Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/407

 APOLLONIUS. THEOCRITUS 383 Theocritus is perhaps the most universally attractive of all Greek poets. It is common to find young students who prefer him to Homer, and most people are con- scious of a certain delighted surprise when they first make his acquaintance. In his own sweet and lowly domain he is absolute monarch ; one might almost say that there is hardly anything beautiful in the pas- toral poetry of the world that does not come from Theocritus. His first idyll, the Dhge on Daphnis, has perhaps had a greater number of celebrated imitations than any poem of its length in existence — from Bion's Adonis, Moschus's Bion, Vergil's Daphnis, to our own Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis. That habit of retrospect, that yearning over the past, which pervades all the poetry, though not the scientific work, of Alexandria, is peculiarly marked in Theocritus. There are poems in plenty about the present ; there are even poems about the future, and the hopes which the poet reposes in his patrons. But the present is rather ugly and the future unreal. The true beauty of Theo- critus's world lies in the country life of the past. The Sicilian peasants of his own day, it has been well remarked, were already far on the road to becoming the agricultural slave population of the Roman Empire, "that most miserable of all proletariats." Yet even long afterwards, under the oppression of Verres, they were known for their cheerfulness and songfulness ; and it is probable that the rustic bards whom we meet in Theocritus are not mere figments of the imagination. It was in the old Sicilian poetry of Stesichorus that the type first appeared. The Sicilian villager, like the Provencal, the Roumanian, and the Highlander, seems to have taken verse-making and singing as part of the ordinary business of fife.