Who, in their petty dealings, pilfer not;
But him whose conscience spurns a secret fraud,
When he might plunder and defy surprise.
His be the praise who, looking down with scorn
On the false judgment of the partial herd,
Consults his own clear heart, and boldly dares
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 eventually returned to Sicily, and ended his days amid his native fields. (Symonds’s “Studies of the Greek Poets,” p. 302.)
The poetry of Theocritus exhibits originality and refinement, the Doric dialect in which he wrote lending the charm of picturesqueness to his descriptions. Pope commends him for simplicity and truthfulness to nature; Dryden, for “the inimitable tenderness of his passions” and the skill with which he disguised his art. As a delineator of natural scenery, he has no superior among ancient or modern poets.—There are extant thirty idyls and twenty-two epigrams of this poet. We present below Idyl VIII.