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16
THEOCRITUS AND VIRGIL
Theocritus of Syracuse, who invented the pastoral, was a Hellenistic poet,
a contemporary of Callimachus and Apollonius. Disappointed perhaps in an
earlier appeal to Hiero II of Syracuse (Idyll 16, 1 a brilliant display-piece),
Theocritus migrated 'with the Muses' (16.107) to th e great new capital of
Egypt, whose lord, Ptolemy Philadelphus, was renowned for his liberality to
poets and men of letters. It is evident from Idyll 15 that Theocritus was familiar
with the city of Alexandria; and from Idyll 17 that he gained Ptolemy's favour.
He was familiar too with the Aegean island of Cos, Ptolemy's birthplace and
home of his tutor Philitas, die coryphaeus, as it were, of the Alexandrian school
of poetry. There Theocritus had good friends, Eucritus, Amyntas, the brothers
Phrasidamus and Antigenes, all mentioned in Idyll 7, the setting of which is
Cos; and there he probably met Nicias, the love-sick physician and minor poet
to whom Idyll 11 is addressed: the Cyclops in love, no longer Homer's bloodcurdling
monster but 'our Cyclops, old Polyphemus' (7-8), an enamoured
country bumpkin. It is tempting to imagine Theocritus in Alexandria,
Alexander's city, a city composed of all sorts and conditions of men, Greek and
barbarian, with no history, no common traditions, no intimate relationship to
the countryside — to imagine him there cultivating a special nostalgia by writing
of the Sicilian herdsmen of his youth: a landscape of memory, for it is not
known that he ever returned to Sicily.
Theocritus' poetry, or radier his pastoral poetry (for he •wrote much
else besides), is nostalgic, exquisitely so, as any urbane reflection on a
simpler, now remote existence will be. But it is saved from sentimentality
by the elegance of the poet's language and his apparent — at times his
too apparent — erudition. (Pastoral poetry was never quite to lose this
character of learning, except perhaps in its most attenuated derivation from
Virgil.)
Here, for example, is a passage from Theocritus' first Idyll: the beginning of
Thyrsis' lament for the cowherd Daphnis, mysteriously, ruthlessly, dying of
1 Theocritus' poems are indiscriminately called "idylls*, tlSOXAia-an all but meaningless term
having none of its English connotations.
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