THEOCRITUS, the creator and most celebrated composer of bucolic poetry, was the _son of Praxagoras and Philinna, and b. at Syracuse. The date of his birth is unknown, but the period of his greatest literary activity was probably 272 B.C. About the close of the reign of Ptolemy Soter, he visited Alexandria, where he received instruction, and made his first successful essays in poetry. He came to be patronized by Ptolemy Philadelphus, who assisted his father, Ptolemy Soter, in the government of Egypt; and in honor of his patron, he composed, about 285 B.C., his 14th, 15th, and 17th idyls. He further formed the acquain tance of the poet Aratus, to whom he addressed his 6th idyl. He subsequently revisited Syracuse, where he continued to reside under Hiero II. From his 16th idyl, it may be concluded that he was dissatisfied with the political state of Sicily, and also with the insufficient rewards which his poems received from Hiero; and that, in consequence, he fixed his attention, during his declining years, rather on the life of the country than of the court, and on those scenes of rural nature which form the chief subject of his poetical remains. The idyls of Theocritus are principally repre sentations, dramatic and mimetic in their character, of the every-day life of the Sicilian peasantry. They have been successfully imitated by Virgil, and have given origin at
least to that so-called pastoral literature of mediaeval and modern times, which is, how ever, totally deficient in the simplicity, fidelity, and therefore poetry of the Syracusan author. Theocritus knows nothing of the imaginary shepherds of a fictitious Arcadia; his dramatic simplicity and truth are in wide contrast to the affected sentiment, the unnatural innocence, and the artificial simplicity of that unreal world. Comedy and pathos enter freely into his representations of rural Sicilian life, and his idyls retain the charms of freshness and nature even to the present day. They are 30 in number, though all of them are not strictly bucolic, or even genuine. They are written in a mixed dialect, in which the softened Doric prevails; and together with a few lines from a lost poem called Berenice, and 22 epigrams in the Greek anthology, make up his re mains, of which the best editions are those of Meineke and Paley; and the best trans lation in English, that of Dr. M. J. Chapman.