What constitutes the difference between the georgic and the pastoral, is love and the colloquial or dramatic form of composition peculiar to the latter; this form of composition is sometimes dispensed with, and love and rural imagery alone are thought sufficient to distinguish the pastoral. The tender passion, however, seems to be essential to this species of poetry, and is hardly ever excluded from those pieces that were intended to come under this denomination: even in those eclogues of the Amœbean kind, whose only purport is a trial of skill between contending shepherds, 103 love has its usual share, and the praises of their respective mistresses are the general subjects of the competitors.
It is to be lamented, that scarce any oriental compositions of this kind have survived the ravages of ignorance, tyranny, and time; we cannot doubt that many such have been extant, possibly as far down as that fatal period, never to be mentioned in the world of letters without horror, when the glorious monuments of human ingenuity perished in the ashes of the Alexandrian library.
Those ingenious Greeks, whom we call the parents of pastoral poetry, were, probably, no more than imitators, of imitators that derived their harmony from higher and remoter sources, and kindled their poetical fires at those then unextinguished lamps which burned within the tombs of oriental genius.
It is evident that Homer has availed himself of those magnificent images and descriptions so frequently to be met with in the books of the Old Testament; and why may not Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion have found their archetypes in other eastern writers, whose names have perished with their works? yet, though it may not be illiberal to admit such a supposition, it would certainly be invidious to conclude, what the malignity of cavillers alone could suggest with regard to Homer, that they destroyed the sources from 104 which they borrowed, and, as it is fabled of the young of the pelican, drained their supporters to death.
As the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament was performed at the request, and under the patronage, of Ptolemy Philadelphus, it were not to be wondered if Theocritus, who was entertained at that prince’s court, had borrowed some part of his pastoral imagery from the poetical passages of those books. I think it can hardly be doubted that the Sicilian poet had in his eye certain expressions of the prophet Isaiah, when he wrote the following lines:
| Νυν ια μεν φορεοιτε βατοι, φορεοιτε δ’ ακανθαι. Ἁ δε καλα Ναρκισσος επ’ αρκευθοισι κομασαι; Παντα δ’ εναλλα γενοιτο, και ἁ πιτυς οχνας ενεικαι –––και τως κυνας ὡλαφος ἑλκοι. Let vexing brambles the blue violet bear, On the rude thorn Narcissus dress his hair, All, all reversed––The pine with pears be crown’d, And the bold deer shall drag the trembling hound. |
The cause, indeed, of these phenomena is very different in the Greek from what it is in the Hebrew poet; the former employing them on the death, the latter on the birth, of an important person: but the marks of imitation are nevertheless obvious.
It might, however, be expected, that if Theocritus had borrowed at all from the sacred writers, the celebrated pastoral epithalamium of Solomon, 105 so much within his own walk of poetry, would not certainly have escaped his notice. His epithalamium on the marriage of Helena, moreover, gave him an open field for imitation; therefore, if he has any obligations to the royal bard, we may expect to find them there. The very opening of the poem is in the spirit of the Hebrew song:
| Ουτω δη πρωιζα κατεδραθες, ω φιλε γαμβρε; |
The colour of imitation is still stronger in the following passage: