“I am One”: The Fragile/Assertive Self and Thematic Unity in the Theocritean

ii Since antiquity, critical reception of Theocritus has focused on bucolic as the poet‘s quintessential domain, whether in the belief that the term designates a small, separable portion of his total corpus or more generally applies to many, most, or all of his hexameter works. As a result, many of Theocritus ‘ non-herding poems have received, on the whole, less critical attention than the herding ones. The book-length studies of Griffiths (1979b), Burton (1995), and Hunter (1996) attempt to redress this imbalance in treatment by dividing the non-herding works into various sub-genres, such as patronage poetry, mimes, hymns, and pederastic poetry, and dealing with each in relative isolation from the rest of the corpus. While this approach may finally give less scrutinized poems their due, it results in the same kind of tunnel vision vis-à-vis the figure of the poet as bucolic-centered studies. A more unitary view of Theocritus is called for. Analysis of the Idylls as a whole from the standpoint of themes and imagery, as opposed to genre, may hold the key to that view. ii