Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/427

Rh After the time of Alexander, literary activity tended to centre at Alexandria rather than Athens, which still, however, remained the headquarters of philosophy. Not that the poets were for the most part born at Alexandria; they came from Sicily and other parts of Hellas, but they generally spent part of their life at Alexandria, where a school of critics gathered round the great Library, and made a natural centre for men of learning and letters. To this school, therefore, belong the epic poet Apollonius of Rhodes (c. B.C. 235), whose Argonautica is an imitation of the Homeric style, and the pastoral poets, Bion of Smyrna, Moschus and Theocritus of Syracuse (between B.C. 300 and 250). Of these Theocritus has left the largest amount of work and has had the greatest influence on succeeding writers. In his thirty-six Idylls there are the qualities whose charms are universal—freshness, humour, passion. The dramatic skill of his dialogues, such as that of the immortal fifteenth Idyll, satisfies every sense and taste. The country scenes and the pastoral background in which the poems are set have an extraordinary fascination. A short passage taken from the seventh Idyll, and describing a woodland retreat in the southern summer, may give us some idea of this charm. Two shepherds are resting after a walk on a couch of “sweet mastich and vine leaves”:—