Theocrĭtus
(
Θεόκριτος). The most famous of the Greek bucolic poets
was a native of Syracuse, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna. He visited Alexandria towards
the end of the reign of Ptolemy Soter, where he received the instruction of Philetas and
Asclepiades, and began to distinguish himself as a poet. Other accounts make him a native of
Cos, which would bring him more directly into connection with Philetas (Suidas, s. v.
Θεόκριτος). His first efforts obtained for him the patronage of
Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was associated in the kingdom with his father, Ptolemy Soter, in
B.C. 285, and in whose praise, therefore, the poet wrote the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
seventeenth Idyls. At Alexandria he became acquainted with the poet Aratus, to whom he
addressed his sixth Idyl. Theocritus afterwards returned to Syracuse, and lived there under
Hiero II. It appears from the sixteenth Idyl that Theocritus was dissatisfied, both with the
want of liberality on the part of Hiero in rewarding him for his poems, and with the political
state of his native country. It may therefore be supposed that he devoted the latter part of
his life almost entirely to the contemplation of those scenes of nature and of country life on
his representations of which his fame chiefly rests.
Theocritus was the creator of bucolic poetry in Greek, and, through imitators, such as
Vergil, in Roman literature. (See
Vergilius.)
The bucolic
Idyls of Theocritus are of a dramatic and mimetic character. They
are
pictures of the ordinary life of the common people of Sicily;
whence their name
εἴδη, εἰδύλλια. The pastoral poems and
romances of later times are a totally different sort of composition from the bucolics of
Theocritus, who knows nothing of the affected sentiment which has been ascribed to the