or tronga and are used for less portentous occasions, blown to notify farmers that the windmills are operating and capable of grinding grain.  Today conch-blowing performers greet cruise passengers in the Marquesas and entertain the patrons of the Hyatt Regency in Honolulu.

      Sea shells may signify love as well as war.  The beauty of cowries is suggested by the fact that the word porcelain derives from the old Italian term for the animal (porcellana).  The lovely complementarity of the one side swelling outward in a smooth mound and the other side with its rippled vent, opening into an unseeable mystery, may have contributed to the shell’s acquisition of symbolic value through association with the female genitals, as attested by both the common name in ancient Rome concha veneris and the scientific subfamily today – Cypraeidae.   Native people in California’s Great Basin called the shells in their own language, “cunts” and prepared their dinner with a phallic mortar and a pestle bowl rimmed in cowries, considering their subsistence and thus their kitchenware hallowed as a gift of coyote. [7]  Today many New Age and African-oriented websites market cowries as a “fertility charm.” 

     Cowrie-shaped amulets are found in ancient Egypt, often in the form of belts or girdles worn about women’s waists, often along with other symbols of generation such as tattoos of Bes.  Cowries of pure gold that accompanied Princess Sithathoryunet to her tomb almost four thousand years ago contained metal balls that would tinkle as she moved, likely providing an apotropaic effect similar to that of the Roman phallic tintinnabulae.

     Perhaps the value acquired through these connotations played a role in the widespread use of cowries for money in Africa and Asia as well as ancient Egypt.  They have found myriad other uses as well, among them as aids in contacting the Orixás in New World settings reflecting Yoruba tradition, called búzios in the practice of Candomblé and Umbanda and in Santería called diloggún.  They are used in divination by the Kaniyar Panicker in Kerala, a group today designated a “backward tribe” by the government though their advanced academies of astrology, ayurvedic medicine, and philosophy gave them once the reputation of scholars.  Less magical uses include the control of livestock according to Plutarch [8]. 

     The story of the miraculous appearance of dew in Gideon’s fleece, taken as a type of the conception of Christ, led to the association of shells with the Virgin Mary.  This connection, prominent in the treatment of the Physiologus [9] associated shells with Mary and a pearl, like the dew Gideon saw, as a representation of the Incarnation.  The round and perfect pearl, according to the second century writer, “removes the uncleanness of the sea” as Christ forgives sin.  In addition the author says that the two shells of a bivalve signify the two Testaments.  Supported by other church fathers [10] and by the continuing popularity of various versions of the Physiologus, shells found their way into religious iconography in paintings by Piero della Francesca and others.  In the dome of Pisa’s cathedral an annunciation scene includes a shell and pearl and the legend rore coelesti foecundor (“heaven’s dew will make me fruitful”). 

     Because of their habitats not far from Santiago de Campostela, scallop shells were one of the first popular souvenirs.  Symbolic of pilgrimage, they are today visible as icons on signs along the route today.   Such shells were also used in baptism and included in the design of baptismal fonts long after they were no longer used. 

     Those if us of a certain age encountered in school a more generally spiritual metaphor in Holmes’ “The Chambered Nautilus,” while Tennyson found a shell a “miracle” of beauty though he felt he had to ornament the natural object with fanciful images.

 

Did he stand at the diamond door           

Of his house in a rainbow frill?   

Did he push, when he was uncurl’d,        

A golden foot or a fairy horn       

Thro’ his dim water-world?  [11]

  

     Material facts determine in part the fascination of sea shells.  These mollusks and other creatures occupy our world, but in a dimension most people never enter.  A cliché of scuba divers likens their experiences to those of astronauts in space (including virtual weightlessness), but the land beneath the sea is busy with a myriad strange animals.  Vertebrates share a common body structure; the bones of mice and men very nearly match, and even insects and fish have predictable body parts, but submarine life seems freed from all prescriptions, capable of taking practically any shape: sea stars, octopus, sea horse, jellyfish, coral.   Animals like bivalves have, perhaps fortunately for the diner who likes them on the half-shell, no identifiable organs.  Apart from its viscous softness and vulnerability, little sign of its life reaches us.  Once seized from their home, shellfish become mute and stubbornly unwilling to reveal their secrets with the fortunate exception of their subtle and ravishing flavor.   

     During the hyperaesthetic Heian period in Japan when aristocrats enjoyed poetry improvisation competitions called uto-amare, a game developed called e-awase in which the players painted small pictures in clam shells on assigned topics.  In its later Kamakura form kai-awase the shells were prepainted and the object of the game was to find matching pairs (called male and female) in a set of three hundred and sixty painted shells.  Today many such shells available in tourist shops are decorated with decals rather than painted and the actual game is seldom played.

