Coffee Talk - the Pastoral
Last week, I gave a presenation for my Hellenistic Poetry seminar, and I embarrassed myself by taking my editor's word on a subject that turned out to be in much dispute. The subject was this: shepherds in antiquity sang songs in a competitive forum. When my editor made this claim, I didn't bat an eyelash; I assumed he had good reason for saying it, and then I extrapolated the evidence to hypothesize that the speech-giving contest in one of Plato's dialogues might have been based on this pastoral institution.
The problem, Prof. Susan S pointed out, is that we have no way of knowing what shepherds did. Presumably, they spent all their time in ISOLATION, tending their flocks. The pastoral, after all, is in many ways an antithesis to city life. Something like Aphrodite and Anchises' encounter would be best facilitated by the shepherd being alone. Thus we have, on the one hand, the image of the lone shepherd, and on the other hand, the image of the social shepherd - the shepherd who frolicks about in the countryside in the company of many other shepherds, composing songs to be performed competitively for the prize of a silver cup or a pretty girl (whom we must believe has leisure enough to do no work all day, even in these times of substinance-level economies).
But opposing this practical conception of shepherds is the overwhelming, crosscultural testimony that shepherds were indeed singers. Hesiod, a self-identified shepherd, is the first Greek example (though he sang alone, not competitively). Shepherd-bards also figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, shepherds in Greek tragedy are rarely anti-social people. If anything, they seem to be MORE hip to what's going on, as their function usually is to relay messages.
On top of all this, we must remember that the pastoral genre, as a rule, almost never has anything to do with the reality of the countryside. Scholars today are discovering that whenever there is a romanticization of rustic life, it is usually motivated by a political statement, concerning the land being somehow threatened.
So talk among yourselves. I'll give you a topic: the idea of the singing, social shepherd was neither historically accurate nor entirely fictional. Discuss! There, I feel better now.
The problem, Prof. Susan S pointed out, is that we have no way of knowing what shepherds did. Presumably, they spent all their time in ISOLATION, tending their flocks. The pastoral, after all, is in many ways an antithesis to city life. Something like Aphrodite and Anchises' encounter would be best facilitated by the shepherd being alone. Thus we have, on the one hand, the image of the lone shepherd, and on the other hand, the image of the social shepherd - the shepherd who frolicks about in the countryside in the company of many other shepherds, composing songs to be performed competitively for the prize of a silver cup or a pretty girl (whom we must believe has leisure enough to do no work all day, even in these times of substinance-level economies).
But opposing this practical conception of shepherds is the overwhelming, crosscultural testimony that shepherds were indeed singers. Hesiod, a self-identified shepherd, is the first Greek example (though he sang alone, not competitively). Shepherd-bards also figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, shepherds in Greek tragedy are rarely anti-social people. If anything, they seem to be MORE hip to what's going on, as their function usually is to relay messages.
On top of all this, we must remember that the pastoral genre, as a rule, almost never has anything to do with the reality of the countryside. Scholars today are discovering that whenever there is a romanticization of rustic life, it is usually motivated by a political statement, concerning the land being somehow threatened.
So talk among yourselves. I'll give you a topic: the idea of the singing, social shepherd was neither historically accurate nor entirely fictional. Discuss! There, I feel better now.
posted by Rex at 4:21 AM
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