SOURCE: “Gender and Power,” in Theocritus's Urban Mimes: Mobility, Gender, and Patronage, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 41-92.

In the following excerpt, Burton examines how Theocritus portrayed changing gender roles, the rise of feminine power, and gender ambiguity in his poems.

The ascendancy of autocratic hegemonies, the rise in mobility, and the reliance on mercenary forces had strong effects on gendered social identities for Greeks in the Hellenistic age. Masculine power in the old Greek world was closely linked with the ideal of a citizen-soldier.¹ But in a mobile Hellenistic world, citizenship was losing its appeal as a measure of masculine power. Further, the rise in state wealth, resulting in part from Alexander's conquests in the East, enabled reliance on mercenaries in armed forces. Thus Hellenistic Greek males, for the most part, had to seek personal identities outside the role of citizen-soldiers and the realm of public political...