       A shell is by definition a concealment, hiding a mystery within.  If its contents remain incognito, what one may see provides a marvelous distraction.  Some shells have intricate sculptural reliefs like angel-wings or painted patterns like even the humble cockle.  The channeled duck clam is often pure white and features the most delicate and tasteful minimalist lines, while the sundial snail (scientific name is the grand Architectonica perspectiva) seen from above resembles not so much a garden timekeeper as a cosmic whorl, an image of the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. 

     The creatures of the sea approach us as well through smell and taste as they are perhaps the most delectable of human foods for those willing to eat flesh.  The saline taste of the ocean enhances the full and rounded sweetness of clams and of oysters, at once so rich and so austere.  Mussels are a more frugal delight, their orange-pink bodies savory and fine, their broth little short of elixir.  Once, in a Seattle restaurant, I ordered scallops on the half-shell and discovered that rare thing, a new pleasure, with little in common with the abductor muscles labeled scallops in the supermarket 

      Looking at shells is like looking through a telescope at stars or through a microscope at a cell or exploring the interior of the body or the cryptic chambers of the mind.  If these creatures can inspire people to war, to bed, to the table and to church, they thereby associate themselves with the most significant realms of human desire.  Still, if they inspire some to poetry, they send others off for an afternoon nap.  A graceful note in a Renaissance painting or a kitschy ashtray.  They provide a glimpse into a new world, utterly foreign to everyday experience yet drawing the eye with irresistible beauty.  The student of sea shells, like the diner facing a plate of clams and oysters, will in the end find an intimate relevance to human life in these elegant and exotic animals. 

 

    

 

1.  “The Sea Shell.”

2.  The battle trumpet of the ancient Hebrew-speaking people was, of course, no shell at all, but a horn, the shofar.  See, for instance, Judges 6:34 or Joshua 6:4-20.

 

3.  Iphigenia in Tauris. 303.  Ares wields a shell trumpet according to Lycophron.

 

4.  Idyll 22, l. 75.  Bithyina is also a genus of snails.

 

5.  Aeneid 6.171ff

 

6.  Dionysiaca 17.93-94.

 

7.  Henry Koerper, “Cowry Shells: Fertility/Fecundity Symbols In Southern California Iconography,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology Vol. 23, No. 1.

 

8.  Table-Talk, 7.8, 713B.

 

9.  XXIV.

 

10.  Isidore, for instance, says that pearls are conceived by means of celestial (caelestis) dew

(Etymologies 12.6).  See also Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Efrem the Syrian.

 

11.  “The Shell” in Maud I.

Notes on Pan

Mythology is always elastic and dynamic, and Pan strikes me as more given to shape-shifting than some. A divinity that might have seemed likely to dwell in the humbler precincts of Olympus, half beast in fact, and patron of backward herdsmen, Pan developed into a personification of both principal god and devil. Though an importunate sexually aroused serial rapist, Pan has been as well the occasion for a vision of Ultimate Reality. These observations stubbornly would not cohere, so I present them as a series of notes.




Pan’s Sphere

     Pan’s name was derived from “pasturer,” and the god governed the opposite pole of Zeus’ royal court: those semi-wild heights, unowned by any so free to all, where sheep or goats could find fodder. His pipes resemble those used by Greek shepherds from the third millennium BCE. Like the land that could sustain domestic animals, he was a blessing, with the epithet of “luck-bringer,” but at times, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he could bring on panicked terror as well. He personifies sexual desire, but sometimes pursues females with selfish passion, according to the stories of Echo and Pitys. His frightening aspect could be beneficent as in Pheidippides’ report of his aiding the Greeks by causing panic among the Persians is told by Herodotus, [1] but it gave even the Arcadians pause. His intimate appeal to the individual is perhaps implied in the fact that the archaeological remains reveal a great many dedications but few dedicated temples. Offerings to Pan were often left in the wilderness.
     Philologists tell us that the folk etymology pan = all (accepted in late antiquity) is inaccurate, yet it has a broad unfocused appropriateness for a deity of generation, and Pan has often been used to represent paganism as a whole. Human awe at the ability of life to generate new plant and animal life led to exaggeration of his sexual characteristics and his frequent ithyphallic representation in art.
     These characteristics are attested by the poets. Pindar refers to Pan’s archaic identity as an attendant of the Great Mother, a role consistent with his association with fertility. [2] Stories of Pan’s human mother (said to be Penelope in her wild older years) [3] doubtless encouraged people to feel closer to Pan than to the full Olympians. In Euripedes’ Helena Pan’s capacity for exciting terror is the focus, here with reference to the rape of a naiad. [4] Pan stands at the very opening of Theocritus’ Idylls. In an atmosphere both rural and erotic, Thyrsis praises the Goatherd’s music as second only to Pan’s, associating both with ample meat to complete the festive note, yet he also refers to the threat of Pan’s anger when disturbed at his siesta. One delights in food and in love only if one also is liable to the pains of a lack of either. The same interdependent complex is implied in Theocritus’ VIIth Idyll in which the poet appeals to Pan for success in love, but incidentally refers to the custom of flagellating Pan with onions when food proves insufficient.


