Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose | Page 5

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