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external evidence for the life of Theocritus is scanty enough. Beyond a brief statement in Suidas, a casual phrase in Choeroboscus, the epigram Ἄλλος ὁ Χῖος, and a comment upon a passage of Ovid, we have only a few short and not always consistent notes in the commentaries which are contained in the manuscripts. His poems tell us plainly that he was a native of Syracuse, and was familiar also with the districts of Croton and Thurii in Italy, with the island of Cos, with Miletus, and with Alexandria, and that he wrote certain of his works about the twelfth year of Ptolemy Philadelphus. The inscriptions he composed for the statues of Gods and poets connect him, or at least his fame, also with Teos. Paros, Ephesus, and Camirus. The rest—and that means much of the following account—is conjecture.

His parents were Praxagoras and Philinna, both possibly of Coan birth or extraction. His early manhood was spent in the Aegean. He seems to have studied medicine, probably at Samos, under the Rh