‘I will begin by telling thee first of thy perfections: thy body is
as fair as an angel’s; no painter could design it. And if any man be
sad, he has but to look on thee, and despite himself he takes
courage, the hapless one, and his heart is joyous. Upon thy brows
are shining the constellated Pleiades, thy breast is full of the
flowers of May, thy breasts are lilies. Thou hast the eyes of a
princess, the glance of a queen, and but one fault hast thou, that
thou deignest not to speak to me.’
Battus might have cried thus, with a modern Greek singer, to the shade of
the dead Amaryllis (Idyl IV), the ‘gracious Amaryllis, unforgotten even
in death’—
‘Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee; what gift to
the other world? The apple rots, and the quince decayeth, and one by
one they perish, the petals of the rose! I send thee my tears bound
in a napkin, and what though the napkin burns, if my tears reach thee
at last!’
The difficulty is to stop choosing, where all the verses of the modern
Greek peasants are so rich in Theocritean memories, so ardent, so
delicate, so full of flowers and birds and the music of fountains.
Enough has been said, perhaps, to show what the popular poetry of Sicily
could lend to the genius of Theocritus.
From her shepherds he borrowed much,—their bucolic melody; their
love-complaints; their rural superstitions; their system of answering
couplets, in which each singer refines on the utterance of his rival.
But he did not borrow their ‘pastoral melancholy.’ There is little of
melancholy in Theocritus. When Battus is chilled by the thought of the
death of Amaryllis, it is but as one is chilled when a thin cloud passes
over the sun, on a bright day of early spring. And in an epigram the
dead girl is spoken of as the kid that the wolf has seized, while the
hounds bay all too late. Grief will not bring her back. The world must
go its way, and we need not darken its sunlight by long regret. Yet
when, for once, Theocritus adopted the accent of pastoral lament, when he
raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the realm of art, he composed a
masterpiece, and a model for all later poets, as for the authors of
_Lycidas_, _Thyrsis_, and _Adonais_.
Theocritus did more than borrow a note from the country people. He
brought the gifts of his own spirit to the contemplation of the world.
He had the clearest vision, and he had the most ardent love of poetry,
‘of song may all my dwelling be full, for neither is sleep more sweet,
nor sudden spring, nor are flowers more delicious to the bees, so dear to
me are the Muses.’ . . . ‘Never may we be sundered, the Muses of Pieria
and I.’ Again, he had perhaps in greater measure than any other poet the
gift of the undisturbed enjoyment of life. The undertone of all his
idyls is joy in the sunshine and in existence. His favourite word, the
word that opens the first idyl, and, as it were, strikes the keynote, is
αδύ, _sweet_. He finds all things delectable in the rural life:
‘Sweet are the voices of the calves, and sweet the heifers’ lowing;
sweet plays the shepherd on the shepherd’s pipe, and sweet is the
echo.’
Even in courtly poems, and in the artificial hymns of which we are to
speak in their place, the memory of the joyful country life comes over
him. He praises Hiero, because Hiero is to restore peace to Syracuse,
and when peace returns, then ‘thousands of sheep fattened in the meadows
will bleat along the plain, and the kine, as they flock in crowds to the
stalls, will make the belated traveller hasten on his way.’ The words
evoke a memory of a narrow country lane in the summer evening, when light
is dying out of the sky, and the fragrance of wild roses by the roadside
is mingled with the perfumed breath of cattle that hurry past on their
homeward road. There was scarcely a form of the life he saw that did not
seem to him worthy of song, though it might be but the gossip of two rude
hinds, or the drinking bout of the Thessalian horse-jobber, and the false
girl Cynisca and her wild lover Æschines. But it is the sweet country
that he loves best to behold and to remember. In his youth Sicily and
Syracuse were disturbed by civil and foreign wars, wars of citizens
against citizens, of Greeks against Carthaginians, and against the fierce
‘men of Mars,’ the banded mercenaries who possessed themselves of
Messana. But this was not matter for his joyous Muse—
κείνος δ’ ού πολέμους, ού δάκρυα, Πανα δ’ έμελπε,
και βούτασ έλίγαινε και άείδων ενόμευε
‘Not of wars, not of tears, but of Pan would he chant, and of the
neatherds he sweetly sang, and singing he shepherded his flocks.’
