THEOCRITUS
Theocritus was the greatest of all pastoral or bucolic poets, and was the real founder of this branch of literature, though he lived in the midst of the formal conventional life of courts and students. He was born about 315 B. c. in Sicily, the land of flocks and herds, but his early training was under Philetas, a poet of the island Cos, near the south- west corner of Asia Minor. Before 280 he returned to Sicily, and sought the favor of Hiero the younger, the king of Syracuse, by a poem which was imitated by Spenser in his Shepherd/ s Calendar, October. In this he asks, " Who of all those who dwell under the bright Dawn will open his doors and receive our Graces to his home ? " Failing to secure Hiero as his patron, he turned to Ptolemy Philadel- phus at Alexandria, the enlightened ruler of Egypt, who had been a pupil of Philetas not long before him. Two of the extant idyls are in honor of Ptolemy, and another clearly was composed to please Ptolemy's queen and sister, Arsinoe. Of the thirty poems which are extant under the name of Theocritus, only one third are strictly bucolic. Two are love songs. Three are mimes or little dramas, of which no other specimens were known to the modern world until in 1891 some of the mimes of Herodas (or Herondas) were published from a papyrus roU found in a tomb in Egj-pt. Two of the idyls are encomia, one is a hymn to the Dios- curi, another is a hj'mn to Dionysus, two are little epic scenes, one is a picture of the life of fishermen, eight are generally rejected or are at least of suspected authenticity. Of twenty-six epigrams, eight are generally accepted as from Theocritus. He seems to have died at Alexandria.
