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202 Among the poets of the period one name, and only one, stands out clear and pre-eminent. This is that of Theocritus, a Sicilian idyllist, who wrote at Alexandria under Ptolemy Philadelphus. His idyls are beautiful pictures of Sicilian pastoral life.

Conclusion: Græco-Roman writers.—After the Roman conquest of Greece, the centre of Greek literary activity shifted from Alexandria to Rome. Hence Greek literature now passes into what is known as its Græco-Roman period (146 B.C.–527 A.D.). The most noted historical writer of the first part of this period was Polybius (about 203–121 B.C.), who wrote a history of the Roman conquests from 264 to 146 B.C. His work, though the larger part of it has reached us in a very mutilated state, is of great worth; for Polybius wrote of matters that had become history in his own day. He had lived to see the larger part of the world he knew absorbed by the ever-growing power of the Imperial City.

Plutarch (b. about 40 A.D.), "the prince of ancient biographers," will always live in literature as the author of the Parallel Lives, in which, with great wealth of illustrative anecdotes, he compares or contrasts Greek and Roman statesmen and soldiers.