The Project Gutenberg EBook of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus
by Andrew Lang
(#35 in our series by Andrew Lang)

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose

Author: Andrew Lang

Release Date: December, 2003  [EBook #4775]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 16, 2002]
[Most recently updated: March 16, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THEOCRITUS, BION AND MOSCHUS ***




Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk, from
the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition.

THEOCRITUS, BION AND MOSCHUS RENDERED INTO ENGLISH PROSE WITH AN
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY ANDREW LANG




LIFE OF THEOCRITUS
(From Suidas)



Theocritus, the Chian.  But there is another Theocritus, the son of
Praxagoras and Philinna (see Epigram XXIII), or as some say of
Simichus.  (This is plainly derived from the assumed name Simichidas
in Idyl VII.)  He was a Syracusan, or, as others say, a Coan settled
in Syracuse.  He wrote the so-called Bucolics in the Dorian dialect.
Some attribute to him the following works:- The Proetidae, The
Pleasures of Hope ([Greek]), Hymns, The Heroines, Dirges, Ditties,
Elegies, Iambics, Epigrams.  But it known that there are three
Bucolic poets:  this Theocritus, Moschus of Sicily, and Bion of
Smyrna, from a village called Phlossa.



LIFE OF THEOCRITUS
[Greek]
(Usually prefixed to the Idyls)



Theocritus the Bucolic poet was a Syracusan by extraction, and the
son of Simichidas, as he says himself, Simichidas, pray whither
through the noon dost thou dray thy feet? (Idyl VII).  Some say that
this was an assumed name, for he seems to have been snub-nosed
([Greek]), and that his father was Praxagoras, and his mother
Philinna.  He became the pupil of Philetas and Asclepiades, of whom
he speaks (Idyl VII), and flourished about the time of Ptolemy Lagus.
He gained much fame for his skill in bucolic poetry.  According to
some his original name was Moschus, and Theocritus was a name he
later assumed.



THEOCRITUS AND HIS AGE



At the beginning of the third century before Christ, in the years
just preceding those in which Theocritus wrote, the genius of Greece
seemed to have lost her productive force.  Nor would it have been
strange if that force had really been exhausted.  Greek poetry had
hitherto enjoyed a peculiarly free development, each form of art
succeeding each without break or pause, because each--epic, lyric,
dithyramb, the drama--had responded to some new need of the state and
of religion.  Now in the years that followed the fall of Athens and
the conquests of Macedonia, Greek religion and the Greek state had
ceased to be themselves.  Religion and the state had been the patrons
of poetry; on their decline poetry seemed dead.  There were no heroic
kings, like those for whom epic minstrels had chanted.  The cities
could no longer welcome an Olympian winner with Pindaric hymns.
There was no imperial Athens to fill the theatres with a crowd of
citizens and strangers eager to listen to new tragic masterpieces.
There was no humorous democracy to laugh at all the world, and at
itself, with Aristophanes.  The very religion of Sophocles and
Aeschylus was debased.  A vulgar usurper had stripped the golden
ornaments from Athene of the Parthenon.  The ancient faith in the
protecting gods of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes, had become a lax
readiness to bow down in the temple of any Oriental Rimmon, of
Serapis or Adonis.  Greece had turned her face, with Alexander of
Macedon, to the East; Alexander had fallen, and Greece had become
little better than the western portion of a divided Oriental empire.
The centre of intellectual life had been removed from Athens to
Alexandria (founded 332 B.C.)  The new Greek cities of Egypt and
Asia, and above all Alexandria, seemed no cities at all to Greeks who
retained the pure Hellenic traditions.  Alexandria was thirty times
larger than the size assigned by Aristotle to a well-balanced state.
Austere spectators saw in Alexandria an Eastern capital and mart, a
place of harems and bazaars, a home of tyrants, slaves, dreamers, and
pleasure-seekers.  Thus a Greek of the old school must have despaired
of Greek poetry.  There was nothing (he would have said) to evoke it;
no dawn of liberty could flush this silent Memnon into song.  The
collectors, critics, librarians of Alexandria could only produce
literary imitations of the epic and the hymn, or could at best write
epigrams or inscriptions for the statue of some alien and luxurious
god.  Their critical activity in every field of literature was
immense, their original genius sterile.  In them the intellect of the
Hellenes still faintly glowed, like embers on an altar that shed no
light on the way.  Yet over these embers the god poured once again
the sacred oil, and from the dull mass leaped, like a many-coloured
frame, the genius of THEOCRITUS.

To take delight in that genius, so human, so kindly, so musical in
expression, requires, it may be said, no long preparation.  The art
of Theocritus scarcely needs to be illustrated by any description of
the conditions among which it came to perfection.  It is always
impossible to analyse into its component parts the genius of a poet.
But it is not impossible to detect some of the influences that worked
on Theocritus.  We can study his early 'environment'; the country
scenes he knew, and the songs of the neatherds which he elevated into
art.  We can ascertain the nature of the demand for poetry in the
chief cities and in the literary society of the time.  As a result,
we can understand the broad twofold division of the poems of
Theocritus into rural and epic idyls, and with this we must rest
contented.

It is useless to attempt a regular biography of Theocritus.  Facts
and dates are alike wanting, the ancient accounts (p. ix) are clearly
based on his works, but it is by no means impossible to construct a
'legend' or romance of his life, by aid of his own verses, and of
hints and fragments which reach us from the past and the present.
The genius of Theocritus was so steeped in the colours of human life,
he bore such true and full witness as to the scenes and men he knew,
that life (always essentially the same) becomes in turn a witness to
his veracity.  He was born in the midst of nature that, through all
the changes of things, has never lost its sunny charm.  The existence
he loved best to contemplate, that of southern shepherds, fishermen,
rural people, remains what it always has been in Sicily and in the
isles of Greece.  The habits and the passions of his countryfolk have
not altered, the echoes of their old love-songs still sound among the
pines, or by the sea-banks, where Theocritus 'watched the visionary
flocks.'

Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century,
or, according to Couat, about 315 B.C., and was a native of Syracuse,
'the greatest of Greek cities, the fairest of all cities.'  So Cicero
calls it, describing the four quarters that were encircled by its
walls,--each quarter as large as a town,--the fountain Arethusa, the
stately temples with their doors of ivory and gold.  On the fortunate
dwellers in Syracuse, Cicero says, the sun shone every day, and there
was never a morning so tempestuous but the sunlight conquered at
last, and broke through the clouds.  That perennial sunlight still
floods the poems of Theocritus with its joyous glow.  His birthplace
was the proper home of an idyllic poet, of one who, with all his
enjoyment of the city life of Greece, had yet been 'breathed on by
the rural Pan,' and best loved the sights and sounds and fragrant air
of the forests and the coast.  Thanks to the mountainous regions of
Sicily, to Etna, with her volcanic cliffs and snow-fed streams,
thanks also to the hills of the interior, the populous island never
lost the charm of nature.  Sicily was not like the overcrowded and
over-cultivated Attica; among the Sicilian heights and by the coast
were few enclosed estates and narrow farms.  The character of the
people, too, was attuned to poetry.  The Dorian settlers had kept
alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and
uplands haunted by Pan.  This popular poetry influenced the literary
verse of Sicily.  The songs of Stesichorus, a minstrel of the early
period, and the little rural 'mimes' or interludes of Sophron are
lost, and we have only fragments of Epicharmus.  But it seems certain
that these poets, predecessors of Theocritus, liked to mingle with
their own composition strains of rustic melody, volks-lieder,
ballads, love-songs, ditties, and dirges, such as are still chanted
by the peasants of Greece and Italy.  Thus in Syracuse and the other
towns of the coast, Theocritus would have always before his eyes the
spectacle of refined and luxurious manners, and always in his ears
the babble of the Dorian women, while he had only to pass the gates,
and wander through the fens of Lysimeleia, by the brackish mere, or
ride into the hills, to find himself in the golden world of pastoral.
Thinking of his early years, and of the education that nature gives
the poet, we can imagine him, like Callicles in Mr. Arnold's poem,
singing at the banquet of a merchant or a general -


'With his head full of wine, and his hair crown'd,
Touching his harp as the whim came on him,
And praised and spoil'd by master and by guests,
Almost as much as the new dancing girl.'


We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems,
though the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown.  We
can follow him, in fancy, as he breaks from the revellers and wanders
out into the night.  Wherever he turned his feet, he could find such
scenes as he has painted in the idyls.  If the moon rode high in
heaven, as he passed through the outlying gardens he might catch a
glimpse of some deserted girl shredding the magical herbs into the
burning brazier, and sending upward to the 'lady Selene' the song
which was to charm her lover home.  The magical image melted in the
burning, the herbs smouldered, the tale of love was told, and slowly
the singer 'drew the quiet night into her blood.'  Her lay ended with
a passage of softened melancholy -

'Do thou farewell, and turn thy steeds to Ocean, lady, and my pain I
will endure, even as I have declared.  Farewell, Selene beautiful;
farewell, ye other stars that follow the wheels of Night.'

A grammarian says that Theocritus borrowed this second idyl, the
story of Simaetha, from a piece by Sophron.  But he had no need to
borrow from anything but the nature before his eyes.  Ideas change so
little among the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition
is so strong, that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their
prayer for pity and help.  Theocritus himself could have added little
passion to this incantation, still chanted in the moonlit nights of
Greece:  {0a}

'Bright golden Moon, that now art near to thy setting, go thou and
salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, and said,
"Never will I leave thee."  And, lo, he has left me, like a field
reaped and gleaned, like a church where no man comes to pray, like a
city desolate.  Therefore I would curse him, and yet again my heart
fails me for tenderness, my heart is vexed within me, my spirit is
moved with anguish.  Nay, even so I will lay my curse on him, and let
God do even as He will, with my pain and with my crying, with my
flame, and mine imprecations.'

It is thus that the women of the islands, like the girl of Syracuse
two thousand years ago, hope to lure back love or avenged love
betrayed, and thus they 'win more ease from song than could be bought
with gold.'

In whatever direction the path of the Syracusan wanderer lay, he
would find then, as he would find now in Sicily, some scene of the
idyllic life, framed between the distant Etna and the sea.  If he
strayed in the faint blue of the summer dawn, through the fens to the
shore, he might reach the wattled cabin of the two old fishermen in
the twenty-first idyl.  There is nothing in Wordsworth more real,
more full of the incommunicable sense of nature, rounding and
softening the toilsome days of the aged and the poor, than the
Theocritean poem of the Fisherman's Dream.  It is as true to nature
as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican.  One cannot read
these verses but the vision returns to one, of sandhills by the sea,
of a low cabin roofed with grass, where fishing-rods of reed are
leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floats up her waves
that fill the waste with sound.  This nature, grey and still, seems
in harmony with the wise content of old men whose days are waning on
the limit of life, as they have all been spent by the desolate margin
of the sea.

The twenty-first idyl is one of the rare poems of Theocritus that are
not filled with the sunlight of Sicily, or of Egypt.  The landscapes
he prefers are often seen under the noonday heat, when shade is most
pleasant to men.  His shepherds invite each other to the shelter of
oak-trees or of pines, where the dry fir-needles are strown, or where
the feathered ferns make a luxurious 'couch more soft than sleep,' or
where the flowers bloom whose musical names sing in the idyls.
Again, Theocritus will sketch the bare beginnings of the hillside, as
in the third idyl, just where the olive-gardens cease, and where the
short grass of the heights alternates with rocks, and thorns, and
aromatic plants.  None of his pictures seem complete without the
presence of water.  It may be but the wells that the maidenhair
fringes, or the babbling runnel of the fountain of the Nereids.  The
shepherds may sing of Crathon, or Sybaris, or Himeras, waters so
sweet that they seem to flow with milk and honey.  Again, Theocritus
may encounter his rustics fluting in rivalry, like Daphnis and
Menalcas in the eighth idyl, 'on the long ranges of the hills.'
Their kine and sheep have fed upwards from the lower valleys to the
place where


'The track winds down to the clear stream,
To cross the sparkling shallows; there
The cattle love to gather, on their way
To the high mountain pastures and to stay,
Till the rough cow-herds drive them past,
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for 'tis the last
Of all the woody, high, well-water'd dells
On Etna, . . .
. . . glade,
And stream, and sward, and chestnut-trees,
End here; Etna beyond, in the broad glare
Of the hot noon, without a shade,
Slope behind slope, up to the peak, lies bare;
The peak, round which the white clouds play.'  {0b}


Theocritus never drives his flock so high, and rarely muses on such
thoughts as come to wanderers beyond the shade of trees and the sound
of water among the scorched rocks and the barren lava.  The day is
always cooled and soothed, in his idyls, with the 'music of water
that falleth from the high face of the rock,' or with the murmurs of
the sea.  From the cliffs and their seat among the bright red berries
on the arbutus shrubs, his shepherds flute to each other, as they
watch the tunny fishers cruising far below, while the echo floats
upwards of the sailors' song.  These shepherds have some touch in
them of the satyr nature; we might fancy that their ears are pointed
like those of Hawthorne's Donatello, in 'Transformation.'

It should be noticed, as a proof of the truthfulness of Theocritus,
that the songs of his shepherds and goatherds are all such as he
might really have heard on the shores of Sicily.  This is the real
answer to the criticism which calls him affected.  When mock
pastorals flourished at the court of France, when the long dispute as
to the merits of the ancients and moderns was raging, critics vowed
that the hinds of Theocritus were too sentimental and polite in their
wooings.  Refinement and sentiment were to be reserved for princely
shepherds dancing, crook in hand, in the court ballets.  Louis XIV
sang of himself -


'A son labeur il passe tout d'un coup,
Et n'ira pas dormir sur la fougere,
Ny s'oublier aupres d'une Bergere,
Jusques au point d'en oublier le Loup.'  {0c}


Accustomed to royal goatherds in silk and lace, Fontenelle (a severe
critic of Theocritus) could not believe in the delicacy of a Sicilian
who wore a skin 'stripped from the roughest of he-goats, with the
smell of the rennet clinging to it still.'  Thus Fontenelle cries,
'Can any one suppose that there ever was a shepherd who could say
"Would I were the humming bee, Amaryllis, to flit to thy cave, and
dip beneath the branches, and the ivy leaves that hide thee"?' and
then he quotes other graceful passages from the love-verses of
Theocritean swains.  Certainly no such fancies were to be expected
from the French peasants of Fontenelle's age, 'creatures blackened
with the sun, and bowed with labour and hunger.'  The imaginative
grace of Battus is quite as remote from our own hinds.  But we have
the best reason to suppose that the peasants of Theocritus's time
expressed refined sentiment in language adorned with colour and
music, because the modern love-songs of Greek shepherds sound like
memories of Theocritus.  The lover of Amaryllis might have sung this
among his ditties -


[Greek]

'To flit towards these lips of thine, I fain would be a swallow,
To kiss thee once, to kiss thee twice, and then go flying homeward.'
{0d}


In his despair, when Love 'clung to him like a leech of the fen,' he
might have murmured -


[Greek]

'Would that I were on the high hills, and lay where lie the stags,
and no more was troubled with the thought of thee.'


