Vasileios Dimoglidis | PhD Candidate | University of Cincinnati

Seminar Chair: Prof. Ivana Petrovic (University of Virginia)

Abstract

Space in Idyll 2 turns into the organizing principle of Simaetha’s affective narrative. Rather than treating the city as neutral background, the poem plots emotion through female movement from space to space so that distance and proximity become the very terms in which Simaetha’s desire and abandonment are narrated. Building on scholarship that recognizes Simaetha’s power (Segal 1985; Burton 1995: esp.42-43; Klooster 2012: esp.107, and 117; Thalmann 2023: esp.40-41), I argue that Simaetha’s agency is also constructed through deliberate manipulation of spatial boundaries: she projects movement toward male territory (the παλαίστρα) yet pairs this with domestic control (the spell’s repeated demand to draw Delphis “to her house”), and even extends influence into his threshold through a female intermediary. This spatial intelligence also shapes reception. The “female reader” at stake here is not a demographic claim but an implied position encoded in first-person, female focalization, bodily gestures, domestic ritual, and the mapping of emotion onto female-coded spaces. Work on female literacy and literate culture (e.g. Cole 1981; Pomeroy 1990) elaborate on the social conditions under which women could participate in literary culture, allowing the poem’s gendered perspective to be read in relation to possible female reception. As I suggest, Idyll 2 does not merely “give voice” to a woman; it models a form of spatial “know-how”, inviting female readers to inhabit Simaetha’s experiential horizon and to see how female initiative can negotiate, re-center, and re-configure the poem’s affective topography, and thus share with Simaetha the dynamics of female presence in city.

Works Cited

Burton, J.B. (1995), Theocritus’s Urban Mimes. Mobility, Gender, and Patronage, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cole S.G. (1981), “Could Greek women read and write?”, in H. P. Foley (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity, London and New York: Routledge, 219-245.

Klooster, J.J.H. (2012). “Space in Theocritus”, in I.J.F. de Jong (ed.), Space in Ancient Greek Literature. Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 99-117.

Pomeroy, S.B. (1990), Women in Hellenistic Egypt. From Alexander to Cleopatra, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Segal, C. (1985), “Space, time, and imagination in Theocritus’ second Idyll”, Classical Antiquity 4: 103-119.

Thalmann, W.G. (2023), Theocritus. Space, Absence, and Desire, Oxford: Oxford University Press.