This was the training that Sicily, her hills, her seas, her lovers, her
poet-shepherds, gave to Theocritus. Sicily showed him subjects which he
imitated in truthful art. Unluckily the later pastoral poets of northern
lands have imitated _him_, and so have gone far astray from northern
nature. The pupil of nature had still to be taught the ‘rules’ of the
critics, to watch the temper and fashion of his time, and to try his
fortune among the courtly poets and grammarians of the capital of
civilisation. Between the years of early youth in Sicily and the years
of waiting for court patronage at Alexandria, it seems probable that we
must place a period of education in the island of Cos. The testimonies
of the Grammarians who handed on to us the scanty traditions about
Theocritus, agree in making him the pupil of Philetas of Cos. This
Philetas was a critic, a commentator on Homer, and an elegiac poet whose
love-songs were greatly admired by the Romans of the Augustan age. He is
said to have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was himself
born, as Theocritus records, in the isle of Cos. It has been conjectured
that Ptolemy and Theocritus were fellow pupils, and that the poet may
have hoped to obtain court favour at Alexandria from this early
connection. About this point nothing is certainly known, nor can we
exactly understand the sort of education that was given in the school of
the poet Philetas. The ideas of that artificial age make it not
improbable that Philetas professed to teach the art of poetry. A French
critic and poet of our own time, M. Baudelaire, was willing to do as much
‘in thirty lessons.’ Possibly Philetas may have imparted technical rules
then in vogue, and the fashionable knack of introducing obscure
mythological allusions. He was a logician as well as a poet, and is
fabled to have died of vexation because he could not unriddle one of the
metaphysical catches or puzzles of the sophists. His varied activity
seems to have worn him to a shadow; the contemporary satirists bantered
him about his leanness, and it was alleged that he wore leaden soles to
his sandals lest the wind should blow him, as it blew the calves of
Daphnis (Idyl IX) over a cliff against the rocks, or into the sea. {0e}
Philetas seems a strange master for Theocritus, but, whatever the
qualities of the teacher, Cos, the home of the luxurious old age of
Meleager, was a beautiful school. The island was one of the most ancient
colonies of the Dorians, and the Syracusan scholar found himself among a
people who spoke his own broad and liquid dialect. The sides of the
limestone hills were clothed with vines, and with shadowy plane-trees
which still attain extraordinary size and age, while the wine-presses
where Demeter smiled, ‘with sheaves and poppies in her hands,’ yielded a
famous vintage. The people had a soft industry of their own, they
fashioned the ‘Coan stuff,’ transparent robes for woman’s wear, like the
ύδάτινα βράκη, the thin undulating tissues which Theugenis was to weave
with the ivory distaff, the gift of Theocritus. As a colony of
Epidaurus, Cos naturally cultivated the worship of Asclepius, the divine
physician, the child of Apollo. In connection with his worship and with
the clan of the Asclepiadae (that widespread stock to which Aristotle
belonged, and in which the practice of leechcraft was hereditary), Cos
possessed a school of medicine. In the temple of Asclepius patients hung
up as votive offerings representations of their diseased limbs, and thus
the temple became a museum of anatomical specimens. Cos was therefore
resorted to by young students from all parts of the East, and Theocritus
cannot but have made many friends of his own age. Among these he alludes
in various passages to Nicias, afterwards a physician at Miletus, to
Philinus, noted in later life as the head of a medical sect, and to
Aratus. Theocritus has sung of Aratus’s love-affairs, and St. Paul has
quoted him as a witness to man’s instinctive consent in the doctrine of
the universal fatherhood of God. These strangely various notices have
done more for the memory of Aratus than his own didactic poem on the
meteorological theories of his age. He lives, with Philinus and the rest
of the Coan students, because Theocritus introduced them into the picture
of a happy summer’s day. In the seventh idyl, that one day of Demeter’s
harvest-feast is immortal, and the sun never goes down on its delight.
