by Theocritus
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 famous physician Erasistratus, along with the Milesian Nicias to whom he dedicates the Cyclops and the Hylas. Theocritus is also said to have been a pupil of the Samian poet Asclepiades, whose epigrams we know in the Anthology. He certainly spent some years at Cos, sitting at the feet of the great poet and critic Philitas, who numbered among his pupils Zenodotus the grammarian, Hermesianax the elegist, and the young man who was afterwards Ptolemy II. This happy period of our author’s life is almost certainly recalled in a poem written at a later time, the Harvest-home. Philitas probably died about the year 283. Ten years later we find Theocritus at Syracuse, seeking the favour of the young officer who in 274 had been elected general-in-chief after the troubles of Pyrrhus’ regime and was soon to be known as Hiero II. The poem we know as Charites or The Graces probably appeared as epistle-dedicatory to a collection of poems, Charites being really the title of the whole book. Such fancy titles were the fashion of the day. Alexander of Aetolia, for instance, published a collection called The Muses; the “nightingales” of Callimachus’ famous little poem on Heracleitus are best explained as the name of his old friend’s collected poems; and Aratus published a collection actually called by this name, for Helladius writes “As Aratus says in the first of his Charites,” iv Χαρίτων πρώτn. Whether Theocritus’ little book contained any of the extant poems we cannot say. It very possibly contained the Cyclops and the Beloved, and from the title it may be judged to have comprised no more than three pieces. One biographical point should be noted here; Theocritus was newly come to Syracuse. We gather from the Charites that Hiero was by no means the first great man to whom Theocritus had gone for patronage, and it is to be remarked that the poet ascribes the indifference with which he had hitherto been received, not to the disturbed state of the country, but to the commercial spirit of the age. There were no doubt other possible patrons than Hiero in Sicily, but peace and tranquillity had not been known there for many years. The same argument may be used to show that his sojourn in Magna Graecia was not during the decade preceding the publication of the Chantes. The poem apparently failed like its predecessors; for Theocritus, like his own Aeschinas, was fain to go overseas and seek his fortune at Alexandria.
The voyage to Egypt lay by way of the southern Aegean, and we are credibly informed that he now spent some time at Cos. He doubtless had many old friends to see. It was probably on this voyage that he wrote the Distaff, to accompany the gift he was taking from Syracuse to the wife of his old friend Nicias, who was now settled in practice at Miletus. The Cyclops is generally regarded as a consolation addressed to the lovesick Nicias. If this is true, it would follow on this placing of the Distaff that the Cyclops was written before the Charites; for it implies that Nicias, to whom it was doubtless sent as a letter, was then unmarried. The probable age of the two friends in 273 points, as we shall see, the same way. If on the other hand we may regard the Cyclops as an outpouring of soul on the part of the lovesick Theocritus, the author likening himself, and not Nicias, to Polyphemus, the two lines — all that has been preserved — of Nicias’ reply may be interpreted with more point: “Love has, it seems, made you a poet,” a compliment upon the first serious piece of work of his friend’s that he had seen. This interpretation puts the Cyclops long before the Charites, independently of the dating of the Distaff. In any case, the Cyclops is certainly an early poem. The same visit to Nicias may have been the occasion of the eighth epigram, an inscription for the base of the new statue of Asclepius with which the doctor had adorned his consulting-room. We may well imagine that Nicias employed his friend in order to put a little money in his pocket; for his own epigrams in the Anthology show clearly that he could have written an excellent inscription himself.
The Love of Cynisca, with its hint of autobiography and its friendly flattery of Philadelphus was in all probability written about this time. There is no doubt as to the approximate dates of the Ptoleiny and the Women at the Adonis Festival. They must both have been written at Alexandria between the king’s marriage with his sister Arsinoë — this took place sometime between 278 and 273 — and her death in 270. The Ptolemy cannot be much later than 273; for it is clear that the Syrian war was in its early days, and this began in 274.
