• 1 Cass. Dio 72.4. For recent studies see R. Alston, “The Revolt of the Boukoloi: Geography, History a (...)

2I should stress at the outset that in this chapter I am interested primarily in actual cow-farmers, rather than the thuggish Egyptian bandits known as the Boukoloi who appear in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, apparently reflecting real-life outlaws of the Roman Empire.1 Why these gained their name is not at all clear: certainly there is no indication in the sources of association with cows or indeed any kind of pastoral farming. It is surely not irrelevant, however, that these notorious anti-establishment figures were identified with a label that (I argue) rapidly acquired powerfully negative associations in the era. Whether they were so named because the boukolos was now imagined in hostile terms, or whether they negatively influenced the portrayal of the actual cowherd, or whether the reality is more complex and bi-directional, are not questions that our evidence permits us to answer. I shall, however, return to this matter in a limited way presently.

• 2 Hom. Il. 5.313–15 (Anchises; cf. HHApr. 54–56), 21.448–49 (Apollo); D. Berman, “The Hierarchy of He (...)

3As I say, my interest lies primarily in actual cow-farmers, as represented in Greek fictional or fictionalising literature of the Roman Empire. Why did they acquire such negative connotations? Before we approach this question, we should consider the earlier literary background, which in fact paints a broadly positive picture. The primary reference points are two, Homer and Theocritus. In the Odyssey, the cowherd Philoetius and the swineherd Eumaeus are loyal to their master, while the goatherd Melanthius (a doublet of the disloyal maid Melantho) is not, and is moreover abusive towards the disguised Odysseus. This differentiation, coupled with the fact that in epic it is acceptable for high-status figures (and even gods) to engage, at least temporarily, in cowherding,2 suggests a general moral and social superiority of cowherds at least over goatherds. This loose differentiation is what we might expect, given the different values of the animals, and in particular the status of the cow as the sacrificial animal most prized by the gods.

• 3 The idea of the bucolic hierarchy is first proposed (for Vergil) in the fifth century CE by Donatus (...)

4In Theocritus, the boukolos is a generally benign figure, albeit prone to love-lorn contemplation. What is important to stress is that, as is now well understood, Theocritean poetry does not enforce a clear status differentiation (the alleged ‘bucolic hierarchy’) between cowherds, shepherds and goatherds, although there are some hints in this direction.3

• 4 κρείττων/κρείσσων is strictly speaking derived from the adjective κρατύς, which is however extremel (...)

6We should note that Dorcon’s posited superiority is asserted in terms of size and power, not beauty or moral excellence: he is ‘greater’ (meizōn), and even ‘mightier’ (kreittōn, sharing a root with kratos, ‘force’).4 The cowherd asserts his physical vigour, which he implicitly shares with ‘cows’—or, perhaps a better translation would be ‘oxen’ or ‘bulls’, since the male animals are often associated with elemental power in Greek culture. In particular, bulls could be linked mythically with the unwelcome pursuit of females, as in the cases of Europa (abducted by Zeus in the guise of a bull) and Deianeira (whom the river god Achelous approached in the monstrous form of a bull). According to Artemidorus of Daldis, to dream of a bull ‘signifies extraordinary danger, especially if it is threatening or pursuing’ (Oneir. 2.12, trans. White).

• 5 See esp. S.J. Epstein, “Longus’ Werewolves,” CPh 90, 1995, p. 59–60. The final theriomorphic elemen (...)
• 6 λύκου δέρμα μεγάλου . . . ὃν ταῦρός ποτε πρὸ τῶν βοῶν μαχόμενος τοῖς κέρασι διέφθειρε.
• 7 At least, this seems to be how the text presents the episode; modern sexual ethics would no doubt b (...)
• 8 In fact bulls are surprisingly rare as positive heroic comparanda in Homer: see Il. 2.480–81, 21.23 (...)

8The bull-rapist has now become a wolf-rapist. The reasons for his choice of a wolf costume are never explained in terms of naturalistic motivation, but the symbolic association between the cowherd and violent, rapacious bestiality, and the general thematic importance to Daphnis and Chloe of the motif of the wolf (as the embodiment of invasive aggression) are evident and have been noted by scholars.5 What is more, the connection between the bull and the wolf is marked within the text: the wolf costume he wears consists of ‘the skin of a big wolf that a bull once gored to death defending his cows’ (1.20.2).6 Dorcon’s attempted rape of Chloe is, in the event, unsuccessful (he is attacked by dogs who mistake him for a real wolf), but the bestial connection does not disappear. He eventually meets his fate when he is attacked by pirates who cut him down, in his own dying words, ‘like a bull fighting for my cows’ (πρὸ τῶν βοῶν μαχόμενον . . . ὡς βοῦν). In death he is brought close to a kind of moral redemption,7 and he pretends even to a heroic status via his simile.8 The taurine violence, however, remains.

• 9 Trapp et al. 2001 s.v. ἀγερωχέω (“überheblich sein, stolz, hochmutig sein”) .

10It is worth reflecting on the word agerōkhos, which means (I think) something more than John Morgan’s ‘hothead’, reproduced here. In Homer it is in fact largely used in a positive sense, of ‘lordly’ individuals. In later Greek, however, it takes on two additional senses: ‘high-spirited’, and ‘overweening, arrogant’ (the meaning that had won out exclusively in Byzantine times,9 and persists into modern Greek). Longus in fact has the word elsewhere in both senses: the young child Eros (2.4.2) and Philetas’ son Tityrus (2.32.1) are presumably to be taken as ‘high-spirited’, whereas Chloe’s avoidance of the shepherds for fear of the agerōkhia presumably recognises their potential for violent behaviour. That Lampis might be taken in the first instance as ‘overweening’ is suggested by the verb emnato, translated above as ‘beseeching’, but really means that he ‘sought her in marriage’: this carries echoes of the Odyssey’s aggressive, domineering suitors (mnēstēres).

• 10 C. Calame, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd, Princeton, Princeton University, (...)
• 11 See e.g. Aesch. Suppl. 663, Pind. Pyth. 9.109–10, Anth. Pal. 7.217.3.

11Like Dorcon, he turns to violence when conventional means fail. His first act is a symbolic one, destroying the garden kept by Daphnis’ father by trampling the flowers, a passage with long-recognised echoes of Sappho fragment 105c Voigt (‘like the hyacinth which shepherds tread underfoot in the mountains, and on the ground the purple flower’: note that in Sappho’s poimēn or ‘shepherd’ has been replaced by a boukolos). Like Dorcon, the boukolos Lampis behaves in a bestial way: he tramples the flowers ‘like a boar’ (hōsper sus, 1.7.3)—perhaps specifically like the Iliad’s Calydonian boar that ‘worked much evil, wasting the orchard plot of Oeneus’ (Hom. Il. 9.540). Although the assault is primarily targeted at Daphnis and his father—his calculation is apparently that the blame will fall on them, and once punished they will no longer be in a position to come between him and Chloe—there are obvious intimations of female rape here. Flowery meadows are prime locations for assaults on young women,10 and flower-plucking can metaphorically suggest defloration.11

• 13 Ath. Deipn. 560b (cf. Duris FGrH 76 F2).
• 14 N. 1 above.

17The simile is instructive: Lampis is imagined as a military enemy subdued in battle. In part, Longus much be invoking the familiar Greek idea that ‘the greatest wars came about thanks to women,’13 and particularly their abduction. If we take Longus to have written after the revolt of the Egyptian Boukoloi in 172–73 CE, however, we may also hear echoes of Gaius Avidius Cassius’ military campaign to subdue them.14

• 15 Hom. Od. 18.85, 18.116, 21.308.

19These malefactors are identified as Echemus, Leon and Bucolos. In fact, the first name is uncertain, appearing in multiple different forms in the manuscripts. (Whatever it was originally, was it perhaps supposed to carry an echo of Echetus, the proverbially savage king referred to on several occasions in the Odyssey?)15 The second and third, however, are unambiguous: Leon (‘Lion’) and Boukolos. The names seem clearly chosen to suggest violence in rural space. What is interesting to me is that the name is apparently expected to carry that hostile resonance on its own, without any kind of contextual framing.

• 16 M.B. Trapp, “Plato’s Phaedrus in the Second Century,” in D.A. Russell (ed.), Antonine Literature, O (...)

