[315] Callimachus, whom Theocritus probably knew at Alexandria, calls the “chrysophrys” sacred—
“Or shall I rather say the gold-browed fish, That sacred fish?”
See Athen., VII. 20.
[316] “Theocritus gives nature, not behind the footlights, but beneath the truthful blaze of Sicily’s sunlit sky. For it was here that the first vibrations of this spontaneous note were heard in their original purity, before art could distort them with allegory, or echo weaken them with imitation. This is all the more remarkable from the contrast which it offers to what Kingsley calls the ‘artificial jingle’ of the Alexandrian school. Simplicity, honesty, truth, and beauty recommend Theocritus as a genuine artist. His imitators, as compared with their model, were like—
‘Those many jackdaw-rhymers, who with vain Chattering contend against the Chian Bard,’
as he himself describes (Id., VII. 47) Homer’s imitators.” Against this verdict by H. Snow on the Alexandrians must be set the more truthful appreciation of their work by Mackail, op. cit., pp. 178-207, especially p. 184: “They are called artificial poets, as though all poetry were not artificial, and the greatest poetry were not the poetry of the most consummate artifice.”
[317] Anth. Pal., VI. 4; VII. 295; VII. 504. While the last two in the MS. are headed Λεωνίδου Ταραντίνου, and τοῦ αὐτοῦ, the first is simply Λεωνίδου. Hence this has sometimes been thought to be by Leonidas of Alexandria, but Professor Mackail informs me that all three epigrams are by the Tarentine, both by evidence of style, and because all three come in groups of epigrams taken from the Anthology of Meleager.
[318] The following translation by Mr. Andrew Lang is truer:
”Theris the Old, the waves that harvested More keen than birds that labour in the sea. With spear and net, by shore and rocky bed, Not with the well-manned galley laboured he; Him not the star of storms, nor sudden sweep Of wind with all his years hath smitten and bent, But in his hut of reeds he fell asleep, As fades a lamp when all the oil is spent: This tomb nor wife nor children raised, but we His fellow-toilers, fishers of the sea.”
[319] In line 5 πρώτης, which makes nonsense, should certainly be corrected to πλωτῆς.