“For I would watch all night to see unfold Heaven’s Gate, and Æthon snort his morning gold Wide o’er the swelling streams, and constantly My nets would be spread out.”
[276] Moses Browne in the introductory essay to his Angling Sports in Nine Piscatory Eclogues asserts that Servius allowed only seven of Virgil’s Bucolics to be pure pastorals, while Heinsius for similar reasons rejects all but ten of Theocritus’s Idylls.
[277] I. 39 ff.; III. 25 f.; IX. 25 ff.; and especially in XXI.
[278] With the execrable taste of his age Sannazaro considered himself bound to produce still paler shades of those pale shadows, the Eclogues of Virgil, just as their author, the most precedent-loving of poets, rarely ventured to introduce an image or an incident without the authority of some Greek original (W. M. Adams, op. cit., p. 45). Moses Browne (ibid.) declares that it would have been far better if Sannazaro had never written his “sea eclogues, for the exercise of fishing appears so contemptible in him, that any that writes on a subject, that seems to be of a similar aspect, must suffer disadvantage.”
[279] They must, however, now according to the evidence of the Papyri be dated back some three centuries, i.e. from the usually accepted date of the sixth to about the third century a.d.
As regards some of the Romance writers, the Papyri are a revelation and compel apparently much revision of dates. Thus Chariton (whom “the critics place variously between the fifth and the ninth centuries a.d.”) is fixed by Pap., Fayum Towns, as before 150 a.d. Achilles Tatius, whose allotted span, owing to his imitation of Heliodorus (who hitherto has been dated about the end of the fourth century), was run “about the latter half of the fifth or beginning of the sixth century,” is now placed by Pap., Oxyrh., 1250, as living before 300, and thus Heliodorus is removed up to (c.) 250 a.d.
[280] In the Anthologia Palatina there are some 3700 epigrams, etc., dating from 700 b.c. and ending about 1300 a.d.; none of these, as far as I can recall, contradict the poverty note. I have chosen 500 a.d. as being a convenient date, because it includes all Greek and Græco-Roman writers as distinct from the Byzantine, and includes also the earlier and better prose writers, like Heliodorus and Longus. Epigrams, it is true, continued to be written until the fourteenth century, but there is little, and that of no poetical account, after the tenth, when the popular or “political” verse began, with a few exceptions, to supplant the classical forms.
[281] H. Blümner, Römische Privataltertümer, p. 329. “It is noteworthy that as Virgil omitted all mention of fishermen in his Bucolics, his imitators have followed his example, and in consequence in classical Latin the fisherman has no place as a pastoral character. The hut and tackle in the Theocritean story of Asphalion was foreign to Virgil’s conception of the province of pastoralism” (Hall, op. cit., 1914, p. 28).
[282] Heliod, Æthiop., V. 18.
[283] De Apollonio Tyrio, 12.