Theocritus’ seventh Idyll (the Thalysia), Virgil’s First Eclogue and Seamus Heaney’s “Glanmore Eclogue” form a poetic constellation within which the second and third author place their work, both seeing their own poetry as part of a tradition to be strengthened and renewed according to a personal aim. Virgil ‘responds’ to Theocritus in the first poem of his collection, and Heaney to Virgil. In both cases, the memory of the Odyssey plays a role, for it is clearly evoked in the Thalysia, the poem that ‘stages’ the origin of bucolic poetry. This study analyses the mode and the effects of the presence of the Odyssey within the tradition that these interconnected texts epitomise, in limine and in extremis.