Here, again, is a love-complaint from modern Epirus, exactly in the
tone of Battus's song in the tenth idyl -


'White thou art not, thou art not golden haired,
Thou art brown, and gracious, and meet for love.'


Here is a longer love-ditty -

'I will begin by telling thee first of thy perfections:  thy body is
as fair as an angel's; no painter could design it.  And if any man be
sad, he has but to look on thee, and despite himself he takes
courage, the hapless one, and his heart is joyous.  Upon thy brows
are shining the constellated Pleiades, thy breast is full of the
flowers of May, thy breasts are lilies.  Thou hast the eyes of a
princess, the glance of a queen, and but one fault hast thou, that
thou deignest not to speak to me.'

Battus might have cried thus, with a modern Greek singer, to the
shade of the dead Amaryllis (Idyl IV), the 'gracious Amaryllis,
unforgotten even in death' -

'Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee; what gift to
the other world?  The apple rots, and the quince decayeth, and one by
one they perish, the petals of the rose!  I send thee my tears bound
in a napkin, and what though the napkin burns, if my tears reach thee
at last!'

The difficulty is to stop choosing, where all the verses of the
modern Greek peasants are so rich in Theocritean memories, so ardent,
so delicate, so full of flowers and birds and the music of fountains.
Enough has been said, perhaps, to show what the popular poetry of
Sicily could lend to the genius of Theocritus.

From her shepherds he borrowed much,--their bucolic melody; their
love-complaints; their rural superstitions; their system of answering
couplets, in which each singer refines on the utterance of his rival.
But he did not borrow their 'pastoral melancholy.'  There is little
of melancholy in Theocritus.  When Battus is chilled by the thought
of the death of Amaryllis, it is but as one is chilled when a thin
cloud passes over the sun, on a bright day of early spring.  And in
an epigram the dead girl is spoken of as the kid that the wolf has
seized, while the hounds bay all too late.  Grief will not bring her
back.  The world must go its way, and we need not darken its sunlight
by long regret.  Yet when, for once, Theocritus adopted the accent of
pastoral lament, when he raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the
realm of art, he composed a masterpiece, and a model for all later
poets, as for the authors of Lycidas, Thyrsis, and Adonais.

Theocritus did more than borrow a note from the country people.  He
brought the gifts of his own spirit to the contemplation of the
world.  He had the clearest vision, and he had the most ardent love
of poetry, 'of song may all my dwelling be full, for neither is sleep
more sweet, nor sudden spring, nor are flowers more delicious to the
bees, so dear to me are the Muses.' . . .  'Never may we be sundered,
the Muses of Pieria and I.'  Again, he had perhaps in greater measure
than any other poet the gift of the undisturbed enjoyment of life.
The undertone of all his idyls is joy in the sunshine and in
existence.  His favourite word, the word that opens the first idyl,
and, as it were, strikes the keynote, is [Greek], sweet.  He finds
all things delectable in the rural life:

'Sweet are the voices of the calves, and sweet the heifers' lowing;
sweet plays the shepherd on the shepherd's pipe, and sweet is the
echo.'

Even in courtly poems, and in the artificial hymns of which we are to
speak in their place, the memory of the joyful country life comes
over him.  He praises Hiero, because Hiero is to restore peace to
Syracuse, and when peace returns, then 'thousands of sheep fattened
in the meadows will bleat along the plain, and the kine, as they
flock in crowds to the stalls, will make the belated traveller hasten
on his way.'  The words evoke a memory of a narrow country lane in
the summer evening, when light is dying out of the sky, and the
fragrance of wild roses by the roadside is mingled with the perfumed
breath of cattle that hurry past on their homeward road.  There was
scarcely a form of the life he saw that did not seem to him worthy of
song, though it might be but the gossip of two rude hinds, or the
drinking bout of the Thessalian horse-jobber, and the false girl
Cynisca and her wild lover AEschines.  But it is the sweet country
that he loves best to behold and to remember.  In his youth Sicily
and Syracuse were disturbed by civil and foreign wars, wars of
citizens against citizens, of Greeks against Carthaginians, and
against the fierce 'men of Mars,' the banded mercenaries who
possessed themselves of Messana.  But this was not matter for his
joyous Muse -


[Greek]

'Not of wars, not of tears, but of Pan would he chant, and of the
neatherds he sweetly sang, and singing he shepherded his flocks.'


This was the training that Sicily, her hills, her seas, her lovers,
her poet-shepherds, gave to Theocritus.  Sicily showed him subjects
which he imitated in truthful art.  Unluckily the later pastoral
poets of northern lands have imitated HIM, and so have gone far
astray from northern nature.  The pupil of nature had still to be
taught the 'rules' of the critics, to watch the temper and fashion of
his time, and to try his fortune among the courtly poets and
grammarians of the capital of civilisation.  Between the years of
early youth in Sicily and the years of waiting for court patronage at
Alexandria, it seems probable that we must place a period of
education in the island of Cos.  The testimonies of the Grammarians
who handed on to us the scanty traditions about Theocritus, agree in
making him the pupil of Philetas of Cos.  This Philetas was a critic,
a commentator on Homer, and an elegiac poet whose love-songs were
greatly admired by the Romans of the Augustan age.  He is said to
have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was himself born, as
Theocritus records, in the isle of Cos.  It has been conjectured that
Ptolemy and Theocritus were fellow pupils, and that the poet may have
hoped to obtain court favour at Alexandria from this early
connection.  About this point nothing is certainly known, nor can we
exactly understand the sort of education that was given in the school
of the poet Philetas.  The ideas of that artificial age make it not
improbable that Philetas professed to teach the art of poetry.  A
French critic and poet of our own time, M. Baudelaire, was willing to
do as much 'in thirty lessons.'  Possibly Philetas may have imparted
technical rules then in vogue, and the fashionable knack of
introducing obscure mythological allusions.  He was a logician as
well as a poet, and is fabled to have died of vexation because he
could not unriddle one of the metaphysical catches or puzzles of the
sophists.  His varied activity seems to have worn him to a shadow;
the contemporary satirists bantered him about his leanness, and it
was alleged that he wore leaden soles to his sandals lest the wind
should blow him, as it blew the calves of Daphnis (Idyl IX) over a
cliff against the rocks, or into the sea. {0e}  Philetas seems a
strange master for Theocritus, but, whatever the qualities of the
teacher, Cos, the home of the luxurious old age of Meleager, was a
beautiful school.  The island was one of the most ancient colonies of
the Dorians, and the Syracusan scholar found himself among a people
who spoke his own broad and liquid dialect.  The sides of the
limestone hills were clothed with vines, and with shadowy plane-trees
which still attain extraordinary size and age, while the wine-presses
where Demeter smiled, 'with sheaves and poppies in her hands,'
yielded a famous vintage.  The people had a soft industry of their
own, they fashioned the 'Coan stuff,' transparent robes for woman's
wear, like the [Greek], the thin undulating tissues which Theugenis
was to weave with the ivory distaff, the gift of Theocritus.  As a
colony of Epidaurus, Cos naturally cultivated the worship of
Asclepius, the divine physician, the child of Apollo.  In connection
with his worship and with the clan of the Asclepiadae (that
widespread stock to which Aristotle belonged, and in which the
practice of leechcraft was hereditary), Cos possessed a school of
medicine.  In the temple of Asclepius patients hung up as votive
offerings representations of their diseased limbs, and thus the
temple became a museum of anatomical specimens.  Cos was therefore
resorted to by young students from all parts of the East, and
Theocritus cannot but have made many friends of his own age.  Among
these he alludes in various passages to Nicias, afterwards a
physician at Miletus, to Philinus, noted in later life as the head of
a medical sect, and to Aratus.  Theocritus has sung of Aratus's love-
affairs, and St. Paul has quoted him as a witness to man's
instinctive consent in the doctrine of the universal fatherhood of
God.  These strangely various notices have done more for the memory
of Aratus than his own didactic poem on the meteorological theories
of his age.  He lives, with Philinus and the rest of the Coan
students, because Theocritus introduced them into the picture of a
happy summer's day.  In the seventh idyl, that one day of Demeter's
harvest-feast is immortal, and the sun never goes down on its
delight.  We see Theocritus


[Greek]

when he 'had not yet reached the mid-point of the way, nor had the
tomb yet risen on his sight.'  He reveals himself as he was at the
height of morning, at the best moment of the journey, in midsummer of
a genius still unchecked by doubt, or disappointment, or neglect.
Life seems to accost him with the glance of the goatherd Lycidas,
'and still he smiled as he spoke, with laughing eyes, and laughter
dwelling on his lips.'  In Cos, Theocritus found friendship, and met
Myrto, 'the girl he loved as dearly as goats love the spring.'  Here
he could express, without any afterthought, an enthusiastic adoration
for the disinterested joys, the enchanted moments of human existence.
Before he entered the thronged streets of Alexandria, and tuned his
shepherd's pipe to catch the ear of princes, and to sing the
epithalamium of a royal and incestuous love, he rested with his
friends in the happy island.  Deep in a cave, among the ruins of
ancient aqueducts, there still bubbles up, from the Coan limestone,
the well-spring of the Nymphs.  'There they reclined on beds of
fragrant rushes, lowly strown, and rejoicing they lay in new stript
leaves of the vine.  And high above their heads waved many a poplar,
many an elm-tree, while close at hand the sacred water from the
nymph's own cave welled forth with murmurs musical' (Idyl VII).

The old Dorian settlers in Syracuse pleased themselves with the fable
that their fountain, Arethusa, had been a Grecian nymph, who, like
themselves, had crossed the sea to Sicily.  The poetry of Theocritus,
read or sung in sultry Alexandria, must have seemed like a new
welling up of the waters of Arethusa in the sandy soil of Egypt.  We
cannot certainly say when the poet first came from Syracuse, or from
Cos, to Alexandria.  It is evident however from the allusions in the
fifteenth and seventeenth idyls that he was living there after
Ptolemy Philadelphus married his own sister, Arsinoe.  It is not
impossible to form some idea of the condition of Alexandrian society,
art, religion, literature and learning at the court of Ptolemy
Philadelphus.  The vast city, founded some sixty years before, was
now completed.  The walls, many miles in circuit, protected a
population of about eight hundred thousand souls.  Into that changing
crowd were gathered adventurers from all the known world.
Merchantmen brought to Ptolemy the wares of India and the porcelains
of China.  Marauders from upper Egypt skulked about the native
quarters, and sallied forth at night to rob the wayfarer.  The king's
guards were recruited with soldiers from turbulent Greece, from Asia,
from Italy.  Settlers were attracted from Syracuse by the prospect of
high wages and profitable labour.  The Jewish quarters were full of
Israelites who did not disdain Greek learning.  The city in which
this multitude found a home was beautifully constructed.  The
Mediterranean filled the northern haven, the southern walls were
washed by the Mareotic lake.  If the isle of Pharos shone dazzling
white, and wearied the eyes, there was shade beneath the long marble
colonnades, and in the groves and cool halls of the Museum and the
Libraries.  The Etesian winds blew fresh in summer from the north,
across the sea, and refreshed the people in their gardens.  No town
seemed greater nor wealthier to the voyager, who (like the hero of
the Greek novel Clitophon and Leucippe) entered by the gate of the
Sun, and found that, after nightfall, the torches borne by men and
women hastening to some religious feast, filled the dusk with a light
like that of 'the sun cut up into fragments.'  At the same time no
town was more in need of the memories of the country, which came to
her in well-watered gardens, in landscape-paintings, and in the verse
of Theocritus.

It is impossible to give a clearer idea of the opulence and luxury of
Alexandria and her kings, than will be conveyed by the description of
the coronation-feast of Ptolemy Philadelphus.  This great masquerade
and banquet was prepared by the elder Ptolemy on the occasion of his
admitting his son to share his throne.  The entertainment was
described (in a work now lost) by Callixenus of Rhodes, and the
record has been preserved by Atheneaus (v. 25).  The inner pavilion
in which the guests of Ptolemy reclined, contained one hundred and
thirty-five couches.  Over the roof was placed a scarlet awning, with
a fringe of white, and there were many other awnings, richly
embroidered with mythological designs.  The pillars which sustained
the roof were shaped in the likeness of palm-trees, and of thyrsi,
the weapons of the wine-god Dionysus.  Round three outer sides ran
arcades, draped with purple tissues, and with the skins of strange
beasts.  The fourth side, open to the air, was shady with the foliage
of myrtles and laurels.  Everywhere the ground was carpeted with
flowers, though the season was mid-winter, with roses and white
lilies and blossoms of the gardens.  By the columns round the whole
pavilion were arrayed a hundred effigies in marble, executed by the
most famous sculptors, and on the middle spaces were hung works by
the painters of Sicyon and tapestry woven with stories of the
adventures of the gods.  Above these, again, ran a frieze of gold and
silver shields, while in the higher niches were placed comic, tragic,
and satiric sculptured groups 'dressed in real clothes,' says the
historian, much admiring this realism.  It is impossible to number
the tripods, and flagons, and couches of gold, resting on golden
figures of sphinxes, the salvers, the bowls, the jewelled vases.  The
masquerade of this winter festival began with the procession of the
Morning-star, Heosphoros, and then followed a masque of kings and a
revel of various gods, while the company of Hesperus, the Evening-
star followed, and ended all.  The revel of Dionysus was introduced
by men disguised as Sileni, wild woodland beings in raiment of purple
and scarlet.  Then came scores of satyrs with gilded lamps in their
hands.  Next appeared beautiful maidens, attired as Victories, waving
golden wings and swinging vessels of burning incense.  The altar of
the God of the Vine was borne behind them, crowned and covered with
leaves of gold, and next boys in purple robes scattered fragrant
scents from golden salvers.  Then came a throng of gold-crowned
satyrs, their naked bodies stained with purple and vermilion, and
among them was a tall man who represented the year and carried a horn
of plenty.  He was followed by a beautiful woman in rich attire,
carrying in one hand branches of the palm-tree, in the other a rod of
the peach-tree, starred with its constellated flowers.  Then the
masque of the Seasons swept by, and Philiscus followed, Philiscus the
Corcyraean, the priest of Dionysus, and the favourite tragic poet of
the court.  After the prizes for the athletes had been borne past,
Dionysus himself was charioted along, a gigantic figure clad in
purple, and pouring libations out of a golden goblet.  Around him lay
huge drinking-cups, and smoking censers of gold, and a bower of vine
leaves grew up, and shaded the head of the god.  Then hurried by a
crowd of priests and priestesses, Maenads, Bacchantes, Bassarids,
women crowned with the vine, or with garlands of snakes, and girls
bearing the mystic vannus Iacchi.  And still the procession was not
ended.  A mechanical figure of Nysa passed, in a chariot drawn by
eighty men, among clusters of grapes formed of precious stones, and
the figure arose, and poured milk out of a golden horn.  The Satyrs
and Sileni followed close, and behind them six hundred men dragged on
a wain, a silver vessel that held six hundred measures of wine.  This
was only the first of countless symbolic vessels that were carried
past, till last came a multitude of sixteen hundred boys clad in
white tunics, and garlanded with ivy, who bore and handed to the
guests golden and silver vessels full of sweet wine.  All this was
only part of one procession, and the festival ended when Ptolemy and
Berenice and Ptolemy Philadelphus had been crowned with golden crowns
from many subject cities and lands.

