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THEOCRITUS - BION AND MOSCHUS RENDERED INTO ENGLISH PROSE
THEOCRITUS - BION AND MOSCHUS RENDERED INTO ENGLISH PROSE ANDREW LANG LIFE OF THEOCRITUS
(From Suidas)
Theocritus the Chian. But there is another Theocritus the son of
Praxagoras and Philinna (see Epigram XXIII) or as some say of
Simichus. (This is plainly derived from the assumed name Simichidas
in Idyl VII.) He was a Syracusan or as others say a Coan settled
in Syracuse. He wrote the so-called Bucolics in the Dorian dialect.
Some attribute to him the following works:- The Proetidae The
Pleasures of Hope ([Greek]) Hymns The Heroines Dirges Ditties
Elegies Iambics Epigrams. But it known that there are three
Bucolic poets: this Theocritus Moschus of Sicily and Bion of
Smyrna from a village called Phlossa.
LIFE OF THEOCRITUS
[Greek]
(Usually prefixed to the Idyls)
Theocritus the Bucolic poet was a Syracusan by extraction and the
son of Simichidas as he says himself Simichidas pray whither
through the noon dost thou dray thy feet? (Idyl VII). Some say that
this was an assumed name for he seems to have been snub-nosed
([Greek]) and that his father was Praxagoras and his mother
Philinna. He became the pupil of Philetas and Asclepiades of whom
he speaks (Idyl VII) and flourished about the time of Ptolemy Lagus.
He gained much fame for his skill in bucolic poetry. According to
some his original name was Moschus and Theocritus was a name he
later assumed.
THEOCRITUS AND HIS AGE
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 luxurious
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.
To take delight in that genius so human so kindly so musical in
expression requires it may be said no long preparation. The art
of Theocritus scarcely needs to be illustrated by any description of
the conditions among which it came to perfection. It is always
impossible to analyse into its component parts the genius of a poet.
But it is not impossible to detect some of the influences that worked
on Theocritus. We can study his early 'environment'; the country
scenes he knew and the songs of the neatherds which he elevated into
art. We can ascertain the nature of the demand for poetry in the
chief cities and in the literary society of the time. As a result
we can understand the broad twofold division of the poems of
Theocritus into rural and epic idyls and with this we must rest
contented.
It is useless to attempt a regular biography of Theocritus. Facts
and dates are alike wanting the ancient accounts (p. ix) are clearly
based on his works but it is by no means impossible to construct a
'legend' or romance of his life by aid of his own verses and of
hints and fragments which reach us from the past and the present.
The genius of Theocritus was so steeped in the colours of human life
he bore such true and full witness as to the scenes and men he knew
that life (always essentially the same) becomes in turn a witness to
his veracity. He was born in the midst of nature that through all
the changes of things has never lost its sunny charm. The existence
he loved best to contemplate that of southern shepherds fishermen
rural people remains what it always has been in Sicily and in the
isles of Greece. The habits and the passions of his countryfolk have
not altered the echoes of their old love-songs still sound among the
pines or by the sea-banks where Theocritus 'watched the visionary
flocks.'
Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century
or according to Couat about 315 B.C. and was a native of Syracuse
'the greatest of Greek cities the fairest of all cities.' So Cicero
calls it describing the four quarters that were encircled by its
walls--each quarter as large as a town--the fountain Arethusa the
stately temples with their doors of ivory and gold. On the fortunate
dwellers in Syracuse Cicero says the sun shone every day and there
was never a morning so tempestuous but the sunlight conquered at
last and broke through the clouds. That perennial sunlight still
floods the poems of Theocritus with its joyous glow. His birthplace
was the proper home of an idyllic poet of one who with all his
enjoyment of the city life of Greece had yet been 'breathed on by
the rural Pan' and best loved the sights and sounds and fragrant air
of the forests and the coast. Thanks to the mountainous regions of
Sicily to Etna with her volcanic cliffs and snow-fed streams
thanks also to the hills of the interior the populous island never
lost the charm of nature. Sicily was not like the overcrowded and
over-cultivated Attica; among the Sicilian heights and by the coast
were few enclosed estates and narrow farms. The character of the
people too was attuned to poetry. The Dorian settlers had kept
alive the magic of rivers of pools where the Nereids dance and
uplands haunted by Pan. This popular poetry influenced the literary
verse of Sicily. The songs of Stesichorus a minstrel of the early
period and the little rural 'mimes' or interludes of Sophron are
lost and we have only fragments of Epicharmus. But it seems certain
that these poets predecessors of Theocritus liked to mingle with
their own composition strains of rustic melody volks-lieder
ballads love-songs ditties and dirges such as are still chanted
by the peasants of Greece and Italy. Thus in Syracuse and the other
towns of the coast Theocritus would have always before his eyes the
spectacle of refined and luxurious manners and always in his ears
the babble of the Dorian women while he had only to pass the gates
and wander through the fens of Lysimeleia by the brackish mere or
ride into the hills to find himself in the golden world of pastoral.