At this point it becomes necessary to discuss a question of great importance not only to the biographer of Theocritus but to the historian of the Pastoral. Does the Harvest-home deal with real persons? The scene of the poem is Cos. We have the characters Simichidas and Lycidas and the dumb characters Eucritus and Amjntas; the two songs mention in connexion with one or other of these persons Ageanax, Tityrus, Aratus, Aristis, Philinus, and two unnamed shepherds of Acharnae and Lycopè; in another part of the poem — though these are not necessarily to be reckoned as friends of the others — we have Philitas, and Sicelidas of Samos. Of these, Philitas certainly, and Aratus possibly, are the well-known poets; Philinus may or may not be the Coan Philinus who won at Olympia in 264 and 260 and who is probably the Philinus of the Spell; Aristis is a clip-form of some compound like Aristodamus; Amyntas is also called Amyntichus. The Tityrus, to whom, in the guise of a goatherd,
Theocritus dedicates the Serenade, is almost certainly a real person, and as certainly, Tityrus was not his real name; Tityrus here may or may not be the same person. Sicelidas, on external grounds, is certainly to be identified with the poet Asclepiades; it is to be noted that he is called Sicelidas elsewhere than in Theocritus; but he and Philitas are in a sense outside this discussion. Lastly, Amyntas bears a royal name. We know Ptolemy Philadelphus to have been taught by Philitas; and though his father was reputed the son of Lagus, the Macedonians were proud to believe him to be actually the son of Philip of Macedon, whose father was Amyntas. It is generally thought that Philitas went to Philadelphus; but in view both of the climate of Egypt and of the great probability that from 301 Cos was a vassal either of Ptolemy I or of his son-in-law Lysimachus, it is at least as likely that Philadelphus went to Philitas. Cos, moreover, was Philadelphus, birthplace.
If these were the only facts before us, sufficient evidence would be still to seek; for there is unfortunately some doubt as to the identity of Aratus. But there are other considerations which, taken with these, bring us near to certainty. If Lycidas is not a real person, why does the poet insist upon his characteristic laugh, and emphasise the excellence of his pastoral get-up? If Aristis is not a real person, why is he so carefully described, and what business has he in the poem? It is Aratus’ love, not Aristis’ knowledge of it, that is important to the narrative. Lastly, there is the tradition of the scholia that the narrator is either Theocritus or one of his friends, of which alternatives the former is far the more probable. The conclusion we must come to is that we are dealing throughout with real persons, some of whom have their ordinary names and others not. This does not mean, of course, that the “other-names” were invented for the occasion by the poet. Rather should they be considered pet-names by which these persons were known to their friends. There can be no certain identification.
A further question arises. Whence did Theocritus derive the notion of staging himself and his friends as herdsmen? The answer is not far to seek. First, the Greek mind associated poetry directly with music; and secondly, Greek herdsmen were then, as they are still, players and singers. The poets of his day, some of whom dealt like him with country life, would naturally appear, to a country-loving poet like Theocritus, the literary counterparts, so to speak, of the herdsmen, and their poetry in some sense the art-form of the herdsman’s folk-music. It is not perhaps without ulterior motive that Lycidas the poet-goatherd is made to claim fellowship with Comatas the goatherd-poet. The accident that combined this staging with the use of pet-names in this poem, is responsible, through Vergil’s imitations, for the modern notion of the Pastoral.
Let us now return to the life of Theocritus.
