AT the beginning of the third century before Christ, in the years just
preceding those in which Theocritus wrote, the genius of Greece seemed to
have lost her productive force. Nor would it have been strange if that
force had really been exhausted. Greek poetry had hitherto enjoyed a
peculiarly free development, each form of art succeeding each without
break or pause, because each—epic, lyric, dithyramb, the drama—had
responded to some new need of the state and of religion. Now in the
years that followed the fall of Athens and the conquests of Macedonia,
Greek religion and the Greek state had ceased to be themselves. Religion
and the state had been the patrons of poetry; on their decline poetry
seemed dead. There were no heroic kings, like those for whom epic
minstrels had chanted. The cities could no longer welcome an Olympian
winner with Pindaric hymns. There was no imperial Athens to fill the
theatres with a crowd of citizens and strangers eager to listen to new
tragic masterpieces. There was no humorous democracy to laugh at all the
world, and at itself, with Aristophanes. The very religion of Sophocles
and Aeschylus was debased. A vulgar usurper had stripped the golden
ornaments from Athene of the Parthenon. The ancient faith in the
protecting gods of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes, had become a lax
readiness to bow down in the temple of any Oriental Rimmon, of Serapis or
Adonis. Greece had turned her face, with Alexander of Macedon, to the
East; Alexander had fallen, and Greece had become little better than the
western portion of a divided Oriental empire. The centre of intellectual
life had been removed from Athens to Alexandria (_founded_ 332 B.C.) The
new Greek cities of Egypt and Asia, and above all Alexandria, seemed no
cities at all to Greeks who retained the pure Hellenic traditions.
Alexandria was thirty times larger than the size assigned by Aristotle to
a well-balanced state. Austere spectators saw in Alexandria an Eastern
capital and mart, a place of harems and bazaars, a home of tyrants,
slaves, dreamers, and pleasure-seekers. Thus a Greek of the old school
must have despaired of Greek poetry. There was nothing (he would have
said) to evoke it; no dawn of liberty could flush this silent Memnon into
song. The collectors, critics, librarians of Alexandria could only
produce literary imitations of the epic and the hymn, or could at best
write epigrams or inscriptions for the statue of some alien and luxurious
god. Their critical activity in every field of literature was immense,
their original genius sterile. In them the intellect of the Hellenes
still faintly glowed, like embers on an altar that shed no light on the
way. Yet over these embers the god poured once again the sacred oil, and
from the dull mass leaped, like a many-coloured frame, the genius of
THEOCRITUS.
To take delight in that genius, so human, so kindly, so musical in
expression, requires, it may be said, no long preparation. The art of
Theocritus scarcely needs to be illustrated by any description of the
conditions among which it came to perfection. It is always impossible to
analyse into its component parts the genius of a poet. But it is not
impossible to detect some of the influences that worked on Theocritus.
We can study his early ‘environment’; the country scenes he knew, and the
songs of the neatherds which he elevated into art. We can ascertain the
nature of the demand for poetry in the chief cities and in the literary
society of the time. As a result, we can understand the broad twofold
division of the poems of Theocritus into rural and epic idyls, and with
this we must rest contented.
It is useless to attempt a regular biography of Theocritus. Facts and
dates are alike wanting, the ancient accounts (p. ix) are clearly based
on his works, but it is by no means impossible to construct a ‘legend’ or
romance of his life, by aid of his own verses, and of hints and fragments
which reach us from the past and the present. The genius of Theocritus
was so steeped in the colours of human life, he bore such true and full
witness as to the scenes and men he knew, that life (always essentially
the same) becomes in turn a witness to his veracity. He was born in the
midst of nature that, through all the changes of things, has never lost
its sunny charm. The existence he loved best to contemplate, that of
southern shepherds, fishermen, rural people, remains what it always has
been in Sicily and in the isles of Greece. The habits and the passions
of his countryfolk have not altered, the echoes of their old love-songs
still sound among the pines, or by the sea-banks, where Theocritus
‘watched the visionary flocks.’
Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century, or,
according to Couat, about 315 B.C., and was a native of Syracuse, ‘the
greatest of Greek cities, the fairest of all cities.’ So Cicero calls
it, describing the four quarters that were encircled by its walls,—each
quarter as large as a town,—the fountain Arethusa, the stately temples
with their doors of ivory and gold. On the fortunate dwellers in
Syracuse, Cicero says, the sun shone every day, and there was never a
morning so tempestuous but the sunlight conquered at last, and broke
through the clouds. That perennial sunlight still floods the poems of
Theocritus with its joyous glow. His birthplace was the proper home of
an idyllic poet, of one who, with all his enjoyment of the city life of
Greece, had yet been ‘breathed on by the rural Pan,’ and best loved the
sights and sounds and fragrant air of the forests and the coast. Thanks
to the mountainous regions of Sicily, to Etna, with her volcanic cliffs
and snow-fed streams, thanks also to the hills of the interior, the
populous island never lost the charm of nature. Sicily was not like the
overcrowded and over-cultivated Attica; among the Sicilian heights and by
the coast were few enclosed estates and narrow farms. The character of
the people, too, was attuned to poetry. The Dorian settlers had kept
alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and uplands
haunted by Pan. This popular poetry influenced the literary verse of
Sicily. The songs of Stesichorus, a minstrel of the early period, and
the little rural ‘mimes’ or interludes of Sophron are lost, and we have
only fragments of Epicharmus. But it seems certain that these poets,
predecessors of Theocritus, liked to mingle with their own composition
strains of rustic melody, _volks-lieder_, ballads, love-songs, ditties,
and dirges, such as are still chanted by the peasants of Greece and
Italy. Thus in Syracuse and the other towns of the coast, Theocritus
would have always before his eyes the spectacle of refined and luxurious
manners, and always in his ears the babble of the Dorian women, while he
had only to pass the gates, and wander through the fens of Lysimeleia, by
the brackish mere, or ride into the hills, to find himself in the golden
world of pastoral. Thinking of his early years, and of the education
that nature gives the poet, we can imagine him, like Callicles in Mr.
Arnold’s poem, singing at the banquet of a merchant or a general—
‘With his head full of wine, and his hair crown’d,
Touching his harp as the whim came on him,
And praised and spoil’d by master and by guests,
Almost as much as the new dancing girl.’
We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems, though
the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown. We can follow
him, in fancy, as he breaks from the revellers and wanders out into the
night. Wherever he turned his feet, he could find such scenes as he has
painted in the idyls. If the moon rode high in heaven, as he passed
through the outlying gardens he might catch a glimpse of some deserted
girl shredding the magical herbs into the burning brazier, and sending
upward to the ‘lady Selene’ the song which was to charm her lover home.
The magical image melted in the burning, the herbs smouldered, the tale
of love was told, and slowly the singer ‘drew the quiet night into her
blood.’ Her lay ended with a passage of softened melancholy—
‘Do thou farewell, and turn thy steeds to Ocean, lady, and my pain I
will endure, even as I have declared. Farewell, Selene beautiful;
farewell, ye other stars that follow the wheels of Night.’
A grammarian says that Theocritus borrowed this second idyl, the story of
Simaetha, from a piece by Sophron. But he had no need to borrow from
anything but the nature before his eyes. Ideas change so little among
the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition is so strong, that
betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their prayer for pity and help.
Theocritus himself could have added little passion to this incantation,
still chanted in the moonlit nights of Greece: {0a}
‘Bright golden Moon, that now art near to thy setting, go thou and
salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, and said,
“Never will I leave thee.” And, lo, he has left me, like a field
reaped and gleaned, like a church where no man comes to pray, like a
city desolate. Therefore I would curse him, and yet again my heart
fails me for tenderness, my heart is vexed within me, my spirit is
moved with anguish. Nay, even so I will lay my curse on him, and let
God do even as He will, with my pain and with my crying, with my
flame, and mine imprecations.’
It is thus that the women of the islands, like the girl of Syracuse two
thousand years ago, hope to lure back love or avenged love betrayed, and
thus they ‘win more ease from song than could be bought with gold.’
In whatever direction the path of the Syracusan wanderer lay, he would
find then, as he would find now in Sicily, some scene of the idyllic
life, framed between the distant Etna and the sea. If he strayed in the
faint blue of the summer dawn, through the fens to the shore, he might
reach the wattled cabin of the two old fishermen in the twenty-first
idyl. There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the
incommunicable sense of nature, rounding and softening the toilsome days
of the aged and the poor, than the Theocritean poem of the Fisherman’s
Dream. It is as true to nature as the statue of the naked fisherman in
the Vatican. One cannot read these verses but the vision returns to one,
of sandhills by the sea, of a low cabin roofed with grass, where
fishing-rods of reed are leaning against the door, while the
Mediterranean floats up her waves that fill the waste with sound. This
nature, grey and still, seems in harmony with the wise content of old men
whose days are waning on the limit of life, as they have all been spent
by the desolate margin of the sea.
