Page:The Greek bucolic poets (1912).djvu/38



''and a goatherd meet in the pastures one noontide, and compliment each other upon their piping. The shepherd, Thyrsis by name, is persuaded by the other—for a cup which he describes but does not at firstshow—to sing him The Affliction of Daphnis, a ballad which tells how the ideal shepherd, friend not only of Nymph andMuse, but of all the wild creatures, having vowed to his first love that she should be his last, pined and died for the love of another. The ballad is divided into three parts marked by changes in the refrain. The first part, after a complaint to the Nymphs of their neglect, tells how the herds and the herdsmen gathered about the dying man, and Hermes his father, and Priapus the country-god of fertility whom he had flouted, came and spoke and got no answer. In the second part, the slighted Love-Goddess comes, and gently npbraids him, whereat he breaks silence with a threat of vengeance after death. The lines of his speech which follow tell in veiled ironic terms what the vengeance of this friend of wild things will be; for Anchises was'' 6