Pan in Plato

     In his Cratylus Plato echoes Hesiod’s muses who warned humans (whom they called “mere bellies”) that, while they may deliver the truth, they also “know how to speak many false things as though they were true.” [5] Socrates tells Hermogenes that Pan is “double-formed” because “speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false.” [6] This striking anticipation of modern concepts of the inherent limitation of language occurs in a dialogue which has, quite appropriately, itself been viewed with uncertainty by readers who cannot tell what is meant to be Socrates’ position on the issue of whether the signifier is linked to the signified or is wholly arbitrary. Socrates changes his mind, or at least the direction of his argument in mid-dialogue. Further, the lengthy presentation of fanciful etymologies has been considered satirical by some and serious by others.
     Socrates does trace a pattern in these weird imaginative speculations on the origins of words: the repeated mention of flux. To him this signifies a fundamental doubt at the basis of the world-view of the “name-givers” which has led them to insert hints of instability into the verbal code. “Namemakers believed everything to be in flux. Suppose it should prove that although those who gave the names gave them in the belief that all things are in motion and flux—I myself think they did have that belief— still in reality that is not the case, and the namegivers themselves, having fallen into a kind of vortex, are whirled about, dragging us along with them.” [7]
     In the end Socrates is not so distant from Huang Po who directed his listeners to gaze to the Mind behind phenomena, reinforcing rather than negating everyday experience in the process. Lacking the nonverbal intuition by which both Greek and the Chinese thinkers apprehended truth, Cratylus can only play the part of the absolute skeptic.
     In the Phaedrus Pan was Socrates’ god of choice to whom he offers a most philosophic prayer, directing his words also, in a pleasantly ecumenical gesture, to “whatever gods may be present.” Socrates asks for inner perfection and for only such possessions as a reasonable man can handle, noting that the only true wealth is wisdom. [8]


Pan and Christ

     Herodotus suggests that Pan is, along with Dionysus and Heracles, a younger god [9] yet he adds that, among the Egyptians (who, he assures his readers, kept excellent records) he is considered to be very ancient. The archaic character of his role as producing fertility, both plant and animal, in wild regions, might seem to support the latter judgment, at least as far as a local cult in Arcadia is concerned. He shares with Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles the non-Olympian characteristic of a mixed human/divine parentage and a career including the human experience of death.
     Plutarch [10] tells the story of Thamus, the Egyptian ship’s pilot, who learned in a divine vision of the death of the god, news which eventually reached Tiberius who launched an investigation. As the date of this incident happened to coincide, roughly, at least, with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the story has been used to signify the end of paganism and the triumph of the Christian deity with his resurrection. For Eusebius it added to what he saw as considerable evidence that the pre-Christian gods has departed to make way for his god. [11] By the time of the Renaissance, the death of Pan had come to signify not the departure of the Greek deities, but Christ’s redemptive death itself. Orthodox authors such as Rabelais (for whom, of course, Panurge and Pantagruel are heroes) and Guillaume Bigot identified the two gods and treated Pan’s death as a figurative way of speaking of Christ’s own. [12] Rabelais says, “For my part, I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests, and monks of the Mosaic law. And methinks my interpretation is not improper; for he may lawfully be said in the Greek tongue to be Pan, since he is our all. For all that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope, is him, by him, from him, and in him. He is the good Pan, the great shepherd, who, as the loving shepherd Corydon affirms, hath not only a tender love and affection for his sheep, but also for their shepherds.” [13]
     This reading of Pan as a symbol of Christ reached England as well. In the month of “Maye” in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar Pan is simply a code-word for Jesus: “When great Pan Account of Shepherds shall ask.” (54) Milton follows in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in which the shepherds find that “the mighty Pan/ Was kindly com to live with them below.” [14]



Pan and the Romantics

     Wordsworth and Byron both used Pan as the representative of a paganism which for them meant primarily aesthetic values. When Byron recounts the story from Plutarch of Pan’s reported death in “Aristomenes,” Pan represents paganism as a whole. The loss of the pre-Christian world-view seems to the poet an aesthetic loss.