We see Theocritus
κουπω ταν μεσάταν όδον ανυμες, ουδε το σαμα
άμιν το Βρασίλα κατεφαίνετο—
when he ‘had not yet reached the mid-point of the way, nor had the tomb
yet risen on his sight.’ He reveals himself as he was at the height of
morning, at the best moment of the journey, in midsummer of a genius
still unchecked by doubt, or disappointment, or neglect. Life seems to
accost him with the glance of the goatherd Lycidas, ‘and still he smiled
as he spoke, with laughing eyes, and laughter dwelling on his lips.’ In
Cos, Theocritus found friendship, and met Myrto, ‘the girl he loved as
dearly as goats love the spring.’ Here he could express, without any
afterthought, an enthusiastic adoration for the disinterested joys, the
enchanted moments of human existence. Before he entered the thronged
streets of Alexandria, and tuned his shepherd’s pipe to catch the ear of
princes, and to sing the epithalamium of a royal and incestuous love, he
rested with his friends in the happy island. Deep in a cave, among the
ruins of ancient aqueducts, there still bubbles up, from the Coan
limestone, the well-spring of the Nymphs. ‘There they reclined on beds
of fragrant rushes, lowly strown, and rejoicing they lay in new stript
leaves of the vine. And high above their heads waved many a poplar, many
an elm-tree, while close at hand the sacred water from the nymph’s own
cave welled forth with murmurs musical’ (Idyl VII).
The old Dorian settlers in Syracuse pleased themselves with the fable
that their fountain, Arethusa, had been a Grecian nymph, who, like
themselves, had crossed the sea to Sicily. The poetry of Theocritus,
read or sung in sultry Alexandria, must have seemed like a new welling up
of the waters of Arethusa in the sandy soil of Egypt. We cannot
certainly say when the poet first came from Syracuse, or from Cos, to
Alexandria. It is evident however from the allusions in the fifteenth
and seventeenth idyls that he was living there after Ptolemy Philadelphus
married his own sister, Arsinoë. It is not impossible to form some idea
of the condition of Alexandrian society, art, religion, literature and
learning at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. The vast city, founded
some sixty years before, was now completed. The walls, many miles in
circuit, protected a population of about eight hundred thousand souls.
Into that changing crowd were gathered adventurers from all the known
world. Merchantmen brought to Ptolemy the wares of India and the
porcelains of China. Marauders from upper Egypt skulked about the native
quarters, and sallied forth at night to rob the wayfarer. The king’s
guards were recruited with soldiers from turbulent Greece, from Asia,
from Italy. Settlers were attracted from Syracuse by the prospect of
high wages and profitable labour. The Jewish quarters were full of
Israelites who did not disdain Greek learning. The city in which this
multitude found a home was beautifully constructed. The Mediterranean
filled the northern haven, the southern walls were washed by the Mareotic
lake. If the isle of Pharos shone dazzling white, and wearied the eyes,
there was shade beneath the long marble colonnades, and in the groves and
cool halls of the Museum and the Libraries. The Etesian winds blew fresh
in summer from the north, across the sea, and refreshed the people in
their gardens. No town seemed greater nor wealthier to the voyager, who
(like the hero of the Greek novel _Clitophon and Leucippe_) entered by
the gate of the Sun, and found that, after nightfall, the torches borne
by men and women hastening to some religious feast, filled the dusk with
a light like that of ‘the sun cut up into fragments.’ At the same time
no town was more in need of the memories of the country, which came to
her in well-watered gardens, in landscape-paintings, and in the verse of
Theocritus.
It is impossible to give a clearer idea of the opulence and luxury of
Alexandria and her kings, than will be conveyed by the description of the
coronation-feast of Ptolemy Philadelphus. This great masquerade and
banquet was prepared by the elder Ptolemy on the occasion of his
admitting his son to share his throne. The entertainment was described
(in a work now lost) by Callixenus of Rhodes, and the record has been
preserved by Atheneaus (v. 25). The inner pavilion in which the guests
of Ptolemy reclined, contained one hundred and thirty-five couches. Over
the roof was placed a scarlet awning, with a fringe of white, and there
were many other awnings, richly embroidered with mythological designs.
The pillars which sustained the roof were shaped in the likeness of
palm-trees, and of _thyrsi_, the weapons of the wine-god Dionysus. Round
three outer sides ran arcades, draped with purple tissues, and with the
skins of strange beasts. The fourth side, open to the air, was shady
with the foliage of myrtles and laurels. Everywhere the ground was
carpeted with flowers, though the season was mid-winter, with roses and
white lilies and blossoms of the gardens. By the columns round the whole
pavilion were arrayed a hundred effigies in marble, executed by the most
famous sculptors, and on the middle spaces were hung works by the
painters of Sicyon and tapestry woven with stories of the adventures of
the gods. Above these, again, ran a frieze of gold and silver shields,
while in the higher niches were placed comic, tragic, and satiric
sculptured groups ‘dressed in real clothes,’ says the historian, much
admiring this realism. It is impossible to number the tripods, and
flagons, and couches of gold, resting on golden figures of sphinxes, the
salvers, the bowls, the jewelled vases. The masquerade of this winter
festival began with the procession of the Morning-star, Heosphoros, and
then followed a masque of kings and a revel of various gods, while the
company of Hesperus, the Evening-star followed, and ended all. The revel
of Dionysus was introduced by men disguised as Sileni, wild woodland
beings in raiment of purple and scarlet. Then came scores of satyrs with
gilded lamps in their hands. Next appeared beautiful maidens, attired as
Victories, waving golden wings and swinging vessels of burning incense.
