Theocritus
Theocritus (?310-?250 BCE) was a Greek poet, the first to write pastoral poetry. He was a powerful influence on the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 BCE), whose Eclogues are modelled on some of Theocritus’ poems.
Theocritus was born on the island of Sicily, in the city of Syracuse, and as an adult travelled widely in the eastern Mediterranean. From references in his poems it is clear that he spent time in Alexandria in Egypt and on the island of Cos in the south eastern Aegean Sea, and he may also have visited the city of Miletus on the west coast of Asia Minor and parts of southern Italy (Magna Graecia). Beyond these details and the names of his parents – said to have been Praxagoras and Philina – nothing is known about his life.
Theocritus wrote pastoral poetry: his poems paint an idealised picture of life in the country and celebrate the pleasures of the simple life lived by the shepherds and goatherds who inhabit this rural landscape, in particular, the pleasures of music and the pleasures, and pains, of love. The poems are referred to in Greek as εἰδύλλια (eidullia), the plural of εἰδύλλιον (eidullion), a diminutive of εἶδος (eidos, form) used of ‘any short, highly wrought, descriptive poem, usually, on a pastoral subject’ (H.G. Liddell & Robert Scott, revised by Henry Stuart Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon). The English translation (or transliteration) of εἰδύλλιον (eidullion) is ‘idyll’, a word which is aptly applied both to the poems of Theocritus themselves and to many of the scenes they describe. In Idyll I, for example, a shepherd, Thyrsis, meets a goatherd; they compliment each other on their singing; and Thyrsis recounts the story of Daphnis, a mythical herdsman,who died from defying the power of the goddess of love, Aphrodite; and in Idyll 11 Polyphemus (no longer the fearsome giant of the Odyssey, but a gentle, rather simple-minded figure) tells of his love for the sea nymph Galatea. In some of the Idylls there is a narrator, the poet; while in others the characters themselves speak directly, so that the poems are closer to drama.
The pastoral tradition of which Theocritus is the earliest Greek exemplar was continued, in Greek, by Moschus (fl. 150 BCE), who like Theocritus was a native of Syracuse, and Bion (fl.100 BCE), who came from Phlossa near Smyrna on the west coast of Asia Minor, and most famously, in Latin, by Virgil, whose Eclogues are modelled on the Idylls of Theocritus. However, much of Theocritus' poetry is in the Doric dialect, which modern readers find difficult, and this may go some way to explaining why, during the Renaissance and after, the pastoral tradition in Europe owed more to Virgil's Eclogues than to Theocritus' Idylls.