How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race


     For Wordsworth this meant a gentle soothing landscape picturesqueness as in the sonnet “Composed By the Side of Grasmere Lake” in which “Great Pan” “low-whispers” “tranquility is here.” One recalls that in “The World Is Too Much With Us” the poet wishes that, as a pagan, he might be made “less forlorn” by such entertainments as the “sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” This is religion reduced to the amusement of sight-seeing.
     In Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan” the god is not, as in Wordsworth and Byron, the representative of a picturesque and charming mythology, but is instead a model for the very human experience of delusive desire.


“I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.”


     (Mary Shelley for her part wrote a play Midas -- which I have yet to read -- with two lyrics by Percy to open with the music contest between Apollo and Pan.)
     Keats is far profound, original, and provocative in his use of Pan as a sort of objective correlative of negative capability. In Endymion [15] Pan is first described as a Romantic nature spirit ruling “desolate places, where dank moisture breeds/ The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.” to whom “yellow-girted bees” offer their honey. He is associated with the sort of magic likely among farmers “Breather round our farms,/ To keep off mildews, and all weather harms,” yet for Keats he is above all mysterious. The “Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,” and “Dread opener of the mysterious doors/ Leading to universal knowledge.” At the hymn’s conclusion this has become a virtual mystic via negativa:


be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new// birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown


Pan and Neo-Paganism

     The earlier use of Pan to represent all pagan deities persisted into the nineteenth century, though the associated values altered. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the extended exclamations of “The Dead Pan” maintains a conventional preference for the new god, “one in Sion/ Hung for love’s sake on a cross,” but her successors did not prove always so orthodox. To some post-Romantic poets, this god’s resemblance to the Christian devil in his horns and cloven hooves proved more an attraction than an impediment to his renewed worship as an icon of eroticism, forbidden pleasure in general, and the unconscious.
     This use of Pan as a mask to protest appears in Baudelaire. In “La Muse Malade” Pan is recognized as god of poetry together with Apollo, but the recognition is largely nostalgic. This belated author’s muse is characterized by “folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.” In “L'École païenne” Pan is identified directly with revolution and his return with the end of the tyrannical reign of Christianity. Baudelaire details this view in The Painter of Modern Life [16] he maintains “The birthplace of Painting is the Temple. Its roots are in religion. The modern temple and the modern Religion are the Revolution. Thus let us create the Temple of the Revolution and the Painting of the Revolution . . . Pan must kill god. Pan is the people.”
     Varieties of this counter-cultural Pan are discernable in paintings by Burne-Jones such as Psyche and Pan [17] in which a dubious looking naked female stands well below an amorous Pan whose coiffure is positively architectural. The excitable Swinburne identifies Pan with élan vital in “A Nympholept”; the even more irregular Aleister Crowley made Pan a major symbol of his Thelemic mysticism and sang wildly of his wish to “Thrill with lissome lust of the light.” [18] Most readers of poetry can call to mind e. e. cummings’ balloon man, at first called “little” and “lame,” then “queer” and “old,” until the cat is let out of the bag and he is said to be “goat-footed.” [19]






1. Histories, (I, 105).

2. Pythian iii. 77, fr. 6. 1.

3. Apollodorus Epitome (7.38) says Odysseus’ Penelope conceived Pan after she was ousted for infidelity by the hero.

4. 167-190.

5. Theogony, ll. 26-28.

6. 408.

7. 439c.

8. 279.

9. Histories, II. 145.

10. Moralia, “The Obsolescence of Oracles,” 419.

11. Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, Ch. XVII.

12. By the beginning of the 18th century this trend had become sufficiently pronounced to be ridiculed. Thus Fontenelle comments, “Ce grand Pan qui meurt sous Tibere, aussi bien que Jesus-Christ, est le Maistre des Demons, dont l'Empire est ruine par cette mort d'un Dieu si salutaire a l'Univers; ou si cette explication ne vous plaist pas, car enfin on peut sans impieté donner des sens contraires a une mesme chose, quoy qu'elle regarde la Religion; ce grand Pan est Jesus-Christ luy-mesme, dont la mort cause une douleur et une consternation generale parmy leg Demons, qui ne peuvent plus exercer leur tirannie sur les hommes. C'est ainsi qu'on a trouve moyen de donner a ce grand Pan deux faces bien differentes.” This passage and many more are included in O. Weinreich’s article “Zum Tode des Grossen Pan,” published in ARW 13 (1910) pp. 467-73).

13. Book. IV, Ch. 24. This is Urquhart’s version.

14. ll. 89-90.

15. The passages cited all occur in the episode in I, 232-306.

16. In Chapter 10, “Philosophic Art.”

17. See also “The Garden of Pan” in which a buff lad plays his pipes for a pair of lovers while gazing directly at the viewer.

18. “Hymn to Pan.”

