THE EVOLUTION OF ALLEGORY IN THE PASTORAL ... - Repositories

a
the pastoral.
The history of the form begins with Theocritus'
Idylls, a collection of thirty short poems so varied
in subject matter that only ten can be classified as truly
p
pastoral. Surely the most important influence on these
earliest-known, extant pastorals was the actual piping and
singing of the Sicilian shepherd in which Theocritus finds
the basis for the recurrent refrain of his bucolic melody,
for the song of the love complaint, for the abundance of
rustic superstitions, and for the arrangement of antiphonal
couplets in the singing match.
Theocritus molds these along
with original additions into a form "that strikes a happy
q
medium between the realistic and the ideal."
It is also possible that during the fourth century
B. C. a school of pastoral poets existed on the island of
Cos who were the first to combine bucolic themes with the
verse form known as the mime, a brief, realistic sort of
poem, quasi-dramatic in form, humorous or ironic in tone,
precise in its observation of detail, and often risque in
expression and content.
These bucolic mimes attained
definitive form in certain of the idylls of Theocritus with
only slight variation.
His formal change in the recited
mime consisted of his using dactylic hexameter, the meter
of the epic.
Idylls (which comes from the Greek word meaning
"little pictures") is not the title Theocritus gave to his
poems, but a label applied by scholiasts.
In classical