The Pastoral Narcissus

Book excerpt: In The Pastoral Narcissus, the only book-length treatment of the First Idyll of Theocritus, Clayton Zimmerman returns to a more philological consideration of the major problems in the text, keeping in sight the best recent scholarship. Zimmerman demonstrates that Theocritus is clearly evoking the Narcissus myth, and in doing so provides readers with the first complete study of that myth since 1860. He then uses his reading of Daphnis to inform other bucolic poems in the corpus, and to expose the connections between Daphnis and a Theocritean ideal of poetic composition.