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art, not for feeling but for intellectual play. Again, Romantic Irony offers a different approach. Just as our lovers' absurdities are no obstacles to their love, so our awareness of the true nature of art need not invalidate an emotional response. As another of Theocritus' surrogates remarks, 'Even in empty44 kisses there is sweet pleasure' (3. 20). Theocritus' famous 'deflationary' endings like those to Idyll 1: |
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Then, Thyrsis, you must stop your mouth with sweetness,
Eat only honeycomb and the best dried figs,
Since even as it is, you out-sing the cicada.
Here is the cup. Smell the scented wood, so fresh
You would think it had been dipped at the well of the Hours.
Cissaetha!
Yours for milking! Gently, my goats,
Down! or you'll have the billy force you down. |
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Praxinoa, what wouldn't I give to sing like that!
Time to go home. Diocleidas will be in a state.
it's more than my life's worth if his dinner's late.
Goodbye, Adonis. I pray that you find us here,
Healthy and happy, when you come back next year. |
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can be read as classic examples of Romantic Irony, enabling us to take them seriously rather than 'distancing' us from sublimity. But the best example of all is perhaps Idyll 10, with its contrast between the absurd lover-artist Boucaeus and the robust realist Milon, who comments at the end how much more real his art is (568): |
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44 , parodied in [Theocritus] 27.5. Dover's note on 3. 20, 'Empty, i.e. not proceeding to sexual intercourse' is true enough of course as far as it goes: but the resonances in connection with art of words like  and inanis need not be restricted to the most obvious contexts (like Aeneid 1. 464). |
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