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MARK PAYNE. Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. viii + 183 pp. Cloth, $96.
Whether one accepts his initial argument or not-that there is no real, true fiction until Theocritus' Idylls-Mark Payne's Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction admirably demonstrates that the idyllic "world" of Theocritus is fiction on a level theretofore unknown in Greek literature. Payne prefers to describe this new, fictional world as "realms of the unreal" (introduction). Distinct from earlier fictional worlds, such as that of the Iliad and Odyssey or of old Comedy, the "realms of the unreal" in Theocritean bucolic neither attach themselves to myth nor do they utilize old Comedy's surreal and fantastic engagement of the real world of fifth-century Athens. There are, of course, Idylls that do, as, for example, Idyll 15, where New Comedy conventions issue forth with a mimiambic aspect. but Payne's focus is on those Idylls where the disjunct between mythical world and real world is so jarring as to create a "realm of the unreal," specifically Idylls 1, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13.
In chapter 1, "The Pleasures of the imaginary," Payne addresses himself to Idyll 1. Here, the gap between the fictional world of the idyll and reality is so great that Theocritus takes no pains at all, either through the poet's voice or through the words of the bucolic characters, Thyrsis and the unnamed syrinx player, to establish any sort of referentiality from reality to the "realm of the unreal." The poetic function of the completeness of this fiction is to create a sort of poetic involture, to "invite us to go further with the game of world-building that [the characters] initiate. if the poem does not tell us how to arrange the shepherd's seat and the oaks in relation to the elm, Priapus, and...