Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose | Page 6

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 introducing obscure
mythological allusions. He was a logician as well as a poet, and is
fabled to have died of vexation because he could not unriddle one of
the metaphysical catches or puzzles of the sophists. His varied activity
seems to have worn him to a shadow; the contemporary satirists
bantered him about his leanness, and it was alleged that he wore leaden
soles to his sandals lest the wind should blow him, as it blew the calves
of Daphnis (Idyl IX) over a cliff against the rocks, or into the sea. {0e}
Philetas seems a strange master for Theocritus, but, whatever the
qualities of the teacher, Cos, the home of the luxurious old age of
Meleager, was a beautiful school. The island was one of the most

ancient colonies of the Dorians, and the Syracusan scholar found
himself among a people who spoke his own broad and liquid dialect.
The sides of the limestone hills were clothed with vines, and with
shadowy plane-trees which still attain extraordinary size and age, while
the wine-presses where Demeter smiled, 'with sheaves and poppies in
her hands,' yielded a famous vintage. The people had a soft industry of
their own, they fashioned the 'Coan stuff,' transparent robes for
woman's wear, like the [Greek], the thin undulating tissues which
Theugenis was to weave with the ivory distaff, the gift of Theocritus.
As a colony of Epidaurus, Cos naturally cultivated the worship of
Asclepius, the divine physician, the child of Apollo. In connection with
his worship and with the clan of the Asclepiadae (that widespread stock
to which Aristotle belonged, and in which the practice of leechcraft was
hereditary), Cos possessed a school of medicine. In the temple of
Asclepius patients hung up as votive offerings representations of their
diseased limbs, and thus the temple became a museum of anatomical
specimens. Cos was therefore resorted to by young students from all
parts of the East, and Theocritus cannot but have made many friends of
his own age. Among these he alludes in various passages to Nicias,
afterwards a physician at Miletus, to Philinus, noted in later life as the
head of a medical sect, and to Aratus. Theocritus has sung of Aratus's
loveaffairs, and St. Paul has quoted him as a witness to man's

instinctive consent in the doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God.
These strangely various notices have done more for the memory of
Aratus than his own didactic poem on the meteorological theories of
his age. He lives, with Philinus and the rest of the Coan students,
because Theocritus introduced them into the picture of a happy
summer's day. In the seventh idyl, that one day of Demeter's
harvest-feast is immortal, and the sun never goes down on its