“Poor foolish heart, I cried ‘Beware,’
I vowed thou wouldst be captured,
So fondly hovering round the snare,
With thy false love enraptured.
“I cried, and thou art caught at last,
All vainly flutterest in the toils.
Lord Love himself hath bound thee fast
And meshed thy pinions in his coils.
“And he hath set thee on his fire,
In drugs thy swooning soul immersed,
In stifling perfumes of desire,
With scalding tears to quench thy thirst.”
So far it is mainly a record of revivals, but in Theocritus, who, though Sicilian by birth, passed most of his active career at Alexandria, we have the inventor of a new and most important branch of literature. With him pastoral poetry was a fresh and genuine creation. His Idylls are, as their name implies, a series of cameo pictures of shepherd life in Sicily. We have found no space here to speak of the later developments of Sicilian history, which in the fourth and third centuries became once more a desperate battleground between Carthaginian invaders and clever Syracusan tyrants like Dionysius and Agathocles. It is strange to think that the beautiful rustic life depicted by Theocritus could exist among the hills and glens of Sicily in spite of all the turmoil of history. Mr. Andrew Lang has completely vindicated Theocritus from the charge of artificiality by pointing out that the shepherds of modern Greece sing in language of refined and impassioned poetry that is perfectly natural and spontaneous. Large parts of the Idylls sound like quotations of such songs of Nature. 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. This is a rudimentary style of drama which seeks to portray little genre scenes of life with no attempt at a plot. Herondas of Cos was the principal master of this art.
Two pupils of Theocritus were Bion and Moschus, both accomplished elegiac poets. Bion’s dirge for Daphnis and Moschus’ lament for Bion have provided the type for Vergil’s lament for Daphnis, for Milton’s “Lycidas,” for Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis.”
Athens and her Philosophers
In Alexandria, then, the Hellenic genius was as fruitful as ever. But it was growing under glass there, and it was not pure Occidental culture. We have to think of the Greek Ptolemies, descended from Macedonian generals, as on the one hand writing Greek poetry and inviting Greek scholars to criticise it, but on the other hand accepting homage and
Plate 86.—Relief from Pergamum.