The Alternative Futures of the Lyric Characters: Time Imagined and Time Sung in the Bucolic Corpus

Abstract The aim of the present study is to explore the pattern of the alternative future in the example of three love stories in the bucolic corpus involving three characters, namely the anonymous goatherd of Idyll 3, the Cyclops and Daphnis. The alternative future is expressed through the rhetorical means of the future tense, the optative or imperative mood, and the conditional sentences, and may be described as imagined, performed or narrated. The test cases from the bucolic corpus are analyzed according to three criteria: the subjective viewpoint of the lyric mind, the distanced perspective of the bucolic singer and the words uttered by the dramatized characters and/or the narrator.