19. “in Just-“

The Role of Rhetoric in Theocritus' Idyll V

     The studies of rhetoric and poetics have closely interrelated histories. In antiquity the distinction between verse and prose was often far from rigid, and the early composition of rhetorical technai and their inclusion in the educational trivium led to their often assuming the role of real general theories of literature. [1] The process was continuous and cumulative throughout European history until a few centuries ago. Indeed, the chief medieval critical theorists (like Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendôme) write wholly about poetry but with an agenda, a vocabulary, and a conceptual foundation all borrowed directly from rhetorical thought. Even among the Greeks themselves, there is no clear line to distinguish the two fields: examples meant to serve the needs of orators are frequently drawn from Homer or other poets (the so-called “Gorgianic figures” have an explicitly poetic origin, for example) and, on the other hand, poets borrowed back from the exhaustive inventories of literary devices compiled by authors who were primarily concerned to meet the needs of speech-makers,
     This interdependence of rhetoric and poetry is not the product only of the historical circumstance that rhetorical handbooks were written before poetry as such received much speculative attention: it is also the outgrowth of specifically Greek poetic practice. Beyond the fact that self-consciously cadenced prose was much admired, thus compromising the main criterion marking it off from verse, the ancient (and medieval) poets had a view of their art that caused it to be amenable to approaching rhetorical guidelines. The overriding concern for the reader (related to persuasion as a goal in properly rhetorical texts and to communication -- often of pathos -- for the poetic) [2] and the conviction that the job of the poet is to sway and instruct as well as to delight caused the two to coalesce more naturally in antiquity than they may seem to do for readers who are under the influence of romantic ideas that deny the importance of the artist's relation to his audience.
     Beyond this, the ancients also held a highly conventionalized view of literature that stressed the importance of intertextuality and the significance of topoi and genre for the understanding of any single text. Inasmuch as rhetorical handbooks set down formal expectations and catalogued acceptable figures of speech and thought they tended to create their own anticipatory hermeneutic apparatus. Although their formulations were originally drawn from inductive examination of existing admired texts, they were then applied in new writing by authors bearing prior commentaries in mind in ways that would be unintelligible without the reader's being privy to the convention involved. It is this very heavy conventionality that makes much ancient and medieval poetry difficult to read and understand today, and it is specifically the task of rhetorical studies to illuminate that particularly troublesome blind spot. I regard Theocritus as one of those poets who wrote what might be called meta-rhetorical poetry, poetry in which --the devices and conventions of writing become more than ornamental or supportive of a theme; they become the theme itself.
     This rhetorical rereading of a Theocritean idyll is today all the more necessary in light of the general revaluation of rhetoric which might be regarded as having begun with the work of Curtius and Zumthor in the 1940s and which has continued through Barthes’ rhetoric course at the College de France and other contemporaries who have perceived a deep affinity between the way that rhetoric has traditionally viewed linguistic artifacts and the newly evolving attitudes of today's critical avant-garde. A grand succession of theorists, the high road really of European tradition, has consistently viewed literature as a self-contained object, primarily referring to other texts, highly artificial and only in ways that are either playfully trivial or highly conflicted and ambiguous attempting to “imitate” nature. Recovery of the implications of rhetoric for poetry will shed light on this theoretical question and on Theocritus’ position on the issue as it was posed in his day: in the Callimachus versus Apollonius controversy. [3]
     I have selected Theocritus' Idyll V for examination with a certain arbitrariness -- any of his works or of those other poems associated with his name would do equally well. I believe that an analysis of the rhetorical code expressed in that poem will reveal that that code coexists with the semantic and acoustic codes, and, further, that the rhetorical code is the most significant of the three, [4] although it is the one most easily discounted or ignored completely. The choice of Theocritus is not, however, arbitrary. He is one of the Greek poets in need of resuscitation today. Though his name is secure thanks to the genre that he seems to have fathered, he is rarely read with pleasure and more rarely with understanding. As an Alexandrian poet he was highly self-conscious about his work and was probably familiar with much other poetry as well as literary theory and school-knowledge. His dramatic Idylls might very well be analyzed as little epideictic set-pieces, but in this paper I intend to concentrate on his tropes, figures of speech and thought. Though the whole procedure for planning discourse was adopted from rhetoric to poetry, it was the figures that are most relevant to this poetry. Rather than draw up a complete list of the rhetorical figures in Idyll V, I intend to isolate those few which seem to me most significant for defining the theme of the poem, for it is these which are most relevant to all poems which are similarly saturated with rhetorical learning.
     Before turning to these figures, though, it is necessary to briefly sketch the general character of the poem. It describes an amoebaean competition between Comatas, a goatherd, and Lacon, a shepherd. As fictional speech put into the mouths of conventional characters it reminds one of the practice of writing epideictic showpieces in fictional personae. As a contest in language between two rivals complete with a judge and a decision, it places their use of words squarely in the agonistic atmosphere appropriate to the assembly or the courtroom in which rhetoric was so much at home. I will concentrate my attention on the words of this singing-match itself.
     The very first pair of couplets Comatas and Lacon exchange constructs a conceptual pattern highly typical of rhetoric yet never analyzed by writers on poetry. Here it is clear that the argument does not proceed in either a logical or narrative straight line with a conclusion that follows from, and marks an advance over what had preceded. Rather, Theocritus is concerned only with the relationship between the parts — truly a case of a structuralist poem. It is purely formal, like the technopaignia so closely associated with pastoralism (poems in the shape of a wing, an egg, a pipe, altar, etc.). The purpose of these opening couplets is to build a pattern with an almost geometric sense of elaboration. The first few words set up the initial terms of an analogy: the Muses are said to stand in a certain relation to the author. But the reader feels as though the specific content is only secondarily significant. The fact that the sentence describes a love-relation is decorative, although it accumulates over the poem as a whole to the point that it constitutes an insistent recurrence which assumes importance by determining the limits of the whole rather like the border on a piece of fabric or pottery.
     Just past the end of the first line the first full statement of relationship is established.