The altar of the God of the Vine was borne behind them, crowned and
covered with leaves of gold, and next boys in purple robes scattered
fragrant scents from golden salvers. Then came a throng of gold-crowned
satyrs, their naked bodies stained with purple and vermilion, and among
them was a tall man who represented the year and carried a horn of
plenty. He was followed by a beautiful woman in rich attire, carrying in
one hand branches of the palm-tree, in the other a rod of the peach-tree,
starred with its constellated flowers. Then the masque of the Seasons
swept by, and Philiscus followed, Philiscus the Corcyraean, the priest of
Dionysus, and the favourite tragic poet of the court. After the prizes
for the athletes had been borne past, Dionysus himself was charioted
along, a gigantic figure clad in purple, and pouring libations out of a
golden goblet. Around him lay huge drinking-cups, and smoking censers of
gold, and a bower of vine leaves grew up, and shaded the head of the god.
Then hurried by a crowd of priests and priestesses, Maenads, Bacchantes,
Bassarids, women crowned with the vine, or with garlands of snakes, and
girls bearing the mystic _vannus Iacchi_. And still the procession was
not ended. A mechanical figure of Nysa passed, in a chariot drawn by
eighty men, among clusters of grapes formed of precious stones, and the
figure arose, and poured milk out of a golden horn. The Satyrs and
Sileni followed close, and behind them six hundred men dragged on a wain,
a silver vessel that held six hundred measures of wine. This was only
the first of countless symbolic vessels that were carried past, till last
came a multitude of sixteen hundred boys clad in white tunics, and
garlanded with ivy, who bore and handed to the guests golden and silver
vessels full of sweet wine. All this was only part of one procession,
and the festival ended when Ptolemy and Berenice and Ptolemy Philadelphus
had been crowned with golden crowns from many subject cities and lands.
This festival was obviously arranged to please the taste of a prince with
late Greek ideas of pictorial display, and with barbaric wealth at his
command. Theocritus himself enables us in the seventeenth idyl to
estimate the opulence and the dominion of Ptolemy. He was not master of
fertile Aegypt alone, where the Nile breaks the rich dank soil, and where
myriad cities pour their taxes into his treasuries. Ptolemy held lands
also in Phoenicia, and Arabia; he claimed Syria and Libya and Aethiopia;
he was lord of the distant Pamphylians, of the Cilicians, the Lycians and
the Carians, and the Cyclades owned his mastery. Thus the wealth of the
richest part of the world flowed into Alexandria, attracting thither the
priests of strange religions, the possessors of Greek learning, the
painters and sculptors whose work has left its traces on the genius of
Theocritus.
Looking at this early Alexandrian age, three points become clear to us.
First, the fashion of the times was Oriental, Oriental in religion and in
society. Nothing could be less Hellenic, than the popular cult of
Adonis. The fifteenth idyl of Theocritus shows us Greek women
worshipping in their manner at an Assyrian shrine, the shrine of that
effeminate lover of Aphrodite, whom Heracles, according to the Greek
proverb, thought ‘no great divinity.’ The hymn of Bion, with its
luxurious lament, was probably meant to be chanted at just such a
festival as Theocritus describes, while a crowd of foreigners gossiped
among the flowers and embroideries, the strangely-shaped sacred cakes,
the ebony, the gold, and the ivory. Not so much Oriental as barbarous
was the impulse which made Ptolemy Philadelphus choose his own sister,
Arsinoë, for wife, as if absolute dominion had already filled the mind of
the Macedonian royal race with the incestuous pride of the Incas, or of
Queen Hatasu, in an elder Egyptian dynasty. This nascent barbarism has
touched a few of the Alexandrian poems even of Theocritus, and his
panegyric of Ptolemy, of his divine ancestors, and his sister-bride is
not much more Greek in sentiment than are those old native hymns of
Pentaur to ‘the strong Bull,’ or the ‘Risen Sun,’ to Rameses or Thothmes.
