Women in Theocritus

The list of contemporary mortal women appearing as characters or mentioned in Theocritus’ corpus is long and inclusive. In the mythological pieces too, heroines feature prominently. The ambiguity and open-endedness of the bucolic poems, especially Idylls 11 and 6, hinge to a large extent on the inaccessible female sweethearts. The mimes allow glimpses of the sociocultural mosaic in the multiethnic empires of the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Like the mythological pieces, the mimes also feature ambivalent or ironic associations. Theocritean queens are powerful and active, and their female subjects are feisty, but none entirely abandons traditional roles and beliefs. Theocritean women may cause suffering and suffer, and the mythological heroines endure and perform outrages, but none is said to be destroyed or irreparably damaged. The potential for failure or destruction is always there, but almost never actualized. To a large extent, Theocritean song is a song for and about women, both a serenade for contemporary ones and a hymn for mythological heroines

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