This festival was obviously arranged to please the taste of a prince
with late Greek ideas of pictorial display, and with barbaric wealth
at his command.  Theocritus himself enables us in the seventeenth
idyl to estimate the opulence and the dominion of Ptolemy.  He was
not master of fertile Aegypt alone, where the Nile breaks the rich
dank soil, and where myriad cities pour their taxes into his
treasuries.  Ptolemy held lands also in Phoenicia, and Arabia; he
claimed Syria and Libya and Aethiopia; he was lord of the distant
Pamphylians, of the Cilicians, the Lycians and the Carians, and the
Cyclades owned his mastery.  Thus the wealth of the richest part of
the world flowed into Alexandria, attracting thither the priests of
strange religions, the possessors of Greek learning, the painters and
sculptors whose work has left its traces on the genius of Theocritus.

Looking at this early Alexandrian age, three points become clear to
us.  First, the fashion of the times was Oriental, Oriental in
religion and in society.  Nothing could be less Hellenic, than the
popular cult of Adonis.  The fifteenth idyl of Theocritus shows us
Greek women worshipping in their manner at an Assyrian shrine, the
shrine of that effeminate lover of Aphrodite, whom Heracles,
according to the Greek proverb, thought 'no great divinity.'  The
hymn of Bion, with its luxurious lament, was probably meant to be
chanted at just such a festival as Theocritus describes, while a
crowd of foreigners gossiped among the flowers and embroideries, the
strangely-shaped sacred cakes, the ebony, the gold, and the ivory.
Not so much Oriental as barbarous was the impulse which made Ptolemy
Philadelphus choose his own sister, Arsinoe, for wife, as if absolute
dominion had already filled the mind of the Macedonian royal race
with the incestuous pride of the Incas, or of Queen Hatasu, in an
elder Egyptian dynasty.  This nascent barbarism has touched a few of
the Alexandrian poems even of Theocritus, and his panegyric of
Ptolemy, of his divine ancestors, and his sister-bride is not much
more Greek in sentiment than are those old native hymns of Pentaur to
'the strong Bull,' or the 'Risen Sun,' to Rameses or Thothmes.

Again, the early Alexandrian was what we call a 'literary' age.
Literature was not an affair of religion and of the state, but
ministered to the pleasure of individuals, and at their pleasure was
composed. {0f}  The temper of the time was crudely critical.  The
Museum and the Libraries, with their hundreds of thousands of
volumes, were hot-houses of grammarians and of learned poets.
Callimachus, the head librarian, was also the most eminent man of
letters.  Unable, himself, to compose a poem of epic length and
copiousness, he discouraged all long poems.  He shone in epigrams,
pedantic hymns, and didactic verses.  He toyed with anagrams, and won
court favour by discovering that the letters of 'Arsinoe,' the name
of Ptolemy's wife, made the words [Greek], the violet of Hera.  In
another masterpiece the genius of Callimachus followed the stolen
tress of Queen Berenice to the skies, where the locks became a
constellation.  A contemporary of Callimachus was Zenodotus, the
critic, who was for improving the Iliad and Odyssey by cutting out
all the epic commonplaces which seemed to him to be needless
repetitions.  It is pretty plain that, in literary society, Homer was
thought out of date and rococo.  The favourite topics of poets were
now, not the tales of Troy and Thebes, but the amorous adventures of
the gods.  When Apollonius Rhodius attempted to revive the epic, it
is said that the influence of Callimachus quite discomfited the young
poet.  A war of epigrams began, and while Apollonius called
Callimachus a 'blockhead' (so finished was his invective), the
veteran compared his rival to the Ibis, the scavenger-bird.  Other
singers satirised each others' legs, and one, the Aretino of the
time, mocked at king Ptolemy and scourged his failings in verse.  The
literary quarrels (to which Theocritus seems to allude in Idyl VII,
where Lycidas says he 'hates the birds of the Muses that cackle in
vain rivalry with Homer') were as stupid as such affairs usually are.
The taste for artificial epic was to return; although many people
already declared that Homer was the world's poet, and that the world
needed no other.  This epic reaction brought into favour Apollonius
Rhodius, author of the Argonautica.  Theocritus has been supposed to
aim at him as a vain rival of Homer, but M. Couat points out that
Theocritus was seventy when Apollonius began to write.  The literary
fashions of Alexandria are only of moment to us so far as they
directly affected Theocritus.  They could not make him obscure,
affected, tedious, but his nature probably inclined him to obey
fashion so far as only to write short poems.  His rural poems are
[Greek], 'little pictures.'  His fragments of epic, or imitations of
the epic hymns are not


[Greek]


- not full and sonorous as the songs of Homer and the sea.  'Ce poete
est le moins naif qui se puisse rencontrer, et il se degage de son
oeuvre un parfum de naivete rustique.' {0g}  They are, what a German
critic has called them, mythologischen genre-bilder, cabinet pictures
in the manner called genre, full of pretty detail and domestic
feeling.  And this brings us to the third characteristic of the age,-
-its art was elaborately pictorial.  Poetry seems to have sought
inspiration from painting, while painting, as we have said, inclined
to genre, to luxurious representations of the amours of the gods or
the adventures of heroes, with backgrounds of pastoral landscape.
Shepherds fluted while Perseus slew Medusa.

The old order of things in Greece had been precisely the opposite of
this Alexandrian manner.  Homer and the later Homeric legends, with
the tragedians, inspired the sculptors, and even the artisans who
decorated vases.  When a new order of subjects became fashionable,
and when every rich Alexandrian had pictures or frescoes on his
walls, it appears that the painters took the lead, that the
initiative in art was theirs.  The Alexandrian pictures perished long
ago, but the relics of Alexandrian style which remain in the buried
cities of Campania, in Pompeii especially, bear testimony to the
taste of the period. {0h}  Out of nearly two thousand Pompeian
pictures, it is calculated that some fourteen hundred (roughly
speaking) are mythological in subject.  The loves of the gods are
repeated in scores of designs, and these designs closely correspond
to the mythological poems of Theocritus and his younger
contemporaries Bion and Moschus.  Take as an example the adventure of
Europa:  Lord Tennyson's lines, in The Palace of Art are intended to
describe picture -


'Or sweet Europa's mantle blew unclasp'd,
   From off her shoulder backward borne:
From one hand droop'd a crocus:  one hand grasp'd
      The mild bull's golden horn.'


The words of Moschus also seem as if they might have derived their
inspiration from a painting, the touches are so minute, and so
picturesque -

'Meanwhile Europa, riding on the back of the divine bull, with one
hand clasped the beast's great horn, and with the other caught up her
garment's purple fold, lest it might trail and be drenched in the
hoar sea's infinite spray.  And her deep robe was blown out in the
wind, like the sail of a ship, and lightly ever it wafted the maiden
onward.'

Now every single 'motive' of this description,--Europa with one hand
holding the bull's horn, with the other lifting her dress, the wind
puffing out her shawl like a sail, is repeated in the Pompeian wall-
pictures, which themselves are believed to be derived from
Alexandrian originals.  There are more curious coincidences than
this.  In the sixth idyl of Theocritus, Damoetas makes the Cyclops
say that Galatea 'will send him many a messenger.'  The mere idea of
describing the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus in love, is artificial
and Alexandrian.  But who were the 'messengers' of the sea-nymph
Galatea?  A Pompeian picture illustrates the point, by representing a
little Love riding up to the shore on the back of a dolphin, with a
letter in his hand for Polyphemus.  Greek art in Egypt suffered from
an Egyptian plague of Loves.  Loves flutter through the Pompeian
pictures as they do through the poems of Moschus and Bion.  They are
carried about in cages, for sale, like birds.  They are caught in
bird-traps.  They don the lion-skin of Heracles.  They flutter about
baskets laden with roses; round rosy Loves, like the cupids of
Boucher.  They are not akin to 'the grievous Love,' the mighty
wrestler who threw Daphnis a fall, in the first idyl of Theocritus.
They are 'the children that flit overhead, the little Loves, like the
young nightingales upon the budding trees,' which flit round the dead
Adonis in the fifteenth idyl.  They are the birds that shun the boy
fowler, in Bion's poem, and perch uncalled (as in a bronze in the
Uffizi) on the grown man.  In one or other of the sixteen Pompeian
pictures of Venus and Adonis, the Loves are breaking their bows and
arrows for grief, as in the hymn of Bion.

Enough has perhaps been said about the social and artistic taste of
Alexandria to account for the remarkable differences in manner
between the rustic idyls of Theocritus and the epic idyls of himself
and his followers Moschus and Bion.  In the rural idyls, Theocritus
was himself and wrote to please himself.  In the epic idyls, as in
the Hymn to the Dioscuri, and in the two poems on Heracles, he was
writing to please the taste of Alexandria.  He had to choose epic
topics, but he was warned by the famous saying of Callimachus ('a
great book is a great evil') not to imitate the length of the epic.
{0i}  He was also to shun close imitation of what are so easily
imitated, the regular recurring formulae, the commonplace of Homer.
He was to add minute pictorial touches, as in the description of
Alcmena's waking when the serpents attacked her child,--a passage
rich in domestic pathos and incident which contrast strongly with
Pindar's bare narrative of the same events.  We have noted the same
pictorial quality in the Europa of Moschus.  Our own age has often
been compared to the Alexandrian epoch, to that era of large cities,
wealth, refinement, criticism, and science; and the pictorial Idylls
of the King very closely resemble the epico-idyllic manner of
Alexandria.  We have tried to examine the society in which Theocritus
lived.  But our impressions about the poet are more distinct.  In him
we find the most genial character; pious as Greece counted piety;
tender as became the poet of love; glad as the singer of a happy
southern world should be; gifted, above all, with humour, and with
dramatic power.  'His lyre has all the chords'; his is the last of
all the perfect voices of Hellas; after him no man saw life with eyes
so steady and so mirthful.

About the lives of the three idyllic poets literary history says
little.  About their deaths she only tells us through the dirge by
Moschus, that Bion was poisoned.  The lovers of Theocritus would
willingly hope that he returned from Alexandria to Sicily, about the
time when he wrote the sixteenth idyl, and that he lived in the
enjoyment of the friendship and the domestic happiness and honour
which he sang so well, through the golden age of Hiero (264 B.C.)  No
happier fortune could befall him who wrote the epigram of the lady of
heavenly love, who worshipped with the noble wife of Nicias under the
green roof of Milesian Aphrodite, and who prophesied of the return of
peace and of song to Sicily and Syracuse.




THEOCRITUS




IDYL I



The shepherd Thyrsis meets a goatherd, in a shady place beside a
spring, and at his invitation sings the Song of Daphnis.  This ideal
hero of Greek pastoral song had won for his bride the fairest of the
Nymphs.  Confident in the strength of his passion, he boasted that
Love could never subdue him to a new question.  Love avenged himself
by making Daphnis desire a strange maiden, but to this temptation he
never yielded, and so died a constant lover.  The song tells how the
cattle and the wild things of the wood bewailed him, how Hermes and
Priapus gave him counsel in vain, and how with his last breath he
retorted the taunts of the implacable Aphrodite.

The scene is in Sicily.

Thyrsis.  Sweet, meseems, is the whispering sound of yonder pine
tree, goatherd, that murmureth by the wells of water; and sweet are
thy pipings.  After Pan the second prize shalt thou bear away, and if
he take the horned goat, the she-goat shalt thou win; but if he
choose the she-goat for his meed, the kid falls to thee, and dainty
is the flesh of kids e'er the age when thou milkest them.

The Goatherd.  Sweeter, O shepherd, is thy song than the music of
yonder water that is poured from the high face of the rock!  Yea, if
the Muses take the young ewe for their gift, a stall-fed lamb shalt
thou receive for thy meed; but if it please them to take the lamb,
thou shalt lead away the ewe for the second prize.

Thyrsis.  Wilt thou, goatherd, in the nymphs' name, wilt thou sit
thee down here, among the tamarisks, on this sloping knoll, and pipe
while in this place I watch thy flocks?

Goatherd.  Nay, shepherd, it may not be; we may not pipe in the
noontide.  'Tis Pan we dread, who truly at this hour rests weary from
the chase; and bitter of mood is he, the keen wrath sitting ever at
his nostrils.  But, Thyrsis, for that thou surely wert wont to sing
The Affliction of Daphnis, and hast most deeply meditated the
pastoral muse, come hither, and beneath yonder elm let us sit down,
in face of Priapus and the fountain fairies, where is that resting-
place of the shepherds, and where the oak trees are.  Ah! if thou
wilt but sing as on that day thou sangest in thy match with Chromis
out of Libya, I will let thee milk, ay, three times, a goat that is
the mother of twins, and even when she has suckled her kids her milk
doth fill two pails.  A deep bowl of ivy-wood, too, I will give thee,
rubbed with sweet bees'-wax, a twy-eared bowl newly wrought, smacking
still of the knife of the graver.  Round its upper edges goes the ivy
winding, ivy besprent with golden flowers; and about it is a tendril
twisted that joys in its saffron fruit.  Within is designed a maiden,
as fair a thing as the gods could fashion, arrayed in a sweeping
robe, and a snood on her head.  Beside her two youths with fair love-
locks are contending from either side, with alternate speech, but her
heart thereby is all untouched.  And now on one she glances, smiling,
and anon she lightly flings the other a thought, while by reason of
the long vigils of love their eyes are heavy, but their labour is all
in vain.