Again, the early Alexandrian was what we call a ‘literary’ age.
Literature was not an affair of religion and of the state, but ministered
to the pleasure of individuals, and at their pleasure was composed. {0f}
The temper of the time was crudely critical. The Museum and the
Libraries, with their hundreds of thousands of volumes, were hot-houses
of grammarians and of learned poets. Callimachus, the head librarian,
was also the most eminent man of letters. Unable, himself, to compose a
poem of epic length and copiousness, he discouraged all long poems. He
shone in epigrams, pedantic hymns, and didactic verses. He toyed with
anagrams, and won court favour by discovering that the letters of
‘Arsinoë,’ the name of Ptolemy’s wife, made the words ίον Ηρας, the
violet of Hera. In another masterpiece the genius of Callimachus
followed the stolen tress of Queen Berenice to the skies, where the locks
became a constellation. A contemporary of Callimachus was Zenodotus, the
critic, who was for improving the Iliad and Odyssey by cutting out all
the epic commonplaces which seemed to him to be needless repetitions. It
is pretty plain that, in literary society, Homer was thought out of date
and _rococo_. The favourite topics of poets were now, not the tales of
Troy and Thebes, but the amorous adventures of the gods. When Apollonius
Rhodius attempted to revive the epic, it is said that the influence of
Callimachus quite discomfited the young poet. A war of epigrams began,
and while Apollonius called Callimachus a ‘blockhead’ (so finished was
his invective), the veteran compared his rival to the Ibis, the
scavenger-bird. Other singers satirised each others’ legs, and one, the
Aretino of the time, mocked at king Ptolemy and scourged his failings in
verse. The literary quarrels (to which Theocritus seems to allude in
Idyl VII, where Lycidas says he ‘hates the birds of the Muses that cackle
in vain rivalry with Homer’) were as stupid as such affairs usually are.
The taste for artificial epic was to return; although many people already
declared that Homer was the world’s poet, and that the world needed no
other. This epic reaction brought into favour Apollonius Rhodius, author
of the _Argonautica_. Theocritus has been supposed to aim at him as a
vain rival of Homer, but M. Couat points out that Theocritus was seventy
when Apollonius began to write. The literary fashions of Alexandria are
only of moment to us so far as they directly affected Theocritus. They
could not make him obscure, affected, tedious, but his nature probably
inclined him to obey fashion so far as only to write short poems. His
rural poems are ειδύλλια, ‘little pictures.’ His fragments of epic, or
imitations of the epic hymns are not
όσα πόντος άείδει
—not full and sonorous as the songs of Homer and the sea. ‘Ce poète est
le moins naïf qui se puisse rencontrer, et il se dégage de son oeuvre un
parfum de naïveté rustique.’ {0g} They are, what a German critic has
called them, _mythologischen genre-bilder_, cabinet pictures in the
manner called _genre_, full of pretty detail and domestic feeling. And
this brings us to the third characteristic of the age,—its art was
elaborately pictorial. Poetry seems to have sought inspiration from
painting, while painting, as we have said, inclined to _genre_, to
luxurious representations of the amours of the gods or the adventures of
heroes, with backgrounds of pastoral landscape. Shepherds fluted while
Perseus slew Medusa.
The old order of things in Greece had been precisely the opposite of this
Alexandrian manner. Homer and the later Homeric legends, with the
tragedians, inspired the sculptors, and even the artisans who decorated
vases. When a new order of subjects became fashionable, and when every
rich Alexandrian had pictures or frescoes on his walls, it appears that
the painters took the lead, that the initiative in art was theirs. The
Alexandrian pictures perished long ago, but the relics of Alexandrian
style which remain in the buried cities of Campania, in Pompeii
especially, bear testimony to the taste of the period. {0h} Out of
nearly two thousand Pompeian pictures, it is calculated that some
fourteen hundred (roughly speaking) are mythological in subject. The
loves of the gods are repeated in scores of designs, and these designs
closely correspond to the mythological poems of Theocritus and his
younger contemporaries Bion and Moschus. Take as an example the
adventure of Europa: Lord Tennyson’s lines, in _The Palace of Art_ are
intended to describe _picture_—
‘Or sweet Europa’s mantle blew unclasp’d,
From off her shoulder backward borne:
From one hand droop’d a crocus: one hand grasp’d
The mild bull’s golden horn.’
