| Summary: | The pseudo-Theocritean Idyll 23 is frequently criticized as a wretched and unattractive poem. In this article, I argue that such allegedly ‘unattractive’ qualities do not betray the shortcomings of its poet, but are rather part of a distinctive aesthetic strategy. The Idyll embraces the murky, the hard, and the stony to construct an alternative aesthetic mode opposed to the traditional ‘sweetness’ of Theocritean bucolic and to the slender ‘refinement’ of Callimachus and Posidippus. First, I explore the poem’s knowing engagement with epic, tragedy, and epigram to demonstrate its familiarity with the common aesthetic strategies of Hellenistic poetics, whose rules it can both follow and break. Second, I analyse its ‘stony aesthetic’: the poem is dominated by both the literal and figurative language of hardness through its stone-hearted eromenos and lithic landscape. I argue that this stony environment is pointedly set against the ‘sweetness’ of the Theocritean countryside. The poem’s urban landscape both reflects and embodies its distinctive aesthetic.
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