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In Theocritus, Virgil, and Longus each author establishes a tree that is symbolic of their approach to the pastoral tradition. In the opening of Theocritus’ Idylls, a goatherd’s piping is favorably compared with the sound of wind through the pine (πίτυς). This passage establishes the pine as a symbolic marker for Theocritus’ pastoral world. This world, however, is punctuated by the frustration of unfulfilled personal desires, and the pine tree is present in passages which depict this (Idylls 1. 134, 3. 38, 5. 49).Virgil adopts this pastoral tradition and in Eclogue 1, Meliboeus comments that Tityrus lies beneath a beech tree (fagus), piping to the woodland Muse. Although the reader may assume that the beech is simply Virgil’s version of the Theocritean pine, the beginning of the fourth line makes it clear that this pastoral world is not only inhabited by unrequited personal desire, but external upheaval and frustration: “nos patriam fugimus”. The inclusion of external strife is found in two key passages in the Eclogues associated with the beech tree: 3. 12 and 9. 9, and reveals a break in the Theocritean tradition.Virgil thus establishes a mutable element of the pastoral tradition which is taken up by Longus in his genre-bending novel, Daphnis and Chloe. In the tradition of Theocritus and Virgil, Longus establishes the oak as the symbolic tree for Daphnis and Chloe. The oak appears frequently throughout the novel and represents the intensely personal erotic frustrations of the young couple. In many instances, however, Daphnis and Chloe seek refuge under their tree after outsiders have attempted violence on them. In this way, Longus blends the function of the programmatic pastoral tree established by Theocritus and Virgil.Thus, this paper examines how Virgil’s association of his pastoral symbol, the beech, with external frustrations contributes to the adaptability of the pastoral landscape established by Theocritus’ pines, and in turn inherited by Longus’ oak.
Der Beruf des Seelsorgers im Justizvollzug ist ein komplexes Handlungsfeld voller Probleme und Konflikte. Um für das kirchliche Handeln in den (ungarischen) Gefängnissen unter diesen Umständen Anhaltspunkte anzubieten, wurde systemisch untersucht, vor welche Herausforderungen Anstaltsseelsorger durch das System „Gefängnis“ gestellt werden. Die am kirchlichen Handeln in den Justizvollzugsanstalten Mitwirkenden sind zwangsläufig an zwei unterschiedlichen komplexen Systemen beteiligt und werden dadurch vor die Aufgabe gestellt, sich ein in beide Richtungen interaktionsfähiges System zu schaffen, das ein bewusstes und dynamisches Hin-und-her-Pendeln zwischen dem System „Kirche“ und dem System „Justizvollzug“ ermöglicht. Durch die Nutzung der Ressourcen, die sich in diesem Hin-und-her-Pendeln verbergen, kann ein bewusster Auf- und Ausbau der pastoralen Identität erfolgen.
The recognition of topoi, i.e. traditional formulae, is an important means of musical analysis. To illustrate this, the paper discusses the types of the battaglia and the pastoral in Bach’s Cantata Halt im Gedächtnis Jesum Christ, and briefly enumerates different types of allusions to jazz in 20th-century compositions by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Blacher, Tippet, and Zimmermann. Then it raises the possibility of an analysis of topoi in Bartók’s music in four main categories. It considers Bartók’s musical quotations from Bach to Shostakovich; the chorale as special topos appearing in Mikrokosmos, in the Concerto for Orchestra, in the Adagio religioso of the Third Piano Concerto; the topos-like employment of the tritone; and finally the idea of a Bartókian Arcadia in the Finale of Music for Strings, and the integration of bird song in the Adagio religioso.
Drawing on established connections between Roman identity and an agricultural landscape, this paper examines how the imagery of disrupted pastoral and agrarian landscapes and characters represent the effects of civil war on the Roman people in Vergil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Bellum Civile. While disturbance and turmoil are already a part of the natural landscape in Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, in epic, a genre that concerns itself with how empire and imperial power mediate Roman identity, the displacement of shepherds and agriculture partially redefines Roman identity in militaristic terms. Vergil’s pastoral characters, written into military roles as civic landscapes displace agrarian ones in the Aeneid, survive but fail to find a place in Lucan’s ruined and desolate Pharsalian landscape in the Bellum Civile. There, the broken natural landscape, unfit for agriculture, pastoralism, or trade, mirrors the redefinition of what is “Roman” and the occlusion of Rome’s link to an idealized bucolic past.
The tragedies of Hercules and Orpheus in Vergil’s Georgics anticipate their respective elevations in the afterlife.
The Social Construction of Death
Pastoral Power, Death Concept, and Normativity in the Hungarian Peasant Culture
A number of recent anthropological studies focus on the contribution of beliefs and rites connected with death to the reproduction and legitimization of this-worldly social and moral order. The present paper conceptualizes some observations concerning the this-worldly normative character of Hungarian peasant death concept, with special attention to the relations between Christian “pastoral power” (Foucault 1988, 1994) and normativity. The author attempts to demonstrate first of all that the this-worldly normative character of peasant death concept is on the one hand a product, and on the other a tool of Christian pastoral power. More accurately, he tries to define how this kind of power makes death a part of its own ideological basis through the construction, distribution and control of Christian knowledge about death, and how it tries to (re)legitimize and maintain its this-worldly influence through, among others, this knowledge.
Vergil’s Eclogues, despite belonging to the bucolic genre and being largely modelled on Theocritus’ Idylls, bear clear marks of cosmic inspiration; these emerge from time to time, now in one poem, next in another, issuing ideas and images apparently inconsistent with the pastoral world: this happens especially in the three central Eclogues. Non-pastoral ideas and images often refer to philosophical or mythological themes, possibly coming either from poets with a cosmic vein (such as Hesiod and Lucretius), or from philosophic schools dealing with cosmogony (such as Orphism and Stoicism). Vergil develops these themes in innovative ways. This broadening of perspective concerns the power of song that seduces and dominates nature (with remarkable self-reflexive implications), the human desire to interact with the gods (even to enter their realm and identify with them through apotheosis), and the longing for purification and rebirth, hand-in-hand with the universal aspiration for peace and happiness.
Looking at two descriptions of landscape in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (the sacred grove near Massilia and the Libyan desert), we will try to show that the poet uses bucolic elements to depict some places. However, he does not use these pastoral elements to describe a locus amoenus but a locus horridus. Lucan’s landscape can be defined as an inversion and a subversion of the bucolic one.
The article analyzes a simile of the Panegyric on the emperor Avitus by the Late Antique poet Sidonius Apollinaris (430–486 CE). The Vandals who sacked Rome in 455 become terrible wolves. Sidonius has to exaggerate the drama of the event experienced by Rome in order to exalt the salvific role played by the emperor Avitus. Sidonius echoes a lot of Vergil’s pastoral landscapes and other epic similes or phrases by Statius, Silius, Valerius Flaccus, Lucan. This simile is a good example of the poetry of Sidonius and of the literary conceptions of the Late Antique Literature.