The words of Moschus also seem as if they might have derived their
inspiration from a painting, the touches are so minute, and so
picturesque—
‘Meanwhile Europa, riding on the back of the divine bull, with one
hand clasped the beast’s great horn, and with the other caught up her
garment’s purple fold, lest it might trail and be drenched in the
hoar sea’s infinite spray. And her deep robe was blown out in the
wind, like the sail of a ship, and lightly ever it wafted the maiden
onward.’
Now every single ‘motive’ of this description,—Europa with one hand
holding the bull’s horn, with the other lifting her dress, the wind
puffing out her shawl like a sail, is repeated in the Pompeian
wall-pictures, which themselves are believed to be derived from
Alexandrian originals. There are more curious coincidences than this.
In the sixth idyl of Theocritus, Damoetas makes the Cyclops say that
Galatea ‘will send him many a messenger.’ The mere idea of describing
the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus in love, is artificial and Alexandrian.
But who were the ‘messengers’ of the sea-nymph Galatea? A Pompeian
picture illustrates the point, by representing a little Love riding up to
the shore on the back of a dolphin, with a letter in his hand for
Polyphemus. Greek art in Egypt suffered from an Egyptian plague of
Loves. Loves flutter through the Pompeian pictures as they do through
the poems of Moschus and Bion. They are carried about in cages, for
sale, like birds. They are caught in bird-traps. They don the lion-skin
of Heracles. They flutter about baskets laden with roses; round rosy
Loves, like the cupids of Boucher. They are not akin to ‘the grievous
Love,’ the mighty wrestler who threw Daphnis a fall, in the first idyl of
Theocritus. They are ‘the children that flit overhead, the little Loves,
like the young nightingales upon the budding trees,’ which flit round the
dead Adonis in the fifteenth idyl. They are the birds that shun the boy
fowler, in Bion’s poem, and perch uncalled (as in a bronze in the Uffizi)
on the grown man. In one or other of the sixteen Pompeian pictures of
Venus and Adonis, the Loves are breaking their bows and arrows for grief,
as in the hymn of Bion.
Enough has perhaps been said about the social and artistic taste of
Alexandria to account for the remarkable differences in manner between
the rustic idyls of Theocritus and the epic idyls of himself and his
followers Moschus and Bion. In the rural idyls, Theocritus was himself
and wrote to please himself. In the epic idyls, as in the Hymn to the
Dioscuri, and in the two poems on Heracles, he was writing to please the
taste of Alexandria. He had to choose epic topics, but he was warned by
the famous saying of Callimachus (‘a great book is a great evil’) not to
imitate the length of the epic. {0i} He was also to shun close imitation
of what are so easily imitated, the regular recurring _formulae_, the
commonplace of Homer. He was to add minute pictorial touches, as in the
description of Alcmena’s waking when the serpents attacked her child,—a
passage rich in domestic pathos and incident which contrast strongly with
Pindar’s bare narrative of the same events. We have noted the same
pictorial quality in the _Europa_ of Moschus. Our own age has often been
compared to the Alexandrian epoch, to that era of large cities, wealth,
refinement, criticism, and science; and the pictorial _Idylls of the
King_ very closely resemble the epico-idyllic manner of Alexandria. We
have tried to examine the society in which Theocritus lived. But our
impressions about the poet are more distinct. In him we find the most
genial character; pious as Greece counted piety; tender as became the
poet of love; glad as the singer of a happy southern world should be;
gifted, above all, with humour, and with dramatic power. ‘His lyre has
all the chords’; his is the last of all the perfect voices of Hellas;
after him no man saw life with eyes so steady and so mirthful.
About the lives of the three idyllic poets literary history says little.
About their deaths she only tells us through the dirge by Moschus, that
Bion was poisoned. The lovers of Theocritus would willingly hope that he
returned from Alexandria to Sicily, about the time when he wrote the
sixteenth idyl, and that he lived in the enjoyment of the friendship and
the domestic happiness and honour which he sang so well, through the
golden age of Hiero (264 B.C.) No happier fortune could befall him who
wrote the epigram of the lady of heavenly love, who worshipped with the
noble wife of Nicias under the green roof of Milesian Aphrodite, and who
prophesied of the return of peace and of song to Sicily and Syracuse.