22The role of the boukolos here is not merely to nurture his herd, but to contain and constrain the bull’s monstrous violence and anger. What is particularly interesting is the hint of a form of psychic modelling, whereby the bull actually in a sense embodies the passionate spirit (the thumos) and the herdsman the rational force that attempts to control (note ‘check’, epekhei) it. This dyadic metaphor of the soul as a human agent attempting to control a beast is of a very familiar kind in Greek thought, and of course its most celebrated expression comes in the chariot simile of Plato’s Phaedrus, which was widely imitated in the period under discussion.16 In Aelian’s description, the boukolos is presented as someone with a strikingly precarious control over the feral beast (note the latter’s ‘irresistible charge’, hormēi akataskhetos): only if he happens to know the odd (and hardly plausible to anyone, even in antiquity?) workaround of the ribbon trick can he hope to reassert his dominance.

• 17 For a recent defence of their Lucianic authorship see J. Jope, “Interpretation and Authenticity of (...)

28The idea of Eros the boukolos seems once again to be linked to the idea of the chastisement of animals. The first of the two passages from the (?pseudo-)17 Lucianic Erotes, where the proponent of gay love, Theomnestus, talks about the recurrent passions to which he has succumbed:

• 18 LSJ s.v. II. Compare e.g. Alciphron 3.2.3 (ἐλπίσιν ἀπατηλαῖς βουκολούμενοι).

29My interest in this passage lies only in part in the baroque metaphor epithumiais boukoloumai in the second line. The Loeb translation, reproduced here, suggests ‘deceive’ or ‘beguile’, a meaning as old as Aeschylus, which seems to derive from the idea of food provision: the cowherd in effect seduces or bewitches his cows by providing them with free food.18 But the effects of erōs in our passage are more violent than that: they are compared to burning and stinging. Particularly striking is the comparison of erotic stimulation to a gadfly (muōps), an insect that attacks cattle, and of course carries an allusion to the mythical figure of Io, transformed into a cow, who was pursued across the world by a gadfly. Here, then, we seem to have three interrelated levels of thought: the ox that is trained for work by beating; the erōtikos human being, who is subjected to boukolia (in the sense of violent stinging) by his desires; and the mythical Io, who was punished by Hera, jealous of Zeus’ passion for her, with a stinging gadfly. All levels are united by the idea of the cow that is attacked by violent beatings. In other words, the mythical story of Io is being retrospectively rewritten as a tale about boukolia as boun kolazein.

• 19 H. Frangoulis, Du roman à l’épopée : influence du roman grec sur les Dionysiaques de Nonnos de Pano (...)

30My final passage comes from the opening of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, and his account there of Europa on the bull. This passage is heavily indebted to the ecphrasis on the same theme that opens Achilles Tatius.19 In Achilles, an unnamed narrator claims to describe a painting of the episode he has seen in Sidon. Because it is a visual-artistic representation (however fictional) that is at issue, Achilles (or his narrator) is compelled to recount the elements in the picture in their two-dimensional relation to each other. The role of Eros within the picture is thus specified, and it is an allegorical one, tangential to the ‘real’ narrative being played out between the maiden and the bull. Eros is depicted as an anthropomorphic deity, a flying child (‘Eros himself led the bull—Eros, a tiny boy, his wings stretched out, wearing his quiver, his lighted torch in his hands . . .,’ 1.1.13). One can certainly imagine an erotic-psychological reading of the central figures too, Europa and the bull: the violence of the bull’s plashing limbs (‘a billow rose like a mountain where his leg was bent in swimming,’ 1.1.9) might be contrasted with the maiden’s attempts to pilot him (‘with her left hand she clung to his horn, like a charioteer holding the reins, and the bull inclined a little in that direction, guided by the pressure of her hand,’ 1.1.10). The bull might thus be taken as figurative of the welling power of Eros within the young girl, and her attempts to ‘herd’ it through philosophical discipline. Nothing in the text, however, points explicitly in that direction, and it remains but a suggestive hint, a single thread within the complex literary weft.

• 20 For Eros whipping the bull, Nonno di Panopoli, Le dionisiache, I, Canti I-XII, introd., trad. e com (...)
• 21 See in general B. Harries, “The Pastoral Mode in the Dionysiaca,” in N. Hopkinson (ed.), Studies in (...)
• 22 ἐπεμάστιε is from ἐπιμαστί[ζ]ω, which has μάστιξ (‘scourge’) at its root. Note too the ἐπι‑ prefix, (...)
• 23 Nonn. Dion. 4.67, 166; 5.190; 7.204 etc.
• 24 F. Hadjittofi, “Major Themes and Motifs in the Dionysiaca,” in D. Accorinti, (ed.), Brill’s Compani (...)