(ll. 80-81) Muses : Comatas :: Muses: Daphnis (Comatas claims superiority)

     The poet reinforces this simple assertion with another relation that contributes the whole coercive force of sympathetic magic.

(ll. 82-83) Apollo: Lacon:: poetry: goat sacrifice (Lacon claims superiority)

     Comatas’ response is to brag that he is rich in both goods and love.

(ll. 84-85) many goats: Comatas:: maiden’s love: Comatas (Comatas claims superiority)

     Not to be outdone, Lacon claims equal ego-success.

(ll.86-87) much cheese: Lacon:: boy’s love: Lacon (Lacon claims superiority)

     Lines 88-89 expand on the previous claims of sexual attractiveness, the one to a woman, the other to a man. The two herdsmen then go on to compete mentioning particular objects, beasts, plants, and acts of love-making in an effort to bolster their cases. It is a lush texture of rhythms, images, and ideas.
     What is the point of such a passage as this? It clearly has no real narrative or descriptive viability; the scene and the language are altogether artificial and convention-bound. The implication of contractual arrangements with the deities and the chain of equivalences “excellence=love=wealth=sex=divine favor=poetry” are established, but these were commonplaces in the poet’s culture. Here surely is the "incantatory" magic-like development of repetition for its own sake that led to both the fascination and the suspicion rhetoric attracted. Formal play leads the composition here as in a fugue. What is the status of the category of truth in this fragment of poetry? Is there any significance to Comatas’ eventual victory? Are their claims true? Might either exist apart from the other? This poetry seems to me imperiously indifferent to content and concerned primarily with the melodious possibilities of mental play itself.
     It is my contention that these structural relationships are the poem's subject. The aesthetic appeal (for those to whom it appeals) is based on the symmetries and surprises of a system of formal play maintained through a complex series of metamorphoses through the entire poem. To refer to this sort of poetry as play, however, does not exhaust its potential. In poetry such play is often anathematized as decadent, but in the case of Theocritus it is subtle and coherent enough to support semiotic analysis as a series of codes open to bearing any number of messages though tinted with their own thematic coloration and quite demanding in their internal formal requirements. Besides, the thematic always lingers on: the preoccupations of pastoral — otium, the locus amoenus, the problematic sexuality of the livestock juxtaposed with the often conflicted relations among the shepherds – these concerns do not vanish altogether, even the difference between heterosexual and homosexual love. All these values and tensions are manifested in a well-designed pattern which itself affirms the “natural” values that correspond to the natural landscape.
     Once such exacting symmetries are developed in the content of the poem, the prosodic form itself assumes a new significance. The nice antiphonal balance of concepts corresponds to the precisely predictable units of language allowed by the meter. For the remainder of the singing-match the momentum of these analogies in which the relations are almost too exact will be maintained and supported by the elegiac couplets. [10]
     Another instance of form becoming content, of the rhetorical color itself emerging into the foreground through the play of its internal system of relationships, may be traced through the poem’s use of hyperbole. Now a certain provocative hyperbole is latent in the whole situation. The pretense of super-attractive, poeticizing rustics is the poem's ubiquitous invitation to “pretend” by idealizing, enhancing, formulating a pleasing reality that can be made only of words, but which as words possesses unlimited potential. The stanzas I have already considered clearly partake of hyperbole since, in the spirit of what the Occitanian writers would have called a gab (and which shares its basic antiphonal form with Bo Diddley’s “Say Man”), the speakers claim extraordinary relations with divinity, art, and lovers, as well as animal husbandry.
