SOURCE: “Seeing and Feeling: Representation in Two Poems of Theocritus,” in Classical Philology, Vol. 80, No. 1, January, 1985, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Walsh studies “Idyll 1” and “Idyll 7” for what they reveal about Theocritus's attempts to portray certain aspects of character.

As soon as poets begin to speak, at the end of the fifth century, about their skill at capturing the familiar look of things,¹ others begin to ask questions about the limits of this endeavor. First, they ask technical questions, like the one posed in Aristophanes' Frogs: can the naturalistic manner adequately represent every kind of object? (According to “Aeschylus” in this play, there is a moral kind of object that literal images of life do not capture.) Later, Plato suggests that some things cannot be represented directly by any manner of verbal or visual art. Theocritus has similar concerns, partly technical and partly philosophical, about the peculiar...