The Ancient Gaze

Into the Wild: Simichidas’ Journey out of the City

       Theocritus uses the gaze in Idyll 7 in order to establish the division between the urban world and the uncultivated natural world through the control of the gaze. Unlike the rest of the Idylls, the main narrator, Simichidas, comes “ek polios” (“from the city”) as opposed to being a rustic figure; thus, the reader experiences the pastoral world through the eyes of a city man. Theocritus draws in the readers visually through the gaze so that they become part of the narration. The spring is described in the most simple direction- the reader’s gaze is drawn up, then back down. In contrast to this, the locus amoenus- the festival of Demeter- is the most complex, with the gaze being directed in many different directions, and the reader joins the celebration through the stimulation of all the senses.

       Through Simichidas’ urbanism, Theocritus also plays on the collective mental image of what the natural world is like, especially through his description of Lycidas, the goatherd. Simichidas makes the reader look him down and up again, declaring repeatedly that seeing him, one would know that he was unmistakably a goatherd. Because of Simichidas’ distance from the pastoral world, his descriptions, such as those of Lycidas, the spring, and the festival of Demeter portray the tensions between the natural world and the urban world, as seen by an urban gentleman.