32Because this is not an ecphrasis of an artwork, Nonnus is not compelled to visualise his Eros within a two-dimensional scheme. How Eros is to be imagined is up to the reader. There are certainly visual aspects to the scene, as so often in Nonnus:20 Eros appears whipping a bull occasionally in art, and the simile communicates something about his aspect (Eros raises his bow ‘like a rural staff’). But none of this helps us to understand why he resembles a boukolos, and why the wider bucolic imagery is being used. To understand that, we need to explore subtler literary dynamics that go beyond the visual. Other boukoloi appear in the poem, and bucolic themes are particularly important in the first, pre-military part of the Dionysiaca.21 Eros’ bucolic identity in the programmatic opening scene, then, is part of a complex of pastoral themes that belong to the early parts of the text, but will in time be superseded and absorbed. But Nonnus’ bucolic Eros is not simply an Alexandrian nomeus, an embodiment of rustic peace and yearning: he violently flogs22 the beast, now described as ‘servile’, with his kestos. In the Dionysiaca the kestos is usually the familiar seductive breast-band known to the Homeric tradition,23 but here it seems to be imagined in more aggressive terms, playing the role of a goad. No doubt, however, we should be thinking not literally of a different implement—kestos is unattested elsewhere to my knowledge as ‘goad’—but of a paradoxically violent interpretation given to the effects of seduction. We find similar passages elsewhere in Nonnus, where the kestos substitutes for weapons and such like: the narrator refers to the war undertaken by Minos as involving ‘the kestos not the shield-strap’ (25.149), and elsewhere it is said to be superior to the weapons of Aphrodite (33.135, 241). Particularly important parallels for our passage are the reminiscence of Aphrodite, smitten with lust for Anchises, driving his cattle using the kestos (Dion. 15.210–12), and Poseidon ‘flogged’ (himasseto, 42.491; cf. 438) by it when smitten by desire for Beroe. In other words, Nonnus conceives of Eros as uniting two aspects, the seductive and the violent. In our passage, the deployment of the kestos as a bucolic goad marks the subjection of the king of the gods to a humiliating servitude—paradoxically through the sweet sensations of desire.24 This paradoxical servitude is what Plato named when he coined the word ethelodouleia, ‘willing-slavery’.

• 25 R. Alston, art. cit., p. 129–53, in particular emphasizes the combination of fact and salacious fan (...)

34I conclude, then, that imperial Greek literature saw a transformation in the figure of the boukolos. What motivated this transformation? Awareness of the Nile-Delta bandits known as the boukoloi certainly played its part.25 The re-etymologisation of the word also helped, but that was surely an effect rather than a cause. For the real driver of change we must look elsewhere. The advent of the Roman Empire saw increased urbanisation and hence separation of the elite—the producers of literature—from the peasants, the producers of food. The fact that some 80% of the total population of the empire was involved in the latter can only have sharpened the sense of a gulf between the two. The class divisions engendered by the social organisation of the Empire, in particular the distinction between those who had Roman citizenship and those who did not, must have meant that when most educated Romans experienced cowherding (and other forms of labour) they did with the mixture of superior contempt and fascination that the urbanites in Daphnis and Chloe betray.

• 26 M. Bloomer, The School of Rome: Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education, Berkeley, Unive (...)
• 27 See esp. W. Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination, Cambridge, 2000.
• 28 In particular Emily Kneebone’s forthcoming work on Oppian’s Halieutica is keenly awaited.

35The idea of the bous as subject to the violence of the boukolos points to the same kind of moral world as that of the fables taught to young children, where hierarchical violence between humans and animals, and between animals, is presented as a normal and inevitable fact of life.26 It is also the world of the various Ass narratives, including Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, where humans’ chastisement of animals is seen as a metaphor for the aggressive dominance that inheres in the Roman class structure.27 As is becoming increasingly clear,28 the Roman Greek world was one in which animals were not just good to think with, as the Lévi-Straussian cliché puts it in the absolute; they also became good to think about power with, both the power that individuals exert over each other and that which they exert over themselves.