Theocritus

“ These we can discern well enough, like glimmerings of nymphs and flocks among the trees; and very like Theocritus indeed is his genius; very true to nature and to manners, impulsive in its style, not afraid of colloquialisms and homely traits, but with an air of grace over all, and the right happy aroma of the subtle and the suggestive. ”

“ But, set that aside, and 'tis truth that I speak,
Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek,
I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a line
In that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral Evangeline.
That's not ancient nor modern, its place is apart
Where time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art,
'Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth's hubbub and strife
As quiet and chaste as the author's own life. ”

“ That which distinguishes Theocritus from all other poets, both Greek and Latin, and which raises him even above Virgil in his Eclogues, is the inimitable tenderness of his passions, and the natural expression of them in words so becoming of a pastoral. ”

“ For these have dared to deify men,—Alexander of Macedon, for example, whom they canonized as the thirteenth god, whose pretensions Babylon confuted, which showed him dead. I admire, therefore, the divine sophist. Theocritus was his name. After Alexander’s death, Theocritus, holding up the vain opinions entertained by men respecting the gods, to ridicule before his fellow-citizens, said: “Men, keep up your hearts as long as you see the gods dying sooner than men.” ”

“ Theocritus was, of course, the source of that pastoral convention which has produced so much that is artificial in art and literature amid much of supreme beauty. We think at once of Vergil, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Watteau, and the Dresden shepherdess. Theocritus is the literary father of all these. In his famous Fifteenth Idyll, which describes with exquisite humour the conversation of a pair of Sicilian dames going to see a festival of Adonis at Alexandria, we have the beginnings of another literary form—the mime. ”

“ Theocritus cannot see, makes no effort to see, Nature as distinct from human associations. He cannot, like Keats and Guérin, speak of the physical world "like Adam naming by divine inspiration the creatures." ”

“ This holy man was a native of the city of Rome. And when [the soldiers] seized all the Christians, and compelled them to offer up sacrifice to idols, they seized this Theocritus with them, and they brought him to the emperor who said unto him, “Wilt thou offer up sacrifice, or wilt thou put my tortures to the test?” Now Theocritus was a youth fifteen years old, and he said unto the emperor, “I bring offerings unto my Lord Jesus Christ.” And the emperor said unto him, “Sacrifice, O Theocritus, so that thou mayest not die a cruel death.” ”

“ The other bucolic poems need not be further discussed. Several of them consist of a singing-match, conducted according to the rules of amoebean poetry, in which the second singer takes the subject chosen by the first and contributes a variation in the same air. It may be noted that the peasants of Theocritus differ greatly in refinement. Those in v. are low fellows who indulge in coarse abuse. This Idyll and iv. are laid in the neighbourhood of Croton, and we may infer that Theocritus was personally acquainted with Magna Graecia. Suspicion has been cast upon poems viii. ”

“ And this, the reaction against the world that is too much with us, is, after all, the keynote of what is most intimately associated with the name of pastoral in literature--the note that is struck with idyllic sweetness in Theocritus, and, rising to its fullest pitch of lyrical intensity, lends a poignant charm to the work of Tasso and Guarini. For everywhere in these soft melodies of luscious beauty, even in the studied sketches of primitive innocence itself, there is an undercurrent of tender melancholy and pathos:
Il mondo invecchia
E invecchiando intristisce. ”

“ To be, not to be thought, an honest man.” PASTORAL POETRY.
Theocritus (flourished 283-263 B.C.) .—The pastoral, or bucolic, poetry of the Greeks, which originated in the rude songs of Laconian and Sicilian shepherds, was matured and elevated into a new department of polite composition in the idyls of Theocritus. Born in Sicily, as he tells us in an epigram intended to preface his works, he was tempted to the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Here his refreshing pictures of rural scenery were the delight of the Alexandrians, shut in by the walls of their city from the beauties of nature. ”

“ Theocritus excells all others in nature and simplicity. The subjects of his Idyllia are purely pastoral, but he is not so exact in his persons, having introduced Reapers and fishermen as well as shepherds. He is apt to be long in his descriptions, of which that of the Cup in the first pastoral is a remarkable instance. ”

