What is "corydon"

traditional poetic name for a shepherd or rustic swain, from Latin Corydon, from Greek Korydon, name of a shepherd in Theocritus and Virgil.

Corydon can be:

Corydon (from the Greek κόρυδος korudos "lark") is a stock name for a shepherd in ancient Greek pastoral poems and fables, such as the one in Idyll 4 of the Syracusan poet Theocritus (c.310-250 BC). The name was also used by the Latin poets Siculus and, more significantly, Virgil. In the second of Virgil's Eclogues, it is used for a shepherd whose love for the boy Alexis is described therein. Virgil's Corydon gives his name to the modern book Corydon.

Corydon is the name of a character that features heavily in the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus. Some scholars believe that Calpurnius represents himself, or at least his "poetic voice" through Corydon,

Corydon is mentioned in Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queen as a shepherd in Book VI, Canto X. In this section he is portrayed as a coward who fails to come to the aid of Pastorell when she is being pursued by a tiger.

The name also appears in poem number 17 ("My flocks feed not, my ewes breed not") of The Passionate Pilgrim, an anthology of poetry first published in 1599 and attributed on the title page of the collection to Shakespeare. This poem appeared the following year in another collection, England's Helicon, where it was attributed to "Ignoto" ( Latin for "Unknown"). Circumstantial evidence points to a possible authorship by Richard Barnfield, whose first published work, The Affectionate Shepherd, though dealing with the unrequited love of Daphnis for Ganymede, was in fact, as Barnfield stated later, an expansion of Virgil's second Eclogue which dealt with the love of Corydon for Alexis.

The name is again used for a shepherd boy in an English children's trilogy (Corydon and the Island of Monsters, Corydon and the Fall of Atlantis and Corydon and the Siege of Troy) by Tobias Druitt. 1

Corydon is also the name of a shepherd in a Christian hymn entitled Pastoral Elegy. The town of Corydon, Indiana is named after the shepherd of that hymn.

Corydon and Thyrsis are a pair of shepherds in Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1920 play, "Aria da Capo". 2

Corydon is also the name of a 1924 Dialogue by André Gide, in which the discussion of the naturalness and morality of homosexuality and pederasty are linked to the character Corydon, inspired by Virgil.

Other such stock names in poetry include:

• a Rooster = Chaunticleer (from French Chanticler; [chant + clear, in reference to its crow])
• a Fox = Reynard (from French Reignart; reign + -ard, "kingly one")
• a Cat = Felix (from Latin felix, "happy" [influenced by Latin feles, "cat, feline"])
• a Dog = Rufus (from Latin rufus, "red" [influenced by ruff, the bark of a dog])

Corydon is a book by André Gide consisting of four socratic dialogues on homosexuality. The name of the book comes from Virgil's pederastic character Corydon. Parts of the text were separately privately printed from 1911 to 1920, and the whole book appeared in its French original in France in May 1924 and in the United States in 1950. It is available in an English translation (ISBN 0-252-07006-2) by the poet Richard Howard.

The dialogues use evidence from naturalists, historians, poets, and philosophers in order to back up Gide's argument that homosexuality is natural, or better not unnatural, and that it pervaded the most culturally and artistically advanced civilizations such as Periclean Greece, Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. Gide argues this is reflected by writers and artists from Homer and Virgil to Titian and Shakespeare in their depictions of male-male relationships, such as Achilles and Patroclus, as homosexual rather than as platonic as other critics insist. Gide uses this evidence to insist that homosexuality is more fundamental and natural than exclusive heterosexuality, which he believes is merely a union constructed by society.

"My friends insist that this little book is of the kind which will do me the greatest harm," Gide wrote of the book.

Category:Queer studies Category:LGBT non-fiction books Category:French books Category:1924 books Category:Essay collections