The twenty-first idyl is one of the rare poems of Theocritus that are not
filled with the sunlight of Sicily, or of Egypt. The landscapes he
prefers are often seen under the noonday heat, when shade is most
pleasant to men. His shepherds invite each other to the shelter of
oak-trees or of pines, where the dry fir-needles are strown, or where the
feathered ferns make a luxurious ‘couch more soft than sleep,’ or where
the flowers bloom whose musical names sing in the idyls. Again,
Theocritus will sketch the bare beginnings of the hillside, as in the
third idyl, just where the olive-gardens cease, and where the short grass
of the heights alternates with rocks, and thorns, and aromatic plants.
None of his pictures seem complete without the presence of water. It may
be but the wells that the maidenhair fringes, or the babbling runnel of
the fountain of the Nereids. The shepherds may sing of Crathon, or
Sybaris, or Himeras, waters so sweet that they seem to flow with milk and
honey. Again, Theocritus may encounter his rustics fluting in rivalry,
like Daphnis and Menalcas in the eighth idyl, ‘on the long ranges of the
hills.’ Their kine and sheep have fed upwards from the lower valleys to
the place where
‘The track winds down to the clear stream,
To cross the sparkling shallows; there
The cattle love to gather, on their way
To the high mountain pastures and to stay,
Till the rough cow-herds drive them past,
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for ’tis the last
Of all the woody, high, well-water’d dells
On Etna, . . .
. . . glade,
And stream, and sward, and chestnut-trees,
End here; Etna beyond, in the broad glare
Of the hot noon, without a shade,
Slope behind slope, up to the peak, lies bare;
The peak, round which the white clouds play.’ {0b}
Theocritus never drives his flock so high, and rarely muses on such
thoughts as come to wanderers beyond the shade of trees and the sound of
water among the scorched rocks and the barren lava. The day is always
cooled and soothed, in his idyls, with the ‘music of water that falleth
from the high face of the rock,’ or with the murmurs of the sea. From
the cliffs and their seat among the bright red berries on the arbutus
shrubs, his shepherds flute to each other, as they watch the tunny
fishers cruising far below, while the echo floats upwards of the sailors’
song. These shepherds have some touch in them of the satyr nature; we
might fancy that their ears are pointed like those of Hawthorne’s
Donatello, in ‘Transformation.’
It should be noticed, as a proof of the truthfulness of Theocritus, that
the songs of his shepherds and goatherds are all such as he might really
have heard on the shores of Sicily. This is the real answer to the
criticism which calls him affected. When mock pastorals flourished at
the court of France, when the long dispute as to the merits of the
ancients and moderns was raging, critics vowed that the hinds of
Theocritus were too sentimental and polite in their wooings. Refinement
and sentiment were to be reserved for princely shepherds dancing, crook
in hand, in the court ballets. Louis XIV sang of himself—
‘_A son labeur il passe tout d’un coup_,
_Et n’ira pas dormir sur la fougere_,
_Ny s’oublier aupres d’une Bergere_,
_Jusques au point d’en oublier le Loup_.’ {0c}
Accustomed to royal goatherds in silk and lace, Fontenelle (a severe
critic of Theocritus) could not believe in the delicacy of a Sicilian who
wore a skin ‘stripped from the roughest of he-goats, with the smell of
the rennet clinging to it still.’ Thus Fontenelle cries, ‘Can any one
suppose that there ever was a shepherd who could say “Would I were the
humming bee, Amaryllis, to flit to thy cave, and dip beneath the
branches, and the ivy leaves that hide thee”?’ and then he quotes other
graceful passages from the love-verses of Theocritean swains. Certainly
no such fancies were to be expected from the French peasants of
Fontenelle’s age, ‘creatures blackened with the sun, and bowed with
labour and hunger.’ The imaginative grace of Battus is quite as remote
from our own hinds. But we have the best reason to suppose that the
peasants of Theocritus’s time expressed refined sentiment in language
adorned with colour and music, because the modern love-songs of Greek
shepherds sound like memories of Theocritus. The lover of Amaryllis
might have sung this among his ditties—
Χελιδονάκι θα γενω, σ’ τα χείλη σου να καττώ
Να σε φιλήσω μια και δυό, και πάλε να πετάξω
‘To flit towards these lips of thine, I fain would be a swallow,
To kiss thee once, to kiss thee twice, and then go flying homeward.’
{0d}
In his despair, when Love ‘clung to him like a leech of the fen,’ he
might have murmured—
’Ηθελα να εΐμαι σ’ τα βουνα, μ’ αλάφια να κοιμοΰμαι
Και το δικον σου το κορμι να μη το συλλογιοΰμαι
‘Would that I were on the high hills, and lay where lie the stags,
and no more was troubled with the thought of thee.’
Here, again, is a love-complaint from modern Epirus, exactly in the tone
of Battus’s song in the tenth idyl—
‘White thou art not, thou art not golden haired,
Thou art brown, and gracious, and meet for love.’