     The device is exploited, in fact, throughout. For example, lines such as 124-127 are balanced as ostentatiously as those opening the singing-match, but they more obviously appeal to a taste for witty and extravagant exaggeration. Indeed, here there can be no question of hyperbole arising naturally from the exuberance of language under certain emotional occasions as it does in everyday experience — for Theocritus this systematic hyperbole is a major recurrent signifier of his whole system. The smooth texture of the verse, the obtrusively recondite character of his lexical choices, the blessedness of the pastoral hillside in so many ways correspond to the hyperbolic quality of the poetic assertions.
     Another direct analogue for this hyperbole is the extraordinary plenitude of images. Whether one views this specifically as expolitio or simply as amplificatio with a vengeance, it is clearly an integral part of Theocritus' world. One may note, for instance, lines 92-97 in which ten different plants are named. Each has a role in fleshing out a series of ephemeral sign systems which arise and instantly recede under the pressure of new terms arriving in the following lines, leaving only the impression of perfect accord and a setting so fertile and full that its flora and fauna come to the lines teeming with tropical growth. [12] Here once again, a rhetorical figure has assumed such
prominence in the text that it has become the content. More important than the specific plants which are mentioned in these lines cited above is the fact that a great many are named and that each fills a pigeon-hole in the abstract scheme that provides the framework and the excuse for the passage.
     Before commenting on what seems to me the raison d'etre for this poetic practice, I wish to indicate one further dimension of the penetration of the Theocritean poetic corpus with rhetorical devices. His language is “artificial,” a strange Dorian dialect that has occasioned much scholarly discussion. Further, the text foregrounds its own surface through an exceedingly free use of musical acoustic devices. One critic has described the poet's “very marked preference for alliteration and assonance” citing also the testimony of Hermogenes and Demetrius to the same effect. [13] The point is sufficiently obvious that a few examples will serve to illustrate what sort of effects Theocritus chooses. Homoeoptoton and homoeoteleuton are common [14] especially in certain locations: thus, for instance, they may reinforce the enjambment between lines (note the pattern of short and long o sounds at the end of line 82 and the beginning of 83). Like vowel sounds may also bind a couplet into a more tangible unit by reproducing at its end the same sound with which it began (as in lines 88-89, 128-129, and others), or they may simply accumulate within a line with a force approaching that of the Old English alliterative pattern (see, for instance, 1. 96 which is spoken by Comatas — the very same sound pattern is repeated for Lacon in 122).
     There are many other rhetorical figures in Theocritus' poem, but my concern is less with their description and isolation than with their interpretation. What is the reader to make of these preferences already discernible in Idyll V for unreal symmetry in collatio comparison, a fantastic fondness for hyperbole, a tendency to uncontrolled amplificatio in the enumeration of parallel evidence, and at the same time a rich concentration of purely acoustic musical effects? To think one may dismiss this poetry with the label of “art for art's sake” is, I think, mistaken. What, then, do these habits of composition do other than the admittedly important end of amusement?
     As I have suggested, this use of rhetorical devices in pastoral poetry renders the verse unusually open in a calculated way, polysemous by design as it is interested in depicting relationships, structure, and patterns rather than things. This receptivity to multiple interpretation is clear in the varied interpretive possibilities critics have advanced in discussing Theocritus. Many readings may be roughly classified by their tendency to use either form or content as primary data: content-based readings include those that think of the pastoral as Utopia (Marxist and Freudian readings are subvarieties here), and for form those that view the pastoral as the archliterary artificial set-piece. I believe a new possibility more in keeping with everything in Theocritus is available to the critic who can unite the two directions through a revaluation of the role of rhetorical figures which will also foreground the relevance of the pastoral to current critical debate. It would be a reading that takes semiotics into account in understanding Theocritus’ elevation of form to the level of content (cf. Eco's notion of the aesthetic text’s “semiotic redemption of its basic matter” [15]). 

