16 - Theocritus and Virgil

Summary

Theocritus of Syracuse, who invented the pastoral, was a Hellenistic poet, a contemporary of Callimachus and Apollonius. Disappointed perhaps in an earlier appeal to Hiero II of Syracuse (Idyll 16, a brilliant display-piece), Theocritus migrated ‘with the Muses’ (16.107) to the great new capital of Egypt, whose lord, Ptolemy Philadelphus, was renowned for his liberality to poets and men of letters. It is evident from Idyll 15 that Theocritus was familiar with the city of Alexandria; and from Idyll 17 that he gained Ptolemy's favour. He was familiar too with the Aegean island of Cos, Ptolemy's birthplace and home of his tutor Philitas, the coryphaeus, as it were, of the Alexandrian school of poetry. There Theocritus had good friends, Eucritus, Amyntas, the brothers Phrasidamus and Antigenes, all mentioned in Idyll 7, the setting of which is Cos; and there he probably met Nicias, the love-sick physician and minor poet to whom Idyll 11 is addressed: the Cyclops in love, no longer Homer's bloodcurdling monster but ‘our Cyclops, old Polyphemus’ (7–8), an enamoured country bumpkin. It is tempting to imagine Theocritus in Alexandria, Alexander's city, a city composed of all sorts and conditions of men, Greek and barbarian, with no history, no common traditions, no intimate relationship to the countryside – to imagine him there cultivating a special nostalgia by writing of the Sicilian herdsmen of his youth: a landscape of memory, for it is not known that he ever returned to Sicily.

Theocritus' poetry, or rather his pastoral poetry (for he wrote much else besides), is nostalgic, exquisitely so, as any urbane reflection on a simpler, now remote existence will be.