Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry

The poems of Theocritus are our best witness to a brilliant poetic culture that flourished in the first half of the third century BC. This book considers the context from which these poems grew and, in particular, the manner in which they engage with and recreate the poetic forms of the Greek archaic age. The focus is not on the familiar bucolic poems of Theocritus, but on the hymns, mimes and erotic poems of the second half of the corpus. Recent papyri have greatly increased our understanding of how Theocritus read archaic poetry, and these discoveries are fully exploited in a set of readings which will change the way we look at Hellenistic poetry.

• No other similar literary study available • Make use of the latest papyrological studies • This is the sixth book that Richard Hunter has published with the Press

Preface; List of conventions and abbreviations; 1. Locating the site; 2. ‘All the twos’: Idyll 22; 3. Idyll 16: poet and patron; 4. Idyll 15: imitations of mortality; 5. Idyll 18 and the lyric past; 6. For the love of boys: Idylls 12, 29 and 30; Epilogue; Bibliography; General index; Index of passages discussed.