THEOC'RITUS (Lat., from Gk. 43€6zpiros. Thcokritos) (e.310-c.245 n.e.). The first and greatest of the Greek bucolic poets. The details of his life are not clearly known. He was com monly reckoned a Syracusan, although there is reason to believe that. Cos may have been his birthplace. In any ease, he spent considerable time in that island and Eastern Greece, where he was acquainted with the elegiac poet Philetas and the writer of epigrams Asclepiades, whom tra dition makes his teachers, and also with the physician Nicias of Miletus and the poet Aratus• of Soli. Ile spent some time at the Court of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria and also at the Court of Hiero 11. at Syracuse; hut the ex act dates for these periods cannot he determined, as the chronological order of his poems is uncer tain. He appears to have returned later to Eastern Greece, where lie met his death. We have current under his name 31 poems and a number of epigrams. Of the longer poems 10 are bucolic, three are mimes in imitation of the mimes of Sophron and very similar to the recently discov ered mimes of Herondas, and the other poems are of varying subjects and character, while a few are spurious. Theocritus displayed marvelous power in uniting artistic and popular elements in his verse in a way which has never been equaled by his followers and imitators. His lan
guage is, for the most part, a modified Doric; two poems are in the literary In spite of the fact that Theocritus lived in an artificial pe riod when scholarship rather than poetic genius flourished, there is still in his work a simplicity, a fidelity, and a love of nature that has given him universal fame. His dramatic and mimetic power was great, so that his peasants, shepherds, reapers, and fishermen have a real existence and are not merely literary creations, as the char acters of all his imitators have been. He was imitated by Bion and Moschus among the Greeks, and by Vergil most successfully among the Ro mans. Important editions are by Ahrens (2 vols., Leipzig, 1855), and especially by Ziegler (TO bingen, 1879). The best edition with commen tary is by Fritzsche-Hiller (Leipzig. 1881). There are English editions by Snow (London, 1885) and by Chohneley (ib., 1901) ; English translations by Calverley (2d ed., Cambridge, 1869) in verse, and by Andrew Lang (New York, 1880) in prose. Consult also Legrand, Etude sar Theoerite (Paris, 1898).