If, as is generally believed, the Harvest-home is autobiographical, it was written after the author had won some measure of fame — he makes himself say that he is “no match yet awhile for the excellent Sicelidas” — , and the passage about the “strutting cocks of the Muses’ yard” is a reference to Apollonius of Rhodes and his famous controversy with Callimachus, Theocritus declaring his allegiance to the latter, who maintained that the long epic poem was out of date. This controversy in all probability began upon the publication of the first edition of Apollonius’ Argonautica. The date of this is unfortunately disputed, but it can hardly have been earlier than 260. A further shred of biography may perhaps be derived from a consideration of the story of Comatas in relation to the cruel death of Sotades. This brave outspoken poet denounced Ptolemy’s incestuous marriage, and was thrown into prison. After languishing there for a long time he made good his escape, but falling eventually into the hands of an admiral of the Egyptian fleet, was shut up in a leaden vessel and drowned in the sea. This strange method of execution calls for some explanation. One is tempted to think that Sotades was a friend of Theocritus — he was a writer of love-poems of the type of XII, XXIX, and XXX — , and that after his friend had been some years in prison Theocritus wrote the Harvest-home, hinting that Sotades had suffered long enough, and sheltering himself under a reminder of his own early acquaintance with the king and a declaration of his allegiance to the great court-poet Callimachus. On the unfortunate man’s escape, we may imagine, the story of the frustration of the mythical king’s cruel purpose became directly applicable to the situation; the phrase κακαΐσιν ατασθαΧίαισιν ανακτος was now genuine censure and the particle θήν real sarcasm; and when the admiral sent word of the recapture, Ptolemy with a grim irony ordered that the modern Comatas should be shut up in a modern chest and put beyond reach of the assistance of the bees. Here again we can arrive at no date. All we know is that Sotades’ offence must have been committed about 275 and that he lay a long time in prison.
We do not know for certain where Theocritus spent the rest of his life. Perhaps after the protest of the Harvest-home and its tragic sequel he found it prudent to retire from Alexandria. But whether he now left Egypt or not, it is more than probable that he spent some time during his later years in Cos. There was close intercourse during this period between Cos and Alexandria, and if he did not make the island his home, he may well have paid long summer visits there. Besides the Harvest-home, there are two certainly Coan poems, the Thyrsis and the Spell, and these would seem to belong rather to this 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, epe or δράματα βουκολικά 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 represented by the Ptolemy, the Dioscuri, the Berenice fragment, and perhaps the Charites. The Lyric Poems must have included the Distaff and XXIX and XXX, and perhaps also the Beloved and the Epithalamy. The books known as Elegies, Iambics, Funeral Laments, and The Heroines, and the single poem called The Daughters of Proetus — perhaps known to Vergil, — all these are lost without a trace. It is strange that Suidas’ list apparently omits all mention of the non-pastoral mimes, the Love of Cynisca, the Spell, and the Women at the Adonis Festival, and of the little epics Hylas and The Little Heracles. The Spell may have been included among the Lyric Poems, its claim to be so classed lying in the peculiar way in which, though it is a personal narrative, the refrain is used throughout as if it were a song. We may perhaps guess that the four other poems belonged to the remaining book of Suidas’ list, the Hopes, and that this was a collection published by Theocritus soon after his arrival in Egypt, with the Love of Cynisca standing first as a sort of dedication to his friend Ptolemy and echoing the title’s veiled request for his patronage.
The name ζίδνλλιa, idyls, as applied to the poems of Theocritus, is certainly as old as the commentaries which accompany the text, and some of these probably go back to the first century before Christ. It was known to Pliny the Younger as a collective title for a volume of short poems; there is a collection bearing this name among the works of Ausonius. But it was apparently unknown as the title of Theocritus’ poems to Suidas and his predecessors. The meaning of it is “little poems.” We are told that Pindar’s Epinician Odes were known as eide, and Suidas uses the same word in describing the works of Sotades. There is no warrant for the interpretation “little pictures.”
If we may accept the identification of the “pretty little Amyntas” with Philadelphus, we can get a very close approximation to the date of Theocritus’ birth. Philadelphus was born in 309. At the time described in the Harvest-home he is obviously about fifteen. In the same poem Theocritus has already attained something of a reputation, but is still a young man. We shall not be far wrong if we put his age at twenty-two or three. He was born then about the year 316, and when he wrote the Charités he was about forty-three. This would suit admirably the autobiographical hint in the Love of Cynisca that the poet’s hair at the time of writing was just beginning to go grey. If the Berenice of the fragment preserved by Athenaeus is the wife, not of Soter, but of Euergetes, it would follow that Theocritus was at the Alexandrian court in his seventieth year. It is at any rate certain that he did not die young; for Statius calls him Siculus senex.
