PMG 850: A popular song?|PMG 850: UN CANTO POPOLARE?

PMG 850: A Popular Song? center dot PMG 850 is a short poetic fragment preserved in a passage of Clearchus' Erotikoi quoted by Athenaeus, where it is called nomion melos. Mainly due to this reason, it is considered by most scholars as the folk arche- type of Theocritus' bucolic poetry. This paper aims to call into question the inclu- sion of PMG 850 in the corpus of Carmina Popularia: it is argued that this fragment rather belongs to a literary composition of lyric genre, which is attributed to a fic- titious author, Eriphanis, and deals with the pains of love in a bucolic setting, as is the case in Theocritus' Idylls.