Thinking of his early years and of the education that nature gives
the poet we can imagine him like Callicles in Mr. Arnold's poem
singing at the banquet of a merchant or a general -
'With his head full of wine and his hair crown'd
Touching his harp as the whim came on him
And praised and spoil'd by master and by guests
Almost as much as the new dancing girl.'
We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems
though the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown. We
can follow him in fancy as he breaks from the revellers and wanders
out into the night. Wherever he turned his feet he could find such
scenes as he has painted in the idyls. If the moon rode high in
heaven as he passed through the outlying gardens he might catch a
glimpse of some deserted girl shredding the magical herbs into the
burning brazier and sending upward to the 'lady Selene' the song
which was to charm her lover home. The magical image melted in the
burning the herbs smouldered the tale of love was told and slowly
the singer 'drew the quiet night into her blood.' Her lay ended with
a passage of softened melancholy -
'Do thou farewell and turn thy steeds to Ocean lady and my pain I
will endure even as I have declared. Farewell Selene beautiful;
farewell ye other stars that follow the wheels of Night.'
A grammarian says that Theocritus borrowed this second idyl the
story of Simaetha from a piece by Sophron. But he had no need to
borrow from anything but the nature before his eyes. Ideas change so
little among the Greek country people and the hold of superstition
is so strong that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their
prayer for pity and help. Theocritus himself could have added little
passion to this incantation still chanted in the moonlit nights of
Greece: {0a}
'Bright golden Moon that now art near to thy setting go thou and
salute my lover he that stole my love and that kissed me and said
"Never will I leave thee." And lo he has left me like a field
reaped and gleaned like a church where no man comes to pray like a
city desolate. Therefore I would curse him and yet again my heart
fails me for tenderness my heart is vexed within me my spirit is
moved with anguish. Nay even so I will lay my curse on him and let
God do even as He will with my pain and with my crying with my
flame and mine imprecations.'
It is thus that the women of the islands like the girl of Syracuse
two thousand years ago hope to lure back love or avenged love
betrayed and thus they 'win more ease from song than could be bought
with gold.'
In whatever direction the path of the Syracusan wanderer lay he
would find then as he would find now in Sicily some scene of the
idyllic life framed between the distant Etna and the sea. If he
strayed in the faint blue of the summer dawn through the fens to the
shore he might reach the wattled cabin of the two old fishermen in
the twenty-first idyl. There is nothing in Wordsworth more real
more full of the incommunicable sense of nature rounding and
softening the toilsome days of the aged and the poor than the
Theocritean poem of the Fisherman's Dream. It is as true to nature
as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican. One cannot read
these verses but the vision returns to one of sandhills by the sea
of a low cabin roofed with grass where fishing-rods of reed are
leaning against the door while the Mediterranean floats up her waves
that fill the waste with sound. This nature grey and still seems
in harmony with the wise content of old men whose days are waning on
the limit of life as they have all been spent by the desolate margin
of the sea.
The twenty-first idyl is one of the rare poems of Theocritus that are
not filled with the sunlight of Sicily or of Egypt. The landscapes
he prefers are often seen under the noonday heat when shade is most
pleasant to men. His shepherds invite each other to the shelter of
oak-trees or of pines where the dry fir-needles are strown or where
the feathered ferns make a luxurious 'couch more soft than sleep' or
where the flowers bloom whose musical names sing in the idyls.
Again Theocritus will sketch the bare beginnings of the hillside as
in the third idyl just where the olive-gardens cease and where the
short grass of the heights alternates with rocks and thorns and
aromatic plants. None of his pictures seem complete without the
presence of water. It may be but the wells that the maidenhair
fringes or the babbling runnel of the fountain of the Nereids. The
shepherds may sing of Crathon or Sybaris or Himeras waters so
sweet that they seem to flow with milk and honey. Again Theocritus
may encounter his rustics fluting in rivalry like Daphnis and
Menalcas in the eighth idyl 'on the long ranges of the hills.'