      The fact that the herdsmen are poets should be enough to justify this sort of view of pastoral as literary criticism, but the case is strengthened by the prominence of rhetorical figures I have been discussing. It is this striking density of figures in the text that has caused its pejorative characterization as derivative, effete, epigonistic scholarly dilettantism, but which in this new light allows these formal characteristics to become content. If the narrative line contains, not events or ideas, but relations and patterns of figures, then the meaning of the entire hypersign (to use Corti’s term) must refer to these figures as well. Although the text does develop thematic concerns which are altogether real (about love and work and death and nature, for instance) these are highly refracted, indirect, and problematized. They are not nearly so prominent as the essential implication of the poem which implies a claim for the possibilities of language for resolving or mediating contradictions in general, a possibility most nakedly apparent when the language is mercilessly self-focusing, when its powers are directed toward self-commentary and self-praise, at constructing what may be called a myth of literature, a myth of language. This poetry inclines decisively away from any sort of Platonic mimesis: thus the futility of polemicizing over whether the herdsmen are in any sense like real ones or whether they are Alexandrian snobs pretending. It tends rather toward a more Gorgianic concept of producing effective discourse which will attain its ends without claiming any correspondence between its data and lived experience.
     The same opposition exists on the level of language. Again Theocritus is consistent with modern semiotics as well as with Gorgias in his implicit assumption that the association between signifier and signified is never wholly adequate, but rather is always arbitrary. In this self-reflexive reading of Theocritus, it becomes apparent at what end all the hyperbole is really aimed, and what cosmos possesses the incredible symmetries projected onto the verse. These apply primarily to language and to literature. It is there that all things are possible and the restrictions that so stubbornly adhere to the material creation no longer apply. Apart from the fact that this view of his poetry allows us to understand better, I think, what Theocritus was writing about, it also illuminates his position in the famous contention between Callimachus and Apollonius over the proper length of a “modern” poem. The fact that Theocritus is the most prominent of the exemplars of the school that advocated shorter poems has led many to take Idyll VII, line 45-47 as his poetic credo.

ὥς μοι καὶ τέκτων μέγ᾽ ἀπέχθεται, ὅστις ἐρευνῇ
ἶσον ὄρευς κορυφᾷ τελέσαι δόμον εὐρυμέδοντος,
καὶ Μοισᾶν ὄρνιχες, ὅσοι ποτὶ Χῖον ἀοιδὸν

(For much I hate the builder who seeks to raise his house as high as the peak of mount Oromedon, and much those cocks of the Muse who with the Chian bard [would contend])

     One must question, however, on the basis of the foregoing discussion whether it is solely out of deference to the unrivalable example of Homer that Theocritus takes his position. [17] Rather his compass has shrunken precisely because the generous “realism” of epic in which everything is transparently meaningful is inappropriate to a language grown conscious of itself which tends to rely instead on internal interrelationships and self-reflexive meditation to generate meaning. The fact that Apollonius’ epic has come down to us with a reputation for learned over-refinement not so very different from Theocritus’ may itself suggest which of the two poets more accurately recognized the sort of discourse he was producing.





1. Often rhetorical concepts dominate even those treatises in which they do not have total hegemony, e.g. On the Sublime which claims (Ch. 17) that rhetorical devices are themselves inherently conducive to sublimity.

2. A mediating, transitional category is, of course, epideictic oratory.

3. In spite of his willfully obtuse comments about medieval literature in The Role of the Reader, Eco has a most illuminating discussion of the general rhetorical procedure in the European tradition in Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 276-288.

4. The three codes with very little adjustment might be accommodated to those of Pound's ABC of Reading: melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia.

5. A search of the last twenty-five years in L'Annee Philologique reveals not a single article on the role of rhetoric in Theocritus.

6. Indeed, this particular idyll has not only a contest, but a judge and a decision, thus approximating a judicial setting quite closely, though the content fits more closely the epideictic “laudes — vituperations” as the participants praise themselves.

7. It is one of the special attributes of this idyll that those “golden age” pastoral assumptions are not only evoked but also questioned by the violence of the earlier sexual encounter between Lacon and Comatas which assumes the form of a prefiguration of the current sublimated contest.

8. In this it resembles those long series of almost identical poems in the Greek Anthology in which one poet after another tried to perfect the statement of certain popular topoi by altering only a few words of earlier versions.

9. The entire poem lends itself very tidily to analysis as Levi-Straussian antinomies.

10. Another example of the almost incredible Greek openness to an appreciation of symmetry for its own sake is the correspondences of strophe and antistrophe in the choruses of tragedy most of the effects of which are entirely lost on modern listeners no matter how fluent their Greek.

11. These three objects of their attention may be conflated by those readers who view the whole poem as a description of the process of sublimation of sexuality resulting in song.

12. I am reminded of the catalogues of the voice from the whirlwind in Job where the world of nature is emphatically not purely verbal, but rather is a second-hand representation of the grandeur of God.

13. Steven Walker, Theocritus (Boston: Twayne), p. 131.

14. Alliteration is quite common as well. One notable example is line 110 in which the t-sounds refer to each other and to the sound of cicadas.

15. Eco, p. 268.

16. This was the occasion for Callimachus' memorable comment “A big book is
a big evil.”

17. Feigned modesty, of course, is itself a topos. It appears, for example, in lines 39-41 of the same poem.

18. I am thinking of something close to the concept of epic realism in Lukacs, though I do not mean by this reference to imply that I subscribe to his methodology.