THEOCRITUS, the creator of pastoral poetry, flourished in the 3rd century B.c. Little is known of him beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems ("Idylls") commonly attributed to him have little claim to authenticity. It is clear that at a very early date two collections were made, one of which included a number of doubtful poems and formed a corpus of bucolic poetry, while the other was confined to those works which were considered to be by Theocritus himself. The record of these recensions is preserved by two epigrams, one of which pro ceeds from Artemidorus, a grammarian, who lived in the time of Sulla and is said to have been the first editor of these poems. He says, "Bucolic muses, once were ye scattered, but now one byre, one herd is yours." The second epigram is anonymous, and runs as follows :—"The Chian is another. I, Theocritus, who wrote these songs, am of Syracuse, a man of the people, the son of Praxagoras and famed Philina. I never sought after a strange muse." The last line may mean that he wrote nothing but bucolic poems, or that he only wrote in Doric. The statement that he was a Syracusan is confirmed by allusions in the "Idylls" (xi. 7, xxviii. 16-18). A larger collection, possibly more exten sive than that of Artemidorus, and including poems of doubtful authenticity, was known to Stfidas, who says : "Theocritus wrote the so-called bucolic poems in the Dorian dialect. Some persons also attribute to him the following : Daughters of Proetus, Hopes, Hymns, Heroines, Dirges, Lyrics, Elegies, Iambics, Epigrams." The first of these may have been known to Virgil, who refers to the Proetides in the Eclogues (Ecl. vi., 48). The spurious poem xxi. may have been one of the Hopes (cf. 1.66, Aris Twv brpow), and poem xxvi. may have been one of the Heroines (cf. 1. 36, ipcavat) : elegiacs are found in viii. 33-6o, and the spurious epitaph on Bion may have been one of the Dirges. The other classes are all represented in the larger collection which has come down to us.
The poems which are generally held to be authentic may be classified thus : I. Bucolics and Mimes.—The distinction between these is that the scenes of the former are laid in the country and those of the latter in a town. The most famous of the Bucolics are i., vii., xi. and vi. In i. Thyrsis sings to a goatherd how Daphnis, the mythical herdsman, having defied the power of Aphrodite, dies rather than yield to a passion with which the goddess had inspired him. In xi. Polyphemus is depicted as in love with the
sea-nymph Galatea and finding solace in song : in vi. he is cured of his passion and naively relates how he repulses the overtures now made to him by Galatea. The monster of the Odyssey has been "written up to date" after the Alexandrian manner and has be come a gentle simpleton. Idyll vii., the "Harvest Feast" (eaXimna), is the most important of the bucolic poems. The scene is laid in the isle of Cos. The poet speaks in the first person and is styled Simichidas by his friends. Other poets are introduced under feigned names. Thus ancient critics identified Sicelidas of Samos (1. 4o) with Asclepiades the Samian, and Lycidas, "the goatherd of Cydonia," may well be the poet Astacides, whom Callimachus calls "the Cretan, the goatherd." Theocritus speaks of himself as having already gained fame, and says that his lays have been brought by report even unto the throne of Zeus (possibly Ptolemy : cf. Horace, Ep. i. 19, 43, lovis auribus ista Serves, where fuppiter=Augustus). He praises Philetas, the veteran poet of Cos, and criticizes "the fledgelings of the Muse, who cackle against the Chian bard and find their labour lost." The other bucolic poems need not be further discussed. Several of them consist of a singing-match, conducted according to the rules of amoebean poetry, in which the second singer takes the subject chosen by the first and contributes a variation in the same air. It may be noted that the peasants of Theocritus differ greatly in refinement. Those in v. are low fellows who indulge in coarse abuse. This Idyll and iv. are laid in the neighbourhood of Croton, and we may infer that Theocritus was personally acquainted with Magna Graecia. Suspicion has been cast upon poems viii. and ix. on various grounds. An extreme view holds that in ix. we have two genuine Theocritean fragments, 11. 7-13 and 15-20, describing the joys of summer and winter respectively, which have been provided with a clumsy preface, 11. 1-6, while an early editor of a bucolic collection has appended an epilogue in which he takes leave of the Bucolic Muses. On the other hand, it is clear that both poems were in Virgil's Theocritus, and that they passed the scrutiny of the editor who formed the short collection of Theo critean Bucolics.