“ And Theocritus the Chian, when the wife of Diocles the epicure died, and when the widowed husband, while making a funeral feast for her, kept on eating delicacies and crying all the time, said—"Stop crying, you wretched man; for you will not remedy your grief by eating all that fish." ”

“ But neither in France nor in England has there ever really been, at any time, any life resembling that portrayed by Theocritus; to-day nothing appears to us more absurd than the eighteenth century habit of picturing the Greek shepherd life in English or French landscapes. What really may have existed among the shepherds of the antique world could not possibly exist in modern times. ”

“ SPECIMENS OF THE PATHOS AND PASTORAL OF THEOCRITUS.—THE CYCLOPS IN LOVE.—POETICAL FEELING AMONG UNEDUCATED CLASSES IN THE SOUTH.—PASSAGES FROM THEOCRITUS’S FIRST IDYLL.—HIS VERSIFICATION AND MUSIC.—PASTORAL OF BION AND MOSCHUS.
Having seen the force and comic humour of Theocritus, let us now, if we can, give something of a taste of his pathos, and conclude with him as the Prince of Pastoral. ”

“ It is, however, likely that Theocritus intentionally used realistic language for the sake of dramatic effect, and the MSS. evidence is in favour of the poem. Eustathius quotes from it as the work of Theocritus.
II. Epics.—Three of these are Hymns, viz., xvi., xvii. and xxii. In xvi. the poet praises Hiero II. of Syracuse, in xvii. Ptolemy Philadelphus, and in xxii. the Dioscuri. The other poems are xiii., the story of Hylas and the Nymphs, and xxiv. the youthful Heracles. It cannot be said that Theocritus exhibits signal merit in his Epics. In xiii. ”

“ I promised to speak in another short essay of Theocritus and his songs or idyls of Greek peasant life, but in speaking of him it will be well also to speak of others who equally illustrate the fact that everywhere there is truth and beauty for the mind that can see. ”

“ Theocritus uses it so frequently in the Bucolics that it has become a mannerism. In the Epics his practice agrees with that of Homer.
We always think of Theocritus as an original 'poet, and as the "inventor of bucolic poetry" he deserves this reputation. ”

“ They are not very pastoral-sounding titles; yet the more knowledge the better, even for the shepherd; and the shepherd-poet turns it all to account, just as chemistry itself improves the field and the flowers. One of the friends whom Theocritus himself has immortalised, was a physician. We have it on the authority of a gentleman who knew the Abbate Meli, that he was as good a man as he was a charming poet. He seemed to live only (he says) to do good and to give pleasure: and he was as much beloved by the poor, as his company was in request among the prosperous. ”

“ NICIAS of Miletus, physician, scholar, and poet, was the contemporary and close friend of Theocritus. Idyl xi. is addressed to him, and the scholiast says he wrote an idyl in reply to it; idyl xxii was sent with the gift of an ivory spindle to his wife, Theugenis; and one of Theocritus' epigrams (/Anth. Pal./ vi. 337) was written for him as a dedication. There are eight epigrams of his in the Anthology (/Anth. Pal./ xi. 398 is wrongly attributed to him, and should be referred to Nicarchus) , chiefly dedications and inscriptions for rural places in the idyllic manner. ”

“ A number of passages of Theocritus bear a striking resemblance to descriptions in the inspired pastoral; and many critics have believed that he had studied its beauties and transferred them to his eclogues. Theocritus was imitated in his own dialect by Moschus and Bion; and Virgil, taking advantage of a different language copied, yet rivalled the Sicilian. ”

“ but Idylliums of Theocritus have something so inimitably Sweet in the Verse and Thoughts, such a native Simplicity, and are so genuine, so natural a Result of the rural Life; ”

“ But there is another very distinct mode of primitive feeling traceable in Theocritus, which dictates the good-humoured, often licentious, banter with which the shepherds encounter one another. As the pastoral monologue continued to betray the serious character of the Lament out of which it sprung, so this natural dialogue continued to bear traces of that old licence of the harvest-home and the vintage-season, which
Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit246. ”