Beyond these an ancient fisherman and a rock are fashioned, a rugged
rock, whereon with might and main the old man drags a great net for
his cast, as one that labours stoutly.  Thou wouldst say that he is
fishing with all the might of his limbs, so big the sinews swell all
about his neck, grey-haired though he be, but his strength is as the
strength of youth.  Now divided but a little space from the sea-worn
old man is a vineyard laden well with fire-red clusters, and on the
rough wall a little lad watches the vineyard, sitting there.  Round
him two she-foxes are skulking, and one goes along the vine-rows to
devour the ripe grapes, and the other brings all her cunning to bear
against the scrip, and vows she will never leave the lad, till she
strand him bare and breakfastless.  But the boy is plaiting a pretty
locust-cage with stalks of asphodel, and fitting it with reeds, and
less care of his scrip has he, and of the vines, than delight in his
plaiting.

All about the cup is spread the soft acanthus, a miracle of varied
work, {6} a thing for thee to marvel on.  For this bowl I paid to a
Calydonian ferryman a goat and a great white cream cheese.  Never has
its lip touched mine, but it still lies maiden for me.  Gladly with
this cup would I gain thee to my desire, if thou, my friend, wilt
sing me that delightful song.  Nay, I grudge it thee not at all.
Begin, my friend, for be sure thou canst in no wise carry thy song
with thee to Hades, that puts all things out of mind!

The Song of Thyrsis.

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!  Thyrsis of Etna am I,
and this is the voice of Thyrsis.  Where, ah! where were ye when
Daphnis was languishing; ye Nymphs, where were ye?  By Peneus's
beautiful dells, or by dells of Pindus? for surely ye dwelt not by
the great stream of the river Anapus, nor on the watch-tower of Etna,
nor by the sacred water of Acis.

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

For him the jackals, for him the wolves did cry; for him did even the
lion out of the forest lament.  Kine and bulls by his feet right
many, and heifers plenty, with the young calves bewailed him.

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

Came Hermes first from the hill, and said, 'Daphnis, who is it that
torments thee; child, whom dost thou love with so great desire?'  The
neatherds came, and the shepherds; the goatherds came:  all they
asked what ailed him.  Came also Priapus, -

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

And said:  'Unhappy Daphnis, wherefore dost thou languish, while for
thee the maiden by all the fountains, through all the glades is
fleeting, in search of thee?  Ah! thou art too laggard a lover, and
thou nothing availest!  A neatherd wert thou named, and now thou art
like the goatherd:

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

'For the goatherd, when he marks the young goats at their pastime,
looks on with yearning eyes, and fain would be even as they; and
thou, when thou beholdest the laughter of maidens, dost gaze with
yearning eyes, for that thou dost not join their dances.'

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

Yet these the herdsman answered not again, but he bare his bitter
love to the end, yea, to the fated end he bare it.

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

Ay, but she too came, the sweetly smiling Cypris, craftily smiling
she came, yet keeping her heavy anger; and she spake, saying:
'Daphnis, methinks thou didst boast that thou wouldst throw Love a
fall, nay, is it not thyself that hast been thrown by grievous Love?'

Begin ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

But to her Daphnis answered again:  'Implacable Cypris, Cypris
terrible, Cypris of mortals detested, already dost thou deem that my
latest sun has set; nay, Daphnis even in Hades shall prove great
sorrow to Love.

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

'Where it is told how the herdsman with Cypris--Get thee to Ida, get
thee to Anchises!  There are oak trees--here only galingale blows,
here sweetly hum the bees about the hives!

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

'Thine Adonis, too, is in his bloom, for he herds the sheep and slays
the hares, and he chases all the wild beasts.  Nay, go and confront
Diomedes again, and say, "The herdsman Daphnis I conquered, do thou
join battle with me."

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

'Ye wolves, ye jackals, and ye bears in the mountain caves, farewell!
The herdsman Daphnis ye never shall see again, no more in the dells,
no more in the groves, no more in the woodlands.  Farewell Arethusa,
ye rivers, good-night, that pour down Thymbris your beautiful waters.

Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!

'That Daphnis am I who here do herd the kine, Daphnis who water here
the bulls and calves.

'O Pan, Pan! whether thou art on the high hills of Lycaeus, or
rangest mighty Maenalus, haste hither to the Sicilian isle!  Leave
the tomb of Helice, leave that high cairn of the son of Lycaon, which
seems wondrous fair, even in the eyes of the blessed. {9}

Give o'er, ye Muses, come, give o'er the pastoral song!

'Come hither, my prince, and take this fair pipe, honey-breathed with
wax-stopped joints; and well it fits thy lip:  for verily I, even I,
by Love am now haled to Hades.

Give o'er, ye Muses, come, give o'er the pastoral song!

'Now violets bear, ye brambles, ye thorns bear violets; and let fair
narcissus bloom on the boughs of juniper!  Let all things with all be
confounded,--from pines let men gather pears, for Daphnis is dying!
Let the stag drag down the hounds, let owls from the hills contend in
song with the nightingales.'

Give o'er, ye Muses, come, give o'er the pastoral song!

So Daphnis spake, and ended; but fain would Aphrodite have given him
back to life.  Nay, spun was all the thread that the Fates assigned,
and Daphnis went down the stream.  The whirling wave closed over the
man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the nymphs.

Give o'er, ye Muses, come, give o'er the pastoral song!

And thou, give me the bowl, and the she-goat, that I may milk her and
poor forth a libation to the Muses.  Farewell, oh, farewells
manifold, ye Muses, and I, some future day, will sing you yet a
sweeter song.

The Goatherd.  Filled may thy fair mouth be with honey, Thyrsis, and
filled with the honeycomb; and the sweet dried fig mayst thou eat of
Aegilus, for thou vanquishest the cicala in song!  Lo here is thy
cup, see, my friend, of how pleasant a savour!  Thou wilt think it
has been dipped in the well-spring of the Hours.  Hither, hither,
Cissaetha:  do thou milk her, Thyrsis.  And you young she-goats,
wanton not so wildly lest you bring up the he-goat against you.



IDYL II



Simaetha, madly in love with Delphis, who has forsaken her,
endeavours to subdue him to her by magic, and by invoking the Moon,
in her character of Hecate, and of Selene.  She tells the tale of the
growth of her passion, and vows vengeance if her magic arts are
unsuccessful.

The scene is probably some garden beneath the moonlit shy, near the
town, and within sound of the sea.  The characters are Simaetha, and
Thestylis, her handmaid.

Where are my laurel leaves? come, bring them, Thestylis; and where
are the love-charms?  Wreath the bowl with bright-red wool, that I
may knit the witch-knots against my grievous lover, {11} who for
twelve days, oh cruel, has never come hither, nor knows whether I am
alive or dead, nor has once knocked at my door, unkind that he is!
Hath Love flown off with his light desires by some other path--Love
and Aphrodite?  To-morrow I will go to the wrestling school of
Timagetus, to see my love and to reproach him with all the wrong he
is doing me.  But now I will bewitch him with my enchantments!  Do
thou, Selene, shine clear and fair, for softly, Goddess, to thee will
I sing, and to Hecate of hell.  The very whelps shiver before her as
she fares through black blood and across the barrows of the dead.

Hail, awful Hecate! to the end be thou of our company, and make this
medicine of mine no weaker than the spells of Circe, or of Medea, or
of Perimede of the golden hair.

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Lo, how the barley grain first smoulders in the fire,--nay, toss on
the barley, Thestylis!  Miserable maid, where are thy wits wandering?
Even to thee, wretched that I am, have I become a laughing-stock,
even to thee?  Scatter the grain, and cry thus the while, ''Tis the
bones of Delphis I am scattering!'

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Delphis troubled me, and I against Delphis am burning this laurel;
and even as it crackles loudly when it has caught the flame, and
suddenly is burned up, and we see not even the dust thereof, lo, even
thus may the flesh of Delphis waste in the burning!

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Even as I melt this wax, with the god to aid, so speedily may he by
love be molten, the Myndian Delphis!  And as whirls this brazen
wheel, {13} so restless, under Aphrodite's spell, may he turn and
turn about my doors.

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Now will I burn the husks, and thou, O Artemis, hast power to move
hell's adamantine gates, and all else that is as stubborn.
Thestylis, hark, 'tis so; the hounds are baying up and down the town!
The Goddess stands where the three ways meet!  Hasten, and clash the
brazen cymbals.

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Lo, silent is the deep, and silent the winds, but never silent the
torment in my breast.  Nay, I am all on fire for him that made me,
miserable me, no wife but a shameful thing, a girl no more a maiden.

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Three times do I pour libation, and thrice, my Lady Moon, I speak
this spell:- Be it with a friend that he lingers, be it with a leman
he lies, may he as clean forget them as Theseus, of old, in Dia--so
legends tell--did utterly forget the fair-tressed Ariadne.

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Coltsfoot is an Arcadian weed that maddens, on the hills, the young
stallions and fleet-footed mares.  Ah! even as these may I see
Delphis; and to this house of mine, may he speed like a madman,
leaving the bright palaestra.

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

This fringe from his cloak Delphis lost; that now I shred and cast
into the cruel flame.  Ah, ah, thou torturing Love, why clingest thou
to me like a leech of the fen, and drainest all the black blood from
my body?

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

Lo, I will crush an eft, and a venomous draught to-morrow I will
bring thee!

But now, Thestylis, take these magic herbs and secretly smear the
juice on the jambs of his gate (whereat, even now, my heart is
captive, though nothing he recks of me), and spit and whisper, ''Tis
the bones of Delphis that I smear.'

My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

And now that I am alone, whence shall I begin to bewail my love?
Whence shall I take up the tale:  who brought on me this sorrow?  The
maiden-bearer of the mystic vessel came our way, Anaxo, daughter of
Eubulus, to the grove of Artemis; and behold, she had many other wild
beasts paraded for that time, in the sacred show, and among them a
lioness.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

And the Thracian servant of Theucharidas,--my nurse that is but
lately dead, and who then dwelt at our doors,--besought me and
implored me to come and see the show.  And I went with her, wretched
woman that I am, clad about in a fair and sweeping linen stole, over
which I had thrown the holiday dress of Clearista.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

Lo!  I was now come to the mid-point of the highway, near the
dwelling of Lycon, and there I saw Delphis and Eudamippus walking
together.  Their beards were more golden than the golden flower of
the ivy; their breasts (they coming fresh from the glorious
wrestler's toil) were brighter of sheen than thyself Selene!

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

Even as I looked I loved, loved madly, and all my heart was wounded,
woe is me, and my beauty began to wane.  No more heed took I of that
show, and how I came home I know not; but some parching fever utterly
overthrew me, and I lay a-bed ten days and ten nights.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

And oftentimes my skin waxed wan as the colour of boxwood, and all my
hair was falling from my head, and what was left of me was but skin
and bones.  Was there a wizard to whom I did not seek, or a crone to
whose house I did not resort, of them that have art magical?  But
this was no light malady, and the time went fleeting on.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

Thus I told the true story to my maiden, and said, 'Go, Thestylis,
and find me some remedy for this sore disease.  Ah me, the Myndian
possesses me, body and soul!  Nay, depart, and watch by the
wrestling-ground of Timagetus, for there is his resort, and there he
loves to loiter.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

'And when thou art sure he is alone, nod to him secretly, and say,
"Simaetha bids thee to come to her," and lead him hither privily.'
So I spoke; and she went and brought the bright-limbed Delphis to my
house.  But I, when I beheld him just crossing the threshold of the
door, with his light step, -

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

Grew colder all than snow, and the sweat streamed from my brow like
the dank dews, and I had no strength to speak, nay, nor to utter as
much as children murmur in their slumber, calling to their mother
dear:  and all my fair body turned stiff as a puppet of wax.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

Then when he had gazed on me, he that knows not love, he fixed his
eyes on the ground, and sat down on my bed, and spake as he sat him
down:  'Truly, Simaetha, thou didst by no more outrun mine own coming
hither, when thou badst me to thy roof, than of late I outran in the
race the beautiful Philinus:

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

'For I should have come; yea, by sweet Love, I should have come, with
friends of mine, two or three, as soon as night drew on, bearing in
my breast the apples of Dionysus, and on my head silvery poplar
leaves, the holy boughs of Heracles, all twined with bands of purple.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

'And if you had received me, they would have taken it well, for among
all the youths unwed I have a name for beauty and speed of foot.
With one kiss of thy lovely mouth I had been content; but an if ye
had thrust me forth, and the door had been fastened with the bar,
then truly should torch and axe have broken in upon you.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

'And now to Cypris first, methinks, my thanks are due, and after
Cypris it is thou that hast caught me, lady, from the burning, in
that thou badst me come to this thy house, half consumed as I am!
Yea, Love, 'tis plain, lights oft a fiercer blaze than Hephaestus the
God of Lipara.

Bethink thee of my love, and whence it came, my Lady Moon!

'With his madness dire, he scares both the maiden from her bower and
the bride from the bridal bed, yet warm with the body of her lord!'

So he spake, and I, that was easy to win, took his hand, and drew him
down on the soft bed beside me.  And immediately body from body
caught fire, and our faces glowed as they had not done, and sweetly
we murmured.  And now, dear Selene, to tell thee no long tale, the
great rites were accomplished, and we twain came to our desire.
Faultless was I in his sight, till yesterday, and he, again, in mine.
But there came to me the mother of Philista, my flute player, and the
mother of Melixo, to-day, when the horses of the Sun were climbing
the sky, bearing Dawn of the rosy arms from the ocean stream.  Many
another thing she told me; and chiefly this, that Delphis is a lover,
and whom he loves she vowed she knew not surely, but this only, that
ever he filled up his cup with the unmixed wine, to drink a toast to
his dearest.  And at last he went off hastily, saying that he would
cover with garlands the dwelling of his love.