Their kine and sheep have fed upwards from the lower valleys to the
place where
'The track winds down to the clear stream
To cross the sparkling shallows; there
The cattle love to gather on their way
To the high mountain pastures and to stay
Till the rough cow-herds drive them past
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for 'tis the last
Of all the woody high well-water'd dells
On Etna . . .
. . . glade
And stream and sward and chestnut-trees
End here; Etna beyond in the broad glare
Of the hot noon without a shade
Slope behind slope up to the peak lies bare;
The peak round which the white clouds play.' {0b}
Theocritus never drives his flock so high and rarely muses on such
thoughts as come to wanderers beyond the shade of trees and the sound
of water among the scorched rocks and the barren lava. The day is
always cooled and soothed in his idyls with the 'music of water
that falleth from the high face of the rock' or with the murmurs of
the sea. From the cliffs and their seat among the bright red berries
on the arbutus shrubs his shepherds flute to each other as they
watch the tunny fishers cruising far below while the echo floats
upwards of the sailors' song. These shepherds have some touch in
them of the satyr nature; we might fancy that their ears are pointed
like those of Hawthorne's Donatello in 'Transformation.'
It should be noticed as a proof of the truthfulness of Theocritus
that the songs of his shepherds and goatherds are all such as he
might really have heard on the shores of Sicily. This is the real
answer to the criticism which calls him affected. When mock
pastorals flourished at the court of France when the long dispute as
to the merits of the ancients and moderns was raging critics vowed
that the hinds of Theocritus were too sentimental and polite in their
wooings. Refinement and sentiment were to be reserved for princely
shepherds dancing crook in hand in the court ballets. Louis XIV
sang of himself -
'A son labeur il passe tout d'un coup
Et n'ira pas dormir sur la fougere
Ny s'oublier aupres d'une Bergere
Jusques au point d'en oublier le Loup.' {0c}
Accustomed to royal goatherds in silk and lace Fontenelle (a severe
critic of Theocritus) could not believe in the delicacy of a Sicilian
who wore a skin 'stripped from the roughest of he-goats with the
smell of the rennet clinging to it still.' Thus Fontenelle cries
'Can any one suppose that there ever was a shepherd who could say
"Would I were the humming bee Amaryllis to flit to thy cave and
dip beneath the branches and the ivy leaves that hide thee"?' and
then he quotes other graceful passages from the love-verses of
Theocritean swains. Certainly no such fancies were to be expected
from the French peasants of Fontenelle's age 'creatures blackened
with the sun and bowed with labour and hunger.' The imaginative
grace of Battus is quite as remote from our own hinds. But we have
the best reason to suppose that the peasants of Theocritus's time
expressed refined sentiment in language adorned with colour and
music because the modern love-songs of Greek shepherds sound like
memories of Theocritus. The lover of Amaryllis might have sung this
among his ditties -
[Greek]
'To flit towards these lips of thine I fain would be a swallow
To kiss thee once to kiss thee twice and then go flying homeward.'
{0d}
In his despair when Love 'clung to him like a leech of the fen' he
might have murmured -
[Greek]
'Would that I were on the high hills and lay where lie the stags
and no more was troubled with the thought of thee.'
Here again is a love-complaint from modern Epirus exactly in the
tone of Battus's song in the tenth idyl -
'White thou art not thou art not golden haired
Thou art brown and gracious and meet for love.'
Here is a longer love-ditty -
'I will begin by telling thee first of thy perfections: thy body is
as fair as an angel's; no painter could design it. And if any man be
sad he has but to look on thee and despite himself he takes
courage the hapless one and his heart is joyous. Upon thy brows
are shining the constellated Pleiades thy breast is full of the
flowers of May thy breasts are lilies. Thou hast the eyes of a
princess the glance of a queen and but one fault hast thou that
thou deignest not to speak to me.'
Battus might have cried thus with a modern Greek singer to the
shade of the dead Amaryllis (Idyl IV) the 'gracious Amaryllis
unforgotten even in death' -
'Ah light of mine eyes what gift shall I send thee; what gift to
the other world? The apple rots and the quince decayeth and one by
one they perish the petals of the rose! I send thee my tears bound
in a napkin and what though the napkin burns if my tears reach thee
at last!'
The difficulty is to stop choosing where all the verses of the
modern Greek peasants are so rich in Theocritean memories so ardent
so delicate so full of flowers and birds and the music of fountains.