“ If those who are resolved to find no faults in the Ancients, tell us that Theocritus had a mind to draw Nature just such as it is, I hope that according to those principles, we shall have some Idyllia of Porters, or Watermen discoursing together of their particular Concerns: Which will be every whit as good as some Idyllia of Shepherds speaking of nothing but their Goats or their Cows. ”

“ But he had no need to borrow from anything but the nature before his eyes. Ideas change so little among the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition is so strong, that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their prayer for pity and help. Theocritus himself could have added little passion to this incantation, still chanted in the moonlit nights of Greece: [0a]
‘Bright golden Moon, that now art near to thy setting, go thou and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, and said, “Never will I leave thee.” ”

“ And therefore those who make wanton Love- stories the subject of Pastorals, are in my opinion very unadvis’d; for all sort of lewdness or debauchery are directly contrary to the Innocence of the golden Age. There is another thing in which Theocritus is faulty, and that is making his Shepherds too sharp, and abusive to one another ”

“ But it seems certain that these poets, predecessors of Theocritus, liked to mingle with their own composition strains of rustic melody, volks-lieder, ballads, love-songs, ditties, and dirges, such as are still chanted by the peasants of Greece and Italy. Thus in Syracuse and the other towns of the coast, Theocritus would have always before his eyes the spectacle of refined and luxurious manners, and always in his ears the babble of the Dorian women, while he had only to pass the gates, and wander through the fens of Lysimeleia, by the brackish mere, or p. ”

“ According to Theocritus, this rising and setting, this continual coursing, is accomplished in twelve months: “In twelve months the silent pacing Horæ follow him from the nether-world to that above, the dwelling of the Cyprian goddess, and then he declines again to Acheron [10] .” ”

“ I No longer look upon Theocritus as a romantic writer; he has only given a plain image of the way of life amongst the peasants of his country; who, before oppression had reduced them to want, were, I suppose, all employed as the better sort of them are now. ”

“ In the manifestation of poetic gifts the natural order of advance has always been from the idyllic to the epic. Whether with the founder of pastoral poetry this may have been the{186} case we do not know, since from Theocritus there have come down to us from him no strains more militant than those in which he celebrated the rivalries, the loves, the alternate fears and hopes, not of a purely ideal Arcadia, but as those sentiments existed in everyday life among the Syracusan swains and shepherds whom in real life he knew. ”

“ Theocritus has sung of Aratus’s love-affairs, and St. Paul has quoted him as a witness to man’s instinctive consent in the doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God. These strangely various notices have done more for the memory of Aratus than his own didactic poem on the meteorological theories of his age. He lives, with Philinus and the rest of the Coan students, because Theocritus introduced them into the picture of a happy summer’s day. In the seventh idyl, that one day of Demeter’s harvest-feast is immortal, and the sun never goes down on its delight. We see Theocritus ”

“ Otherwise they differ little from work done by other poets, such as Callimachus and Apollonius Rhodius. The flattery heaped upon Ptolemy is somewhat nauseous. From another point of view, however, these two poems xvi. and xvii. are supremely interesting, since they are the only ones which can be dated. In xvii. Theocritus celebrates the incestuous marriage of Ptolemy Philadelphus with his sister Arsinoë. This marriage is held to have taken place in 277 B.C., and a recently discovered inscription shows that Arsinoë died in 270, in the fifteenth year of her brother’s reign. ”

“ Say I'll give him a kid, and in case he says nay
To this offer, three victims to him will I burn;
A kid, a fleeced ram, and a lamb sleek and fat;
He will listen, mayhap, to my prayers upon that.
V.
Prythee, sing something sweet to me—you that can play
First and second at once. Then I too will essay
To croak on the pipes: and yon lad shall salute
Our ears with a melody breathed through his flute.
In the cave by the green oak our watch we will keep,
And goatish old Pan we'll defraud of his sleep.
VI.
Poor Thyrsis! ”

“ Theocritus excels all others in nature and simplicity. ”

“ This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying, you whom the laurels of Mr. Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy. You kindly ask my opinion on vers de société in general. Well, I think them a very difficult sort of thing to write well, as one may infer from this, that the ancients, our masters, could hardly write them at all. In Greek poetry of the great ages I only remember one piece which can be called a model—the Æolic verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany the gift of the ivory distaff. ”