Page:The Greek bucolic poets (1912).djvu/19

Rh excellence of his pastoral get-up? If Aristis is not a real person, why is he so carefully described, and what business has he in the poem? It is Aratus’ love, not Aristis’ knowledge of it, that is important to the narrative. Lastly, there is the tradition of the scholia that the narrator is either Theocritus or one of his friends, of which alternatives the former is far the more probable. The conclusion we must come to is that we are dealing throughout with real persons, some of whom have their ordinary names and others not. This does not mean, of course, that the “other-names” were invented for the occasion by the poet. Rather should they be considered pet-names by which these persons were known to their friends. There can be no certain identiﬁcation.

A further question arises. Whence did Theocritus derive the notion of staging himself and his friends as herdsmen? The answer is not far to seek. First, the Greek mind associated poetry directly with music; and secondly, Greek herdsmen were then, as they are still, players and singers. The poets of his day, some of whom dealt like him with country life, would naturally appear, to a country-loving poet like Theocritus, the literary counterparts, so to speak, of the herdsmen, and their poetry in some sense the art-form of the herdsman’s folk-music. It is not perhaps without ulterior motive that Lycidas the poet-goatherd is made to claim fellowship with Comatas the goatherd-poet. The accident that combined this staging with the use of pet-names in xv