Enough has been said perhaps to show what the popular poetry of
Sicily could lend to the genius of Theocritus.
From her shepherds he borrowed much--their bucolic melody; their
love-complaints; their rural superstitions; their system of answering
couplets in which each singer refines on the utterance of his rival.
But he did not borrow their 'pastoral melancholy.' There is little
of melancholy in Theocritus. When Battus is chilled by the thought
of the death of Amaryllis it is but as one is chilled when a thin
cloud passes over the sun on a bright day of early spring. And in
an epigram the dead girl is spoken of as the kid that the wolf has
seized while the hounds bay all too late. Grief will not bring her
back. The world must go its way and we need not darken its sunlight
by long regret. Yet when for once Theocritus adopted the accent of
pastoral lament when he raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the
realm of art he composed a masterpiece and a model for all later
poets as for the authors of Lycidas Thyrsis and Adonais.
Theocritus did more than borrow a note from the country people. He
brought the gifts of his own spirit to the contemplation of the
world. He had the clearest vision and he had the most ardent love
of poetry 'of song may all my dwelling be full for neither is sleep
more sweet nor sudden spring nor are flowers more delicious to the
bees so dear to me are the Muses.' . . . 'Never may we be sundered
the Muses of Pieria and I.' Again he had perhaps in greater measure
than any other poet the gift of the undisturbed enjoyment of life.
The undertone of all his idyls is joy in the sunshine and in
existence. His favourite word the word that opens the first idyl
and as it were strikes the keynote is [Greek] sweet. He finds
all things delectable in the rural life:
'Sweet are the voices of the calves and sweet the heifers' lowing;
sweet plays the shepherd on the shepherd's pipe and sweet is the
echo.'
Even in courtly poems and in the artificial hymns of which we are to
speak in their place the memory of the joyful country life comes
over him. He praises Hiero because Hiero is to restore peace to
Syracuse and when peace returns then 'thousands of sheep fattened
in the meadows will bleat along the plain and the kine as they
flock in crowds to the stalls will make the belated traveller hasten
on his way.' The words evoke a memory of a narrow country lane in
the summer evening when light is dying out of the sky and the
fragrance of wild roses by the roadside is mingled with the perfumed
breath of cattle that hurry past on their homeward road. There was
scarcely a form of the life he saw that did not seem to him worthy of
song though it might be but the gossip of two rude hinds or the
drinking bout of the Thessalian horse-jobber and the false girl
Cynisca and her wild lover AEschines. But it is the sweet country
that he loves best to behold and to remember. In his youth Sicily
and Syracuse were disturbed by civil and foreign wars wars of
citizens against citizens of Greeks against Carthaginians and
against the fierce 'men of Mars' the banded mercenaries who
possessed themselves of Messana. But this was not matter for his
joyous Muse -
[Greek]
'Not of wars not of tears but of Pan would he chant and of the
neatherds he sweetly sang and singing he shepherded his flocks.'
This was the training that Sicily her hills her seas her lovers
her poet-shepherds gave to Theocritus. Sicily showed him subjects
which he imitated in truthful art. Unluckily the later pastoral
poets of northern lands have imitated HIM and so have gone far
astray from northern nature. The pupil of nature had still to be
taught the 'rules' of the critics to watch the temper and fashion of
his time and to try his fortune among the courtly poets and
grammarians of the capital of civilisation. Between the years of
early youth in Sicily and the years of waiting for court patronage at
Alexandria it seems probable that we must place a period of
education in the island of Cos. The testimonies of the Grammarians
who handed on to us the scanty traditions about Theocritus agree in
making him the pupil of Philetas of Cos. This Philetas was a critic
a commentator on Homer and an elegiac poet whose love-songs were
greatly admired by the Romans of the Augustan age. He is said to
have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus who was himself born as
Theocritus records in the isle of Cos. It has been conjectured that
Ptolemy and Theocritus were fellow pupils and that the poet may have
hoped to obtain court favour at Alexandria from this early
connection. About this point nothing is certainly known nor can we
exactly understand the sort of education that was given in the school
of the poet Philetas. The ideas of that artificial age make it not
improbable that Philetas professed to teach the art of poetry. A
French critic and poet of our own time M. Baudelaire was willing to
do as much 'in thirty lessons.' Possibly Philetas may have imparted
technical rules then in vogue and the fashionable knack of
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