Page:The Greek bucolic poets (1912).djvu/22

Rh than to an earlier period. Apart altogether from the question of actual impersonation, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that when Speaking of the Sicilian Thyrsis and the song he sang at Cos, Theocritus had himself at the back of his mind, and that when he wrote of Thyrsis’ victory over the Libyan, he was thinking of some contest of his own—perhaps one of the Dionysiac contests mentioned in the Ptolemy—with Callimachus of Cyrenè. And it can hardly be a mere coincidence that in the Spell Theocritus makes the athlete boast of having “outrun the fair Philinus,” and that a Coan named Philinus won at Olympia in 264 and 260; it is only reasonable to suppose that Theocritus wrote these words when Philinus’ name was on every Coan lip.

Except that in XXX the poet speaks of the first appearance of grey hairs upon his head, and that in the Beloved the comparison of the maid to the thrice-wed wife, which could not fail to offend the thrice-wed Arsinoë, must have been written before the author’s sojourn at Alexandria, there is nothing to indicate to what period of his life the remaining poems belong.

The list of Theocritus’ works given by Suidas tells us that we possess by no means all of the works once ascribed to him. His Bucolic Poems, ἔπη or δράματα βουκολικὰ were in the time of Suidas, or rather of the writers upon whom he drew, his chief title to fame. Of the Epigrams or Inscriptions we have some, if not all, known as his in antiquity. The Hymns are now xviii