This news my visitor told me, and she speaks the truth.  For indeed,
at other seasons, he would come to me thrice, or four times, in the
day, and often would leave with me his Dorian oil flask.  But now it
is the twelfth day since I have even looked on him!  Can it be that
he has not some other delight, and has forgotten me?  Now with magic
rites I will strive to bind him, {19} but if still he vexes me, he
shall beat, by the Fates I vow it, at the gate of Hell.  Such evil
medicines I store against him in a certain coffer, the use whereof,
my lady, an Assyrian stranger taught me.

But do thou farewell, and turn thy steeds to Ocean, Lady, and my pain
I will bear, as even till now I have endured it.  Farewell, Selene
bright and fair, farewell ye other stars, that follow the wheels of
quiet Night.



IDYL III



A goatherd, leaving his goats to feed on the hillside, in the charge
of Tityrus, approaches the cavern of Amaryllis, with its veil of
ferns and ivy, and attempts to win back the heart of the girl by
song.  He mingles promises with harmless threats, and repeats, in
exquisite verses, the names of the famous lovers of old days,
Milanion and Endymion.  Failing to move Amaryllis, the goatherd
threatens to die where he has thrown himself down, beneath the trees.

Courting Amaryllis with song I go, while my she-goats feed on the
hill, and Tityrus herds them.  Ah, Tityrus, my dearly beloved, feed
thou the goats, and to the well-side lead them, Tityrus, and 'ware
the yellow Libyan he-goat, lest he butt thee with his horns.

Ah, lovely Amaryllis, why no more, as of old, dust thou glance
through this cavern after me, nor callest me, thy sweetheart, to thy
side.  Can it be that thou hatest me?  Do I seem snub-nosed, now thou
hast seen me near, maiden, and under-hung?  Thou wilt make me
strangle myself!

Lo, ten apples I bring thee, plucked from that very place where thou
didst bid me pluck them, and others to-morrow I will bring thee.

Ah, regard my heart's deep sorrow! ah, would I were that humming bee,
and to thy cave might come dipping beneath the fern that hides thee,
and the ivy leaves!

Now know I Love, and a cruel God is he.  Surely he sucked the
lioness's dug, and in the wild wood his mother reared him, whose fire
is scorching me, and bites even to the bone.

Ah, lovely as thou art to look upon, ah heart of stone, ah dark-
browed maiden, embrace me, thy true goatherd, that I may kiss thee,
and even in empty kisses there is a sweet delight!

Soon wilt thou make me rend the wreath in pieces small, the wreath of
ivy, dear Amaryllis, that I keep for thee, with rose-buds twined, and
fragrant parsley.  Ah me, what anguish!  Wretched that I am, whither
shall I turn!  Thou dust not hear my prayer!

I will cast off my coat of skins, and into yonder waves I will
spring, where the fisher Olpis watches for the tunny shoals, and even
if I die not, surely thy pleasure will have been done.

I learned the truth of old, when, amid thoughts of thee, I asked,
'Loves she, loves she not?' and the poppy petal clung not, and gave
no crackling sound, but withered on my smooth forearm, even so. {21}

And she too spoke sooth, even Agroeo, she that divineth with a sieve,
and of late was binding sheaves behind the reapers, who said that I
had set all my heart on thee, but that thou didst nothing regard me.

Truly I keep for thee the white goat with the twin kids that
Mermnon's daughter too, the brown-skinned Erithacis, prays me to give
her; and give her them I will, since thou dost flout me.

My right eyelid throbs, is it a sign that I am to see her?  Here will
I lean me against this pine tree, and sing, and then perchance she
will regard me, for she is not all of adamant.

Lo, Hippomenes when he was eager to marry the famous maiden, took
apples in his hand, and so accomplished his course; and Atalanta saw,
and madly longed, and leaped into the deep waters of desire.
Melampus too, the soothsayer, brought the herd of oxen from Othrys to
Pylos, and thus in the arms of Bias was laid the lovely mother of
wise Alphesiboea.

And was it not thus that Adonis, as he pastured his sheep upon the
hills, led beautiful Cytherea to such heights of frenzy, that not
even in his death doth she unclasp him from her bosom?  Blessed,
methinks is the lot of him that sleeps, and tosses not, nor turns,
even Endymion; and, dearest maiden, blessed I call Iason, whom such
things befell, as ye that be profane shall never come to know.

My head aches, but thou carest not.  I will sing no more, but dead
will I lie where I fall, and here may the wolves devour me.

Sweet as honey in the mouth may my death be to thee.



IDYL IV



Battus and Corydon, two rustic fellows, meeting in a glade, gossip
about their neighbour, Aegon, who has gone to try his fortune at the
Olympic games.  After some random banter, the talk turns on the death
of Amaryllis, and the grief of Battus is disturbed by the roaming of
his cattle.  Corydon removes a thorn that has run into his friend's
foot, and the conversation comes back to matters of rural scandal.

The scene is in Southern Italy.

Battus.  Tell me, Corydon, whose kine are these,--the cattle of
Philondas?

Corydon.  Nay, they are Aegon's, he gave me them to pasture.

Battus.  Dost thou ever find a way to milk them all, on the sly, just
before evening?

Corydon.  No chance of that, for the old man puts the calves beneath
their dams, and keeps watch on me.

Battus.  But the neatherd himself,--to what land has he passed out of
sight?

Corydon.  Hast thou not heard?  Milon went and carried him off to the
Alpheus.

Battus.  And when, pray, did HE ever set eyes on the wrestlers' oil?

Corydon.  They say he is a match for Heracles, in strength and
hardihood.

Battus.  And I, so mother says, am a better man than Polydeuces.

Corydon.  Well, off he has gone, with a shovel, and with twenty sheep
from his flock here. {24}

Battus.  Milo, thou'lt see, will soon be coaxing the wolves to rave!

Corydon.  But Aegon's heifers here are lowing pitifully, and miss
their master.

Battus.  Yes, wretched beasts that they are, how false a neatherd was
theirs!

Corydon.  Wretched enough in truth, and they have no more care to
pasture.

Battus.  Nothing is left, now, of that heifer, look you, bones,
that's all.  She does not live on dewdrops, does she, like the
grasshopper?

Corydon.  No, by Earth, for sometimes I take her to graze by the
banks of Aesarus, fair handfuls of fresh grass I give her too, and
otherwhiles she wantons in the deep shade round Latymnus.

Battus.  How lean is the red bull too!  May the sons of Lampriades,
the burghers to wit, get such another for their sacrifice to Hera,
for the township is an ill neighbour.

Corydon.  And yet that bull is driven to the mere's mouth, and to the
meadows of Physcus, and to the Neaethus, where all fair herbs bloom,
red goat-wort, and endive, and fragrant bees-wort.

Battus.  Ah, wretched Aegon, thy very kine will go to Hades, while
thou too art in love with a luckless victory, and thy pipe is flecked
with mildew, the pipe that once thou madest for thyself!

Corydon.  Not the pipe, by the nymphs, not so, for when he went to
Pisa, he left the same as a gift to me, and I am something of a
player.  Well can I strike up the air of Glauce and well the strain
of Pyrrhus, and the praise of Croton I sing, and Zacynthus is a
goodly town, and Lacinium that fronts the dawn!  There Aegon the
boxer, unaided, devoured eighty cakes to his own share, and there he
caught the bull by the hoof, and brought him from the mountain, and
gave him to Amaryllis.  Thereon the women shrieked aloud, and the
neatherd,--he burst out laughing.

Battus.  Ah, gracious Amaryllis!  Thee alone even in death will we
ne'er forget.  Dear to me as my goats wert thou, and thou art dead!
Alas, too cruel a spirit hath my lot in his keeping.

Corydon.  Dear Battus, thou must needs be comforted.  The morrow
perchance will bring better fortune.  The living may hope, the dead
alone are hopeless.  Zeus now shows bright and clear, and anon he
rains.

Battus.  Enough of thy comforting!  Drive the calves from the lower
ground, the cursed beasts are grazing on the olive-shoots.  Hie on,
white face.

Corydon.  Out, Cymaetha, get thee to the hill!  Dost thou not hear?
By Pan, I will soon come and be the death of you, if you stay there!
Look, here she is creeping back again!  Would I had my crook for hare
killing:  how I would cudgel thee.

Battus.  In the name of Zeus, prithee look here, Corydon!  A thorn
has just run into my foot under the ankle.  How deep they grow, the
arrow-headed thorns.  An ill end befall the heifer; I was pricked
when I was gaping after her.  Prithee dost see it?

Corydon.  Yes, yes, and I have caught it in my nails, see, here it
is.

Battus.  How tiny is the wound, and how tall a man it masters!

Corydon.  When thou goest to the hill, go not barefoot, Battus, for
on the hillside flourish thorns and brambles plenty.

Battus.  Come, tell me, Corydon, the old man now, does he still run
after that little black-browed darling whom he used to dote on?

Corydon.  He is after her still, my lad; but yesterday I came upon
them, by the very byre, and right loving were they.

Battus.  Well done, thou ancient lover!  Sure, thou art near akin to
the satyrs, or a rival of the slim-shanked Pans! {26}



IDYL V



This Idyl begins with a ribald debate between two hirelings, who, at
last, compete with each other in a match of pastoral song.  No other
idyl of Theocritus is so frankly true to the rough side of rustic
manners.  The scene is in Southern Italy.

Comatas.  Goats of mine, keep clear of that notorious shepherd of
Sibyrtas, that Lacon; he stole my goat-skin yesterday.

Lacon.  Will ye never leave the well-head?  Off, my lambs, see ye not
Comatas; him that lately stole my shepherd's pipe?

Comatas.  What manner of pipe might that be, for when gat'st THOU a
pipe, thou slave of Sibyrtas?  Why does it no more suffice thee to
keep a flute of straw, and whistle with Corydon?

Lacon.  What pipe, free sir? why, the pipe that Lycon gave me.  And
what manner of goat-skin hadst thou, that Lacon made off with?  Tell
me, Comatas, for truly even thy master, Eumarides, had never a goat-
skin to sleep in.

Comatas.  'Twas the skin that Crocylus gave me, the dappled one, when
he sacrificed the she-goat to the nymphs; but thou, wretch, even then
wert wasting with envy, and now, at last, thou hast stripped me bare!

Lacon.  Nay verily, so help me Pan of the seashore, it was not Lacon
the son of Calaethis that filched the coat of skin.  If I lie,
sirrah, may I leap frenzied down this rock into the Crathis!

Comatas.  Nay verily, my friend, so help me these nymphs of the mere
(and ever may they be favourable, as now, and kind to me), it was not
Comatas that pilfered thy pipe.

Lacon.  If I believe thee, may I suffer the afflictions of Daphnis!
But see, if thou carest to stake a kid--though indeed 'tis scarce
worth my while--then, go to, I will sing against thee, and cease not,
till thou dust cry 'enough!'

Comatas.  The sow defied Athene!  See, there is staked the kid, go
to, do thou too put a fatted lamb against him, for thy stake.

Lacon.  Thou fox, and where would be our even betting then?  Who ever
chose hair to shear, in place of wool? and who prefers to milk a
filthy bitch, when he can have a she-goat, nursing her first kid?

Comatas.  Why, he that deems himself as sure of getting the better of
his neighbour as thou dost, a wasp that buzzes against the cicala.
But as it is plain thou thinkst the kid no fair stake, lo, here is
this he-goat.  Begin the match!

Lacon.  No such haste, thou art not on fire!  More sweetly wilt thou
sing, if thou wilt sit down beneath the wild olive tree, and the
groves in this place.  Chill water falls there, drop by drop, here
grows the grass, and here a leafy bed is strown, and here the locusts
prattle.

Comatas.  Nay, no whit am I in haste, but I am sorely vexed, that
thou shouldst dare to look me straight in the face, thou whom I used
to teach while thou wert still a child.  See where gratitude goes!
As well rear wolf-whelps, breed hounds, that they may devour thee!

Lacon.  And what good thing have I to remember that I ever learned or
heard from thee, thou envious thing, thou mere hideous manikin!

* * *

But come this way, come, and thou shalt sing thy last of country
song.

Comatas.  That way I will not go!  Here be oak trees, and here the
galingale, and sweetly here hum the bees about the hives.  There are
two wells of chill water, and on the tree the birds are warbling, and
the shadow is beyond compare with that where thou liest, and from on
high the pine tree pelts us with her cones.

Lacon.  Nay, but lambs' wool, truly, and fleeces, shalt thou tread
here, if thou wilt but come,--fleeces more soft than sleep, but the
goat-skins beside thee stink--worse than thyself.  And I will set a
great bowl of white milk for the nymphs, and another will I offer of
sweet olive oil.

Comatas.  Nay, but an if thou wilt come, thou shalt tread here the
soft feathered fern, and flowering thyme, and beneath thee shall be
strown the skins of she-goats, four times more soft than the fleeces
of thy lambs.  And I will set out eight bowls of milk for Pan, and
eight bowls full of the richest honeycombs.

Lacon.  Thence, where thou art, I pray thee, begin the match, and
there sing thy country song, tread thine own ground and keep thine
oaks to thyself.  But who, who shall judge between us?  Would that
Lycopas, the neatherd, might chance to come this way!

Comatas.  I want nothing with him, but that man, if thou wilt, that
woodcutter we will call, who is gathering those tufts of heather near
thee.  It is Morson.

Lacon.  Let us shout, then!

Comatas.  Call thou to him.

Lacon.  Ho, friend, come hither and listen for a little while, for we
two have a match to prove which is the better singer of country song.
So Morson, my friend, neither judge me too kindly, no, nor show him
favour.

Comatas.  Yes, dear Morson, for the nymphs' sake neither lean in thy
judgment to Comatas, nor, prithee, favour HIM.  The flock of sheep
thou seest here belongs to Sibyrtas of Thurii, and the goats, friend,
that thou beholdest are the goats of Eumarides of Sybaris.

Lacon.  Now, in the name of Zeus did any one ask thee, thou make-
mischief, who owned the flock, I or Sibyrtas?  What a chatterer thou
art!

Comatas.  Best of men, I am for speaking the whole truth, and
boasting never, but thou art too fond of cutting speeches.

Lacon.  Come, say whatever thou hast to say, and let the stranger get
home to the city alive; oh, Paean, what a babbler thou art, Comatas!


THE SINGING MATCH.


Comatas.  The Muses love me better far than the minstrel Daphnis; but
a little while ago I sacrificed two young she-goats to the Muses.

Lacon.  Yea, and me too Apollo loves very dearly, and a noble ram I
rear for Apollo, for the feast of the Carnea, look you, is drawing
nigh.

Comatas.  The she-goats that I milk have all borne twins save two.
The maiden saw me, and 'alas,' she cried, 'dost thou milk alone?'