A scholiast on Ovid’s Ibis 1. 549
Utve Syracosio praestricta fauce poetae,
Sic animae laqueo sit via clausa tuae,
tells us that this is “the Syracusan poet Theocritus, who was arrested by king Hiero for making an attack upon his son, the king’s object being merely to make him think that he was going to be put to death. But when Hiero asked him if he would avoid abusing his son in future, he began to abuse him all the more, and not only the son but the father too. Whereat the king in indignation ordered him to be put to death in real earnest, and according to some authorities he was strangled and according to others beheaded.” There is nothing improbable in this story. When Theocritus was sixty-five Hiero’s son Gelo would be nineteen; we know of no other Syracusan poet who met such a fate; and Antigonus’ treatment of Theocritus of Chios and Ptolemy’s of Sotades show how the most enlightened rulers of the day could deal with adverse criticism. But whether we believe it or no, the story is evidence for a tradition that Theocritus’ last days were spent in Sicily; and we may well imagine that he died at Syracuse, that birthplace, as he calls it, of good men and true, where his fellow-citizens long afterwards pointed out to the collector of inscriptions the statue of his great forerunner Epicharmus, and the words which he once wrote for its base, little thinking perhaps that the time would come when his eulogy would apply as truly to himself: “They that have their habitation in the most mighty city of Syracuse have set him up here, as became fellow-townsmen, in bronze in the stead of the fl
esh, and thus have remembered to pay him his wages for the great heap of words he hath builded; for many are the things he hath told their children profitable unto life. He hath their hearty thanks.”
THEOCRITUS AND HIS AGE by Andrew Lang
At the beginning of the third century before Christ, in the years just preceding those in which Theocritus wrote, the genius of Greece seemed to have lost her productive force. Nor would it have been strange if that force had really been exhausted. Greek poetry had hitherto enjoyed a peculiarly free development, each form of art succeeding each without break or pause, because each — epic, lyric, dithyramb, the drama — had responded to some new need of the state and of religion. Now in the years that followed the fall of Athens and the conquests of Macedonia, Greek religion and the Greek state had ceased to be themselves. Religion and the state had been the patrons of poetry; on their decline poetry seemed dead. There were no heroic kings, like those for whom epic minstrels had chanted. The cities could no longer welcome an Olympian winner with Pindaric hymns. There was no imperial Athens to fill the theatres with a crowd of citizens and strangers eager to listen to new tragic masterpieces. There was no humorous democracy to laugh at all the world, and at itself, with Aristophanes. The very religion of Sophocles and Aeschylus was debased. A vulgar usurper had stripped the golden ornaments from Athene of the Parthenon. The ancient faith in the protecting gods of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes, had become a lax readiness to bow down in the temple of any Oriental Rimmon, of Serapis or Adonis. Greece had turned her face, with Alexander of Macedon, to the East; Alexander had fallen, and Greece had become little better than the western portion of a divided Oriental empire. The centre of intellectual life had been removed from Athens to Alexandria (founded 332 B.C.) The new Greek cities of Egypt and Asia, and above all Alexandria, seemed no cities at all to Greeks who retained the pure Hellenic traditions. Alexandria was thirty times larger than the size assigned by Aristotle to a well-balanced state. Austere spectators saw in Alexandria an Eastern capital and mart, a place of harems and bazaars, a home of tyrants, slaves, dreamers, and pleasure-seekers. Thus a Greek of the old school must have despaired of Greek poetry. There was nothing (he would have said) to evoke it; no dawn of liberty could flush this silent Memnon into song. The collectors, critics, librarians of Alexandria could only produce literary imitations of the epic and the hymn, or could at best write epigrams or inscriptions for the statue of some alien and uxurious god. Their critical activity in every field of literature was immense, their original genius sterile. In them the intellect of the Hellenes still faintly glowed, like embers on an altar that shed no light on the way. Yet over these embers the god poured once again the sacred oil, and from the dull mass leaped, like a many-coloured frame, the genius of Theocritus.