Lacon.  Ah, ah, but Lacon here hath nigh twenty baskets full of
cheese, and Lacon lies with his darling in the flowers!

Comatas.  Clearista, too, pelts the goatherd with apples as he drives
past his she-goats, and a sweet word she murmurs.

Lacon.  And wild with love am I too, for my fair young darling, that
meets the shepherd, with the bright hair floating round the shapely
neck.

Comatas.  Nay, ye may not liken dog-roses to the rose, or wind-
flowers to the roses of the garden; by the garden walls their beds
are blossoming.

Lacon.  Nay, nor wild apples to acorns, for acorns are bitter in the
oaken rind, but apples are sweet as honey.

Comatas.  Soon will I give my maiden a ring-dove for a gift; I will
take it from the juniper tree, for there it is brooding.

Lacon.  But I will give my darling a soft fleece to make a cloak, a
free gift, when I shear the black ewe.

Comatas.  Forth from the wild olive, my bleating she-goats, feed here
where the hillside slopes, and the tamarisks grove.

Lacon.  Conarus there, and Cynaetha, will you never leave the oak?
Graze here, where Phalarus feeds, where the hillside fronts the dawn.

Comatas.  Ay, and I have a vessel of cypress wood, and a mixing bowl,
the work of Praxiteles, and I hoard them for my maiden.

Lacon.  I too have a dog that loves the flock, the dog to strangle
wolves; him I am giving to my darling to chase all manner of wild
beasts.

Comatas.  Ye locusts that overleap our fence, see that ye harm not
our vines, for our vines are young.

Lacon.  Ye cicalas, see how I make the goatherd chafe:  even so,
methinks, do ye vex the reapers.

Comatas.  I hate the foxes, with their bushy brushes, that ever come
at evening, and eat the grapes of Micon.

Lacon.  And I hate the lady-birds that devour the figs of Philondas,
and flit down the wind.

Comatas.  Dost thou not remember how I cudgelled thee, and thou didst
grin and nimbly writhe, and catch hold of yonder oak?

Lacon.  That I have no memory of, but how Eumarides bound thee there,
upon a time, and flogged thee through and through, that I do very
well remember.

Comatas.  Already, Morson, some one is waxing bitter, dust thou see
no sign of it?  Go, go, and pluck, forthwith, the squills from some
old wife's grave.

Lacon.  And I too, Morson, I make some one chafe, and thou dost
perceive it.  Be off now to the Hales stream, and dig cyclamen.

Comatas.  Let Himera flow with milk instead of water, and thou,
Crathis, run red with wine, and all thy reeds bear apples.

Lacon.  Would that the fount of Sybaris may flow with honey, and may
the maiden's pail, at dawning, be dipped, not in water, but in the
honeycomb.

Comatas.  My goats eat cytisus, and goatswort, and tread the lentisk
shoots, and lie at ease among the arbutus.

Lacon.  But my ewes have honey-wort to feed on, and luxuriant
creepers flower around, as fair as roses.

Comatas.  I love not Alcippe, for yesterday she did not kiss me, and
take my face between her hands, when I gave her the dove.

Lacon.  But deeply I love my darling, for a kind kiss once I got, in
return for the gift of a shepherd's pipe.

Comatas.  Lacon, it never was right that pyes should contend with the
nightingale, nor hoopoes with swans, but thou, unhappy swain, art
ever for contention.

Morson's Judgement.  I bid the shepherd cease.  But to thee, Comatas,
Morson presents the lamb.  And thou, when thou hast sacrificed her to
the nymphs, send Morson, anon, a goodly portion of her flesh.

Comatas.  I will, by Pan.  Now leap, and snort, my he-goats, all the
herd of you, and see here how loud I ever will laugh, and exult over
Lacon, the shepherd, for that, at last, I have won the lamb.  See, I
will leap sky high with joy.  Take heart, my horned goats, to-morrow
I will dip you all in the fountain of Sybaris.  Thou white he-goat, I
will beat thee if thou dare to touch one of the herd before I
sacrifice the lamb to the nymphs.  There he is at it again!  Call me
Melanthius, {34} not Comatas, if I do not cudgel thee.



IDYL VI



Daphnis and Damoetas, two herdsmen of the golden age, meet by a well-
side, and sing a match, their topic is the Cyclops, Polyphemus, and
his love for the sea-nymph, Galatea.

The scene is in Sicily.

Damoetas, and Daphnis the herdsman, once on a time, Aratus, led the
flock together into one place.  Golden was the down on the chin of
one, the beard of the other was half-grown, and by a well-head the
twain sat them down, in the summer noon, and thus they sang.  'Twas
Daphnis that began the singing, for the challenge had come from
Daphnis.

Daphnis's Song of the Cyclops.

Galatea is pelting thy flock with apples, Polyphemus, she says the
goatherd is a laggard lover!  And thou dost not glance at her, oh
hard, hard that thou art, but still thou sittest at thy sweet piping.
Ah see, again, she is pelting thy dog, that follows thee to watch thy
sheep.  He barks, as he looks into the brine, and now the beautiful
waves that softly plash reveal him, {36} as he runs upon the shore.
Take heed that he leap not on the maiden's limbs as she rises from
the salt water, see that he rend not her lovely body!  Ah, thence
again, see, she is wantoning, light as dry thistle-down in the
scorching summer weather.  She flies when thou art wooing her; when
thou woo'st not she pursues thee, she plays out all her game and
leaves her king unguarded.  For truly to Love, Polyphemus, many a
time doth foul seem fair!

He ended and Damoetas touched a prelude to his sweet song.

I saw her, by Pan, I saw her when she was pelting my flock.  Nay, she
escaped not me, escaped not my one dear eye,--wherewith I shall see
to my life's end,--let Telemus the soothsayer, that prophesies
hateful things, hateful things take home, to keep them for his
children!  But it is all to torment her, that I, in my turn, give not
back her glances, pretending that I have another love.  To hear this
makes her jealous of me, by Paean, and she wastes with pain, and
springs madly from the sea, gazing at my caves and at my herds.  And
I hiss on my dog to bark at her, for when I loved Galatea he would
whine with joy, and lay his muzzle on her lap.  Perchance when she
marks how I use her she will send me many a messenger, but on her
envoys I will shut my door till she promises that herself will make a
glorious bridal-bed on this island for me.  For in truth, I am not so
hideous as they say!  But lately I was looking into the sea, when all
was calm; beautiful seemed my beard, beautiful my one eye--as I count
beauty--and the sea reflected the gleam of my teeth whiter than the
Parian stone.  Then, all to shun the evil eye, did I spit thrice in
my breast; for this spell was taught me by the crone, Cottytaris,
that piped of yore to the reapers in Hippocoon's field.

Then Damoetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his song, and he gave
Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautiful flute.  Damoetas
fluted, and Daphnis piped, the herdsman,--and anon the calves were
dancing in the soft green grass.  Neither won the victory, but both
were invincible.



IDYL VII



The poet making his way through the noonday heat, with two friends,
to a harvest feast, meets the goatherd, Lycidas.  To humour the poet
Lycidas sings a love song of his own, and the other replies with
verses about the passion of Aratus, the famous writer of didactic
verse.  After a courteous parting from Lycidas, the poet and his two
friends repair to the orchard, where Demeter is being gratified with
the first-fruits of harvest and vintaging.

In this idyl, Theocritus, speaking of himself by the name of
Simichidas, alludes to his teachers in poetry, and, perhaps, to some
of the literary quarrels of the time.

The scene is in the isle of Cos.  G. Hermann fancied that the scene
was in Lucania, and Mr. W. R. Paton thinks he can identify the places
named by the aid of inscriptions (Classical Review, ii. 8, 265).  See
also Rayet, Memoire sur l'ile de Cos, p. 18, Paris, 1876.

The Harvest Feast.

It fell upon a time when Eucritus and I were walking from the city to
the Hales water, and Amyntas was the third in our company.  The
harvest-feast of Deo was then being held by Phrasidemus and
Antigenes, two sons of Lycopeus (if aught there be of noble and old
descent), whose lineage dates from Clytia, and Chalcon himself--
Chalcon, beneath whose foot the fountain sprang, the well of Burine.
He set his knee stoutly against the rock, and straightway by the
spring poplars and elm trees showed a shadowy glade, arched overhead
they grew, and pleached with leaves of green.  We had not yet reached
the mid-point of the way, nor was the tomb of Brasilas yet risen upon
our sight, when,--thanks be to the Muses--we met a certain wayfarer,
the best of men, a Cydonian.  Lycidas was his name, a goatherd was
he, nor could any that saw him have taken him for other than he was,
for all about him bespoke the goatherd.  Stripped from the roughest
of he-goats was the tawny skin he wore on his shoulders, the smell of
rennet clinging to it still, and about his breast an old cloak was
buckled with a plaited belt, and in his right hand he carried a
crooked staff of wild olive:  and quietly he accosted me, with a
smile, a twinkling eye, and a laugh still on his lips:-

'Simichidas, whither, pray, through the noon dost thou trail thy
feet, when even the very lizard on the rough stone wall is sleeping,
and the crested larks no longer fare afield?  Art thou hastening to a
feast, a bidden guest, or art thou for treading a townsman's wine-
press?  For such is thy speed that every stone upon the way spins
singing from thy boots!'

'Dear Lycidas,' I answered him, 'they all say that thou among
herdsmen, yea, and reapers art far the chiefest flute-player.  In
sooth this greatly rejoices our hearts, and yet, to my conceit,
meseems I can vie with thee.  But as to this journey, we are going to
the harvest-feast, for, look you some friends of ours are paying a
festival to fair-robed Demeter, out of the first-fruits of their
increase, for verily in rich measure has the goddess filled their
threshing-floor with barley grain.  But come, for the way and the day
are thine alike and mine, come, let us vie in pastoral song,
perchance each will make the other delight.  For I, too, am a clear-
voiced mouth of the Muses, and they all call me the best of
minstrels, but I am not so credulous; no, by Earth, for to my mind I
cannot as yet conquer in song that great Sicelidas--the Samian--nay,
nor yet Philetas.  'Tis a match of frog against cicala!'

So I spoke, to win my end, and the goatherd with his sweet laugh,
said, 'I give thee this staff, because thou art a sapling of Zeus,
and in thee is no guile.  For as I hate your builders that try to
raise a house as high as the mountain summit of Oromedon, {40} so I
hate all birds of the Muses that vainly toil with their cackling
notes against the Minstrel of Chios!  But come, Simichidas, without
more ado let us begin the pastoral song.  And I--nay, see friend--if
it please thee at all, this ditty that I lately fashioned on the
mountain side!'

The Song of Lycidas.

Fair voyaging befall Ageanax to Mytilene, both when the Kids are
westering, and the south wind the wet waves chases, and when Orion
holds his feet above the Ocean!  Fair voyaging betide him, if he
saves Lycidas from the fire of Aphrodite, for hot is the love that
consumes me.

The halcyons will lull the waves, and lull the deep, and the south
wind, and the east, that stirs the sea-weeds on the farthest shores,
{41} the halcyons that are dearest to the green-haired mermaids, of
all the birds that take their prey from the salt sea.  Let all things
smile on Ageanax to Mytilene sailing, and may he come to a friendly
haven.  And I, on that day, will go crowned with anise, or with a
rosy wreath, or a garland of white violets, and the fine wine of
Ptelea I will dip from the bowl as I lie by the fire, while one shall
roast beans for me, in the embers.  And elbow-deep shall the flowery
bed be thickly strewn, with fragrant leaves and with asphodel, and
with curled parsley; and softly will I drink, toasting Ageanax with
lips clinging fast to the cup, and draining it even to the lees.

Two shepherds shall be my flute-players, one from Acharnae, one from
Lycope, and hard by Tityrus shall sing, how the herdsman Daphnis once
loved a strange maiden, and how on the hill he wandered, and how the
oak trees sang his dirge--the oaks that grow by the banks of the
river Himeras--while he was wasting like any snow under high Haemus,
or Athos, or Rhodope, or Caucasus at the world's end.

And he shall sing how, once upon a time, the great chest prisoned the
living goatherd, by his lord's infatuate and evil will, and how the
blunt-faced bees, as they came up from the meadow to the fragrant
cedar chest, fed him with food of tender flowers, because the Muse
still dropped sweet nectar on his lips. {42}

O blessed Comatas, surely these joyful things befell thee, and thou
wast enclosed within the chest, and feeding on the honeycomb through
the springtime didst thou serve out thy bondage.  Ah, would that in
my days thou hadst been numbered with the living, how gladly on the
hills would I have herded thy pretty she-goats, and listened to thy
voice, whilst thou, under oaks or pine trees lying, didst sweetly
sing, divine Comatas!

When he had chanted thus much he ceased, and I followed after him
again, with some such words as these:-

'Dear Lycidas, many another song the Nymphs have taught me also, as I
followed my herds upon the hillside, bright songs that Rumour,
perchance, has brought even to the throne of Zeus.  But of them all
this is far the most excellent, wherewith I will begin to do thee
honour:  nay listen as thou art dear to the Muses.'

The Song of Simichidas.

For Simichidas the Loves have sneezed, for truly the wretch loves
Myrto as dearly as goats love the spring. {43}  But Aratus, far the
dearest of my friends, deep, deep his heart he keeps Desire,--and
Aratus's love is young!  Aristis knows it, an honourable man, nay of
men the best, whom even Phoebus would permit to stand and sing lyre
in hand, by his tripods.  Aristis knows how deeply love is burning
Aratus to the bone.  Ah, Pan, thou lord of the beautiful plain of
Homole, bring, I pray thee, the darling of Aratus unbidden to his
arms, whosoe'er it be that he loves.  If this thou dost, dear Pan,
then never may the boys of Arcady flog thy sides and shoulders with
stinging herbs, when scanty meats are left them on thine altar.  But
if thou shouldst otherwise decree, then may all thy skin be frayed
and torn with thy nails, yea, and in nettles mayst thou couch!  In
the hills of the Edonians mayst thou dwell in mid-winter time, by the
river Hebrus, close neighbour to the Polar star!  But in summer mayst
thou range with the uttermost AEthiopians beneath the rock of the
Blemyes, whence Nile no more is seen.

And you, leave ye the sweet fountain of Hyetis and Byblis, and ye
that dwell in the steep home of golden Dione, ye Loves as rosy as red
apples, strike me with your arrows, the desired, the beloved; strike,
for that ill-starred one pities not my friend, my host!  And yet
assuredly the pear is over-ripe, and the maidens cry 'alas, alas, thy
fair bloom fades away!'

Come, no more let us mount guard by these gates, Aratus, nor wear our
feet away with knocking there.  Nay, let the crowing of the morning
cock give others over to the bitter cold of dawn.  Let Molon alone,
my friend, bear the torment at that school of passion!  For us, let
us secure a quiet life, and some old crone to spit on us for luck,
and so keep all unlovely things away.

Thus I sang, and sweetly smiling, as before, he gave me the staff, a
pledge of brotherhood in the Muses.  Then he bent his way to the
left, and took the road to Pyxa, while I and Eucritus, with beautiful
Amyntas, turned to the farm of Phrasidemus.  There we reclined on
deep beds of fragrant lentisk, lowly strown, and rejoicing we lay in
new stript leaves of the vine.  And high above our heads waved many a
poplar, many an elm tree, while close at hand the sacred water from
the nymphs' own cave welled forth with murmurs musical.  On shadowy
boughs the burnt cicalas kept their chattering toil, far off the
little owl cried in the thick thorn brake, the larks and finches were
singing, the ring-dove moaned, the yellow bees were flitting about
the springs.  All breathed the scent of the opulent summer, of the
season of fruits; pears at our feet and apples by our sides were
rolling plentiful, the tender branches, with wild plums laden, were
earthward bowed, and the four-year-old pitch seal was loosened from
the mouth of the wine-jars.

Ye nymphs of Castaly that hold the steep of Parnassus, say, was it
ever a bowl like this that old Chiron set before Heracles in the
rocky cave of Pholus?  Was it nectar like this that beguiled the
shepherd to dance and foot it about his folds, the shepherd that
dwelt by Anapus, on a time, the strong Polyphemus who hurled at ships
with mountains?  Had these ever such a draught as ye nymphs bade flow
for us by the altar of Demeter of the threshing-floor?

Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while she
stands smiling by, with sheaves and poppies in her hands.



IDYL VIII



The scene is among the high mountain pastures of Sicily:-

'On the sword, at the cliff top
Lie strewn the white flocks,'

and far below shines and murmurs the Sicilian sea.  Here Daphnis and
Menalcas, two herdsmen of the golden age, meet, while still in their
earliest youth, and contend for the prize of pastoral.  Their songs,
in elegiac measure, are variations on the themes of love and
friendship (for Menalcas sings of Milon, Daphnis of Nais), and of
nature.  Daphnis is the winner,- it is his earliest victory, and the
prelude to his great renown among nymphs and shepherds.  In this
version the strophes are arranged as in Fritzsche's text.  Some
critics take the poem to be a patchwork by various hands.

As beautiful Daphnis was following his kine, and Menalcas shepherding
his flock, they met, as men tell, on the long ranges of the hills.
The beards of both had still the first golden bloom, both were in
their earliest youth, both were pipe-players skilled, both skilled in
song.  Then first Menalcas, looking at Daphnis, thus bespoke him.

'Daphnis, thou herdsman of the lowing kine, art thou minded to sing a
match with me?  Methinks I shall vanquish thee, when I sing in turn,
as readily as I please.'

Then Daphnis answered him again in this wise, 'Thou shepherd of the
fleecy sheep, Menalcas, the pipe-player, never wilt thou vanquish me
in song, not thou, if thou shouldst sing till some evil thing befall
thee!'

Menalcas.  Dost thou care then, to try this and see, dost thou care
to risk a stake?

Daphnis.  I do care to try this and see, a stake I am ready to risk.

Menalcas.  But what shall we stake, what pledge shall we find equal
and sufficient?

Daphnis.  I will pledge a calf, and do thou put down a lamb, one that
has grown to his mother's height.

Menalcas.  Nay, never will I stake a lamb, for stern is my father,
and stern my mother, and they number all the sheep at evening.

Daphnis.  But what, then, wilt thou lay, and where is to be the
victor's gain?

Menalcas.  The pipe, the fair pipe with nine stops, that I made
myself, fitted with white wax, and smoothed evenly, above as below.
This would I readily wager, but never will I stake aught that is my
father's.

Daphnis.  See then, I too, in truth, have a pipe with nine stops,
fitted with white wax, and smoothed evenly, above as below.  But
lately I put it together, and this finger still aches, where the reed
split, and cut it deeply.

Menalcas.  But who is to judge between us, who will listen to our
singing?

Daphnis.  That goatherd yonder, he will do, if we call him hither,
the man for whom that dog, a black hound with a white patch, is
barking among the kids.

Then the boys called aloud, and the goatherd gave ear, and came, and
the boys began to sing, and the goatherd was willing to be their
umpire.  And first Menalcas sang (for he drew the lot) the sweet-
voiced Menalcas, and Daphnis took up the answering strain of pastoral
song--and 'twas thus Menalcas began:

Menalcas.  Ye glades, ye rivers, issue of the Gods, if ever Menalcas
the flute-player sang a song ye loved, to please him, feed his lambs;
and if ever Daphnis come hither with his calves, nay he have no less
a boon.

Daphnis.  Ye wells and pastures, sweet growth o' the world, if
Daphnis sings like the nightingales, do ye fatten this herd of his,
and if Menalcas hither lead a flock, may he too have pasture
ungrudging to his full desire!

Menalcas.  There doth the ewe bear twins, and there the goats; there
the bees fill the hives, and there oaks grow loftier than common,
wheresoever beautiful Milon's feet walk wandering; ah, if he depart,
then withered and lean is the shepherd, and lean the pastures

Daphnis.  Everywhere is spring, and pastures everywhere, and
everywhere the cows' udders are swollen with milk, and the younglings
are fostered, wheresoever fair Nais roams; ah, if she depart, then
parched are the kine, and he that feeds them!

Menalcas.  O bearded goat, thou mate of the white herd, and O ye
blunt-faced kids, where are the manifold deeps of the forest, thither
get ye to the water, for thereby is Milon; go, thou hornless goat,
and say to him, 'Milon, Proteus was a herdsman, and that of seals,
though he was a god.'

Daphnis. . . .

Menalcas.  Not mine be the land of Pelops, not mine to own talents of
gold, nay, nor mine to outrun the speed of the winds!  Nay, but
beneath this rock will I sing, with thee in mine arms, and watch our
flocks feeding together, and, before us, the Sicilian sea.

Daphnis . . . .

Menalcas . . . .

Daphnis.  Tempest is the dread pest of the trees, drought of the
waters, snares of the birds, and the hunter's net of the wild beasts,
but ruinous to man is the love of a delicate maiden.  O father, O
Zeus, I have not been the only lover, thou too hast longed for a
mortal woman.

Thus the boys sang in verses amoebaean, and thus Menalcas began the
crowning lay:

Menalcas.  Wolf, spare the kids, spare the mothers of my herd, and
harm not me, so young as I am to tend so great a flock.  Ah,
Lampurus, my dog, dost thou then sleep so soundly? a dog should not
sleep so sound, that helps a boyish shepherd.  Ewes of mine, spare ye
not to take your fill of the tender herb, ye shall not weary, 'ere
all this grass grows again.  Hist, feed on, feed on, fill, all of
you, your udders, that there may be milk for the lambs, and somewhat
for me to store away in the cheese-crates.

Then Daphnis followed again, and sweetly preluded to his singing:

Daphnis.  Me, even me, from the cave, the girl with meeting eyebrows
spied yesterday as I was driving past my calves, and she cried, 'How
fair, how fair he is!'  But I answered her never the word of railing,
but cast down my eyes, and plodded on my way.

Sweet is the voice of the heifer, sweet her breath, {50} sweet to lie
beneath the sky in summer, by running water.

Acorns are the pride of the oak, apples of the apple tree, the calf
of the heifer, and the neatherd glories in his kine.

So sang the lads; and the goatherd thus bespoke them, 'Sweet is thy
mouth, O Daphnis, and delectable thy song!  Better is it to listen to
thy singing, than to taste the honeycomb.  Take thou the pipe, for
thou hast conquered in the singing match.  Ah, if thou wilt but teach
some lay, even to me, as I tend the goats beside thee, this blunt-
horned she-goat will I give thee, for the price of thy teaching, this
she-goat that ever fills the milking pail above the brim.'

Then was the boy as glad,--and leaped high, and clapped his hands
over his victory,--as a young fawn leaps about his mother.

But the heart of the other was wasted with grief, and desolate, even
as a maiden sorrows that is newly wed.

From this time Daphnis became the foremost among the shepherds, and
while yet in his earliest youth, he wedded the nymph Nais.



IDYL IX



Daphnis and Menalcas, at the bidding of the poet, sing the joys of
the neatherds and of the shepherds life.  Both receive the thanks of
the poet, and rustic prizes--a staff and a horn, made of a spiral
shell.  Doubts have been expressed as to the authenticity of the
prelude and concluding verses.  The latter breathe all Theocritus's
enthusiastic love of song.

Sing, Daphnis, a pastoral lay, do thou first begin the song, the song
begin, O Daphnis; but let Menalcas join in the strain, when ye have
mated the heifers and their calves, the barren kine and the bulls.
Let them all pasture together, let them wander in the coppice, but
never leave the herd.  Chant thou for me, first, and on the other
side let Menalcas reply.

Daphnis.  Ah, sweetly lows the calf, and sweetly the heifer, sweetly
sounds the neatherd with his pipe, and sweetly also I!  My bed of
leaves is strown by the cool water, and thereon are heaped fair skins
from the white calves that were all browsing upon the arbutus, on a
time, when the south-west wind dashed me them from the height.

And thus I heed no more the scorching summer, than a lover cares to
heed the words of father or of mother.

So Daphnis sang to me, and thus, in turn, did Menalcas sing.

Menalcas.  Aetna, mother mine, I too dwell in a beautiful cavern in
the chamber of the rock, and, lo, all the wealth have I that we
behold in dreams; ewes in plenty and she-goats abundant, their
fleeces are strown beneath my head and feet.  In the fire of oak-
faggots puddings are hissing-hot, and dry beech-nuts roast therein,
in the wintry weather, and, truly, for the winter season I care not
even so much as a toothless man does for walnuts, when rich pottage
is beside him.

Then I clapped my hands in their honour, and instantly gave each a
gift, to Daphnis a staff that grew in my father's close, self-shapen,
yet so straight, that perchance even a craftsman could have found no
fault in it.  To the other I gave a goodly spiral shell, the meat
that filled it once I had eaten after stalking the fish on the
Icarian rocks (I cut it into five shares for five of us),--and
Menalcas blew a blast on the shell.

Ye pastoral Muses, farewell!  Bring ye into the light the song that I
sang there to these shepherds on that day!  Never let the pimple grow
on my tongue-tip. {53}

Cicala to cicala is dear, and ant to ant, and hawks to hawks, but to
me the Muse and song.  Of song may all my dwelling be full, for sleep
is not more sweet, nor sudden spring, nor flowers are more delicious
to the bees--so dear to me are the Muses. {54}  Whom they look on in
happy hour, Circe hath never harmed with her enchanted potion.



IDYL X--THE REAPERS



This is an idyl of the same genre as Idyl IV.  The sturdy reaper,
Milon, as he levels the swathes of corn, derides his languid and
love-worn companion, Buttus.  The latter defends his gipsy love in
verses which have been the keynote of much later poetry, and which
echo in the fourth book of Lucretius, and in the Misanthrope of
Moliere.  Milon replies with the song of Lityerses--a string,
apparently, of popular rural couplets, such as Theocritus may have
heard chanted in the fields.

Milan.  Thou toilsome clod; what ails thee now, thou wretched fellow?
Canst thou neither cut thy swathe straight, as thou wert wont to do,
nor keep time with thy neighbour in thy reaping, but thou must fall
out, like an ewe that is foot-pricked with a thorn and straggles from
the herd?  What manner of man wilt thou prove after mid-noon, and at
evening, thou that dost not prosper with thy swathe when thou art
fresh begun?

Battus.  Milon, thou that canst toil till late, thou chip of the
stubborn stone, has it never befallen thee to long for one that was
not with thee?

Milan.  Never!  What has a labouring man to do with hankering after
what he has not got?

Battus.  Then it never befell thee to lie awake for love?

Milan.  Forbid it; 'tis an ill thing to let the dog once taste of
pudding.

Battus.  But I, Milon, am in love for almost eleven days!

Milan.  'Tis easily seen that thou drawest from a wine-cask, while
even vinegar is scarce with me.

Battus.  And for Love's sake, the fields before my doors are untilled
since seed-time.

Milan.  But which of the girls afflicts thee so?

Battus.  The daughter of Polybotas, she that of late was wont to pipe
to the reapers on Hippocoon's farm.

Milan.  God has found out the guilty!  Thou hast what thou'st long
been seeking, that grasshopper of a girl will lie by thee the night
long!

Battus.  Thou art beginning thy mocks of me, but Plutus is not the
only blind god; he too is blind, the heedless Love!  Beware of
talking big.

Milan.  Talk big I do not!  Only see that thou dust level the corn,
and strike up some love-ditty in the wench's praise.  More pleasantly
thus wilt thou labour, and, indeed, of old thou wert a melodist.

Battus.  Ye Muses Pierian, sing ye with me the slender maiden, for
whatsoever ye do but touch, ye goddesses, ye make wholly fair.

They all call thee a GIPSY, gracious Bombyca, and LEAN, and SUNBURNT,
'tis only I that call thee HONEY-PALE.

Yea, and the violet is swart, and swart the lettered hyacinth, but
yet these flowers are chosen the first in garlands.

The goat runs after cytisus, the wolf pursues the goat, the crane
follows the plough, but I am wild for love of thee.

Would it were mine, all the wealth whereof once Croesus was lord, as
men tell!  Then images of us twain, all in gold, should be dedicated
to Aphrodite, thou with thy flute, and a rose, yea, or an apple, and
I in fair attire, and new shoon of Amyclae on both my feet.

Ah gracious Bombyca, thy feet are fashioned like carven ivory, thy
voice is drowsy sweet, and thy ways, I cannot tell of them! {57}

Milan.  Verily our clown was a maker of lovely songs, and we knew it
not!  How well he meted out and shaped his harmony; woe is me for the
beard that I have grown, all in vain!  Come, mark thou too these
lines of godlike Lityerses

THE LITYERSES SONG.

Demeter, rich in fruit, and rich in grain, may this corn be easy to
win, and fruitful exceedingly!

Bind, ye bandsters, the sheaves, lest the wayfarer should cry, 'Men
of straw were the workers here, ay, and their hire was wasted!'

See that the cut stubble faces the North wind, or the West, 'tis thus
the grain waxes richest.

They that thresh corn should shun the noon-day steep; at noon the
chaff parts easiest from the straw.

As for the reapers, let them begin when the crested lark is waking,
and cease when he sleeps, but take holiday in the heat.

Lads, the frog has a jolly life, he is not cumbered about a butler to
his drink, for he has liquor by him unstinted!

Boil the lentils better, thou miserly steward; take heed lest thou
chop thy fingers, when thou'rt splitting cumin-seed.

'Tis thus that men should sing who labour i' the sun, but thy
starveling love, thou clod, 'twere fit to tell to thy mother when she
stirs in bed at dawning.



IDYL XI--THE CYCLOPS IN LOVE



Nicias, the physician and poet, being in love, Theocritus reminds him
that in song lies the only remedy.  It was by song, he says, that the
Cyclops, Polyphemus, got him some ease, when he was in love with
Galatea, the sea-nymph.

The idyl displays, in the most graceful manner, the Alexandrian taste
for turning Greek mythology into love stories.  No creature could be
more remote from love than the original Polyphemus, the cannibal
giant of the Odyssey.

There is none other medicine, Nicias, against Love, neither unguent,
methinks, nor salve to sprinkle,--none, save the Muses of Pieria!
Now a delicate thing is their minstrelsy in man's life, and a sweet,
but hard to procure.  Methinks thou know'st this well, who art
thyself a leech, and beyond all men art plainly dear to the Muses
nine.

'Twas surely thus the Cyclops fleeted his life most easily, he that
dwelt among us,--Polyphemus of old time,--when the beard was yet
young on his cheek and chin; and he loved Galatea.  He loved, not
with apples, not roses, nor locks of hair, but with fatal frenzy, and
all things else he held but trifles by the way.  Many a time from the
green pastures would his ewes stray back, self-shepherded, to the
fold.  But he was singing of Galatea, and pining in his place he sat
by the sea-weed of the beach, from the dawn of day, with the direst
hurt beneath his breast of mighty Cypris's sending,--the wound of her
arrow in his heart!

Yet this remedy he found, and sitting on the crest of the tall cliff,
and looking to the deep, 'twas thus he would sing:-

Song of the Cyclops.

O milk-white Galatea, why cast off him that loves thee?  More white
than is pressed milk to look upon, more delicate than the lamb art
thou, than the young calf wantoner, more sleek than the unripened
grape!  Here dust thou resort, even so, when sweet sleep possesses
me, and home straightway dost thou depart when sweet sleep lets me
go, fleeing me like an ewe that has seen the grey wolf.

I fell in love with thee, maiden, I, on the day when first thou
camest, with my mother, and didst wish to pluck the hyacinths from
the hill, and I was thy guide on the way.  But to leave loving thee,
when once I had seen thee, neither afterward, nor now at all, have I
the strength, even from that hour.  But to thee all this is as
nothing, by Zeus, nay, nothing at all!

I know, thou gracious maiden, why it is that thou dust shun me.  It
is all for the shaggy brow that spans all my forehead, from this to
the other ear, one long unbroken eyebrow.  And but one eye is on my
forehead, and broad is the nose that overhangs my lip.  Yet I (even
such as thou seest me) feed a thousand cattle, and from these I draw
and drink the best milk in the world.  And cheese I never lack, in
summer time or autumn, nay, nor in the dead of winter, but my baskets
are always overladen.

Also I am skilled in piping, as none other of the Cyclopes here, and
of thee, my love, my sweet-apple, and of myself too I sing, many a
time, deep in the night.  And for thee I tend eleven fawns, all
crescent-browed, {61} and four young whelps of the bear.

Nay, come thou to me, and thou shalt lack nothing that now thou hast.
Leave the grey sea to roll against the land; more sweetly, in this
cavern, shalt thou fleet the night with me!  Thereby the laurels
grow, and there the slender cypresses, there is the ivy dun, and the
sweet clustered grapes; there is chill water, that for me deep-wooded
AEtna sends down from the white snow, a draught divine!  Ah who, in
place of these, would choose the sea to dwell in, or the waves of the
sea?

But if thou dust refuse because my body seems shaggy and rough, well,
I have faggots of oakwood, and beneath the ashes is fire unwearied,
and I would endure to let thee burn my very soul, and this my one
eye, the dearest thing that is mine.

Ah me, that my mother bore me not a finny thing, so would I have gone
down to thee, and kissed thy hand, if thy lips thou would not suffer
me to kiss!  And I would have brought thee either white lilies, or
the soft poppy with its scarlet petals.  Nay, these are summer's
flowers, and those are flowers of winter, so I could not have brought
thee them all at one time.

Now, verily, maiden, now and here will I learn to swim, if perchance
some stranger come hither, sailing with his ship, that I may see why
it is so dear to thee, to have thy dwelling in the deep.

Come forth, Galatea, and forget as thou comest, even as I that sit
here have forgotten, the homeward way!  Nay, choose with me to go
shepherding, with me to milk the flocks, and to pour the sharp rennet
in, and to fix the cheeses.

There is none that wrongs me but that mother of mine, and her do I
blame.  Never, nay, never once has she spoken a kind word for me to
thee, and that though day by day she beholds me wasting.  I will tell
her that my head, and both my feet are throbbing, that she may
somewhat suffer, since I too am suffering.

O Cyclops, Cyclops, whither are thy wits wandering?  Ah that thou
wouldst go, and weave thy wicker-work, and gather broken boughs to
carry to thy lambs:  in faith, if thou didst this, far wiser wouldst
thou be!

Milk the ewe that thou hast, why pursue the thing that shuns thee?
Thou wilt find, perchance, another, and a fairer Galatea.  Many be
the girls that bid me play with them through the night, and softly
they all laugh, if perchance I answer them.  On land it is plain that
I too seem to be somebody!


Lo, thus Polyphemus still shepherded his love with song, and lived
lighter than if he had given gold for ease.



IDYL XII--THE PASSIONATE FRIEND



This is rather a lyric than an idyl, being an expression of that
singular passion which existed between men in historical Greece.  The
next idyl, like the Myrmidons of Aeschylus, attributes the same
manners to mythical and heroic Greece.  It should be unnecessary to
say that the affection between Homeric warriors, like Achilles and
Patroclus, was only that of companions in arms and was quite unlike
the later sentiment.

Hast thou come, dear youth, with the third night and the dawning;
hast thou come? but men in longing grow old in a day!  As spring than
the winter is sweeter, as the apple than the sloe, as the ewe is
deeper of fleece than the lamb she bore; as a maiden surpasses a
thrice-wedded wife, as the fawn is nimbler than the calf; nay, by as
much as sweetest of all fowls sings the clear-voiced nightingale, so
much has thy coming gladdened me!  To thee have I hastened as the
traveller hastens under the burning sun to the shadow of the ilex
tree.

Ah, would that equally the Loves may breathe upon us twain, may we
become a song in the ears of all men unborn.

'Lo, a pair were these two friends among the folk of former time,'
the one 'the Knight' (so the Amyclaeans call him), the other, again,
'the Page,' so styled in speech of Thessaly.

'An equal yoke of friendship they bore:  ah, surely then there were
golden men of old, when friends gave love for love!'

And would, O father Cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that
this might be; and that when two hundred generations have sped, one
might bring these tidings to me by Acheron, the irremeable stream.

'The loving-kindness that was between thee and thy gracious friend,
is even now in all men's mouths, and chiefly on the lips of the
young.'

Nay, verily, the gods of heaven will be masters of these things, to
rule them as they will, but when I praise thy graciousness no blotch
that punishes the perjurer shall spring upon the tip of my nose!
Nay, if ever thou hast somewhat pained me, forthwith thou healest the
hurt, giving a double delight, and I depart with my cup full and
running over!

Nisaean men of Megara, ye champions of the oars, happily may ye
dwell, for that ye honoured above all men the Athenian stranger, even
Diodes, the true lover.  Always about his tomb the children gather in
their companies, at the coming in of the spring, and contend for the
prize of kissing.  And whoso most sweetly touches lip to lip, laden
with garlands he returneth to his mother.  Happy is he that judges
those kisses of the children; surely he prays most earnestly to
bright-faced Ganymedes, that his lips may be as the Lydian touchstone
wherewith the money-changers try gold lest, perchance base metal pass
for true.



IDYL XIII--HYLAS AND HERACLES



As in the eleventh Idyl, Nicias is again addressed, by way of
introduction to the story of Hylas.  This beautiful lad, a favourite
companion of Heracles, took part in the Quest of the Fleece of Gold.
As he went to draw water from a fountain, the water-nymphs dragged
him down to their home, and Heracles, after a long and vain search,
was compelled to follow the heroes of the Quest on foot to Phasis.

Not for us only, Nicias, as we were used to deem, was Love begotten,
by whomsoever of the Gods was the father of the child; not first to
us seemed beauty beautiful, to us that are mortal men and look not on
the morrow.  Nay, but the son of Amphitryon, that heart of bronze,
who abode the wild lion's onset, loved a lad, beautiful Hylas--Hylas
of the braided locks, and he taught him all things as a father
teaches his child, all whereby himself became a mighty man, and
renowned in minstrelsy.  Never was he apart from Hylas, not when
midnoon was high in heaven, not when Dawn with her white horses
speeds upwards to the dwelling of Zeus, not when the twittering
nestlings look towards the perch, while their mother flaps her wings
above the smoke-browned beam; and all this that the lad might be
fashioned to his mind, and might drive a straight furrow, and come to
the true measure of man.

But when Iason, Aeson's son, was sailing after the fleece of gold
(and with him followed the champions, the first chosen out of all the
cities, they that were of most avail), to rich Iolcos too came the
mighty man and adventurous, the son of the woman of Midea, noble
Alcmene.  With him went down Hylas also, to Argo of the goodly
benches, the ship that grazed not on the clashing rocks Cyanean, but
through she sped and ran into deep Phasis, as an eagle over the
mighty gulf of the sea.  And the clashing rocks stand fixed, even
from that hour!

Now at the rising of the Pleiades, when the upland fields begin to
pasture the young lambs, and when spring is already on the wane, then
the flower divine of Heroes bethought them of sea-faring.  On board
the hollow Argo they sat down to the oars, and to the Hellespont they
came when the south wind had been for three days blowing, and made
their haven within Propontis, where the oxen of the Cianes wear
bright the ploughshare, as they widen the furrows.  Then they went
forth upon the shore, and each couple busily got ready supper in the
late evening, and many as they were one bed they strewed lowly on the
ground, for they found a meadow lying, rich in couches of strown
grass and leaves.  Thence they cut them pointed flag-leaves, and deep
marsh-galingale.  And Hylas of the yellow hair, with a vessel of
bronze in his hand, went to draw water against suppertime, for
Heracles himself, and the steadfast Telamon, for these comrades twain
supped ever at one table.  Soon was he ware of a spring, in a hollow
land, and the rushes grew thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort,
and green maiden-hair, and blooming parsley, and deer-grass spreading
through the marshy land.  In the midst of the water the nymphs were
arraying their dances, the sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the
country people, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes.
And now the boy was holding out the wide-mouthed pitcher to the
water, intent on dipping it, but the nymphs all clung to his hand,
for love of the Argive lad had fluttered the soft hearts of all of
them.  Then down he sank into the black water, headlong all, as when
a star shoots flaming from the sky, plumb in the deep it falls, and a
mate shouts out to the seamen, 'Up with the gear, my lads, the wind
is fair for sailing.'

Then the nymphs held the weeping boy on their laps, and with gentle
words were striving to comfort him.  But the son of Amphitryon was
troubled about the lad, and went forth, carrying his bended bow in
Scythian fashion, and the club that is ever grasped in his right
hand.  Thrice he shouted 'Hylas!' as loud as his deep throat could
call, and thrice again the boy heard him, and thin came his voice
from the water, and, hard by though he was, he seemed very far away.
And as when a bearded lion, a ravening lion on the hills, hears the
bleating of a fawn afar off, and rushes forth from his lair to seize
it, his readiest meal, even so the mighty Heracles, in longing for
the lad, sped through the trackless briars, and ranged over much
country.

Reckless are lovers:  great toils did Heracles bear, in hills and
thickets wandering, and Iason's quest was all postponed to this.  Now
the ship abode with her tackling aloft, and the company gathered
there, {70} but at midnight the young men were lowering the sails
again, awaiting Heracles.  But he wheresoever his feet might lead him
went wandering in his fury, for the cruel Goddess of love was rending
his heart within him.

Thus loveliest Hylas is numbered with the Blessed, but for a runaway
they girded at Heracles, the heroes, because he roamed from Argo of
the sixty oarsmen.  But on foot he came to Colchis and inhospitable
Phasis.



IDYL XIV



This Idyl, like the next, is dramatic in form.  One Aeschines tells
Thyonichus the story of his quarrel with his mistress Cynisca.  He
speaks of taking foreign service, and Thyonichus recommends that of
Ptolemy.  The idyl was probably written at Alexandria, as a
compliment to Ptolemy, and an inducement to Greeks to join his
forces.  There is nothing, however, to fix the date.

Aeschines.  All hail to the stout Thyonichus!

Thyonichus.  As much to you, Aeschines.

Aeschines.  How long it is since we met!

Thyonichus.  Is it so long?  But why, pray, this melancholy?

Aeschines.  I am not in the best of luck, Thyonichus.

Thyonichus.  'Tis for that, then, you are so lean, and hence comes
this long moustache, and these love-locks all adust.  Just such a
figure was a Pythagorean that came here of late, barefoot and wan,--
and said he was an Athenian.  Marry, he too was in love, methinks,
with a plate of pancakes.

Aeschines.  Friend, you will always have your jest,--but beautiful
Cynisca,--she flouts me!  I shall go mad some day, when no man looks
for it; I am but a hair's-breadth on the hither side, even now.

Thyonichus.  You are ever like this, dear Aeschines, now mad, now
sad, and crying for all things at your whim.  Yet, tell me, what is
your new trouble?

Aeschines.  The Argive, and I, and the Thessalian rough rider, Apis,
and Cleunichus the free lance, were drinking together, at my farm.  I
had killed two chickens, and a sucking pig, and had opened the
Bibline wine for them,--nearly four years old,--but fragrant as when
it left the wine-press.  Truffles and shellfish had been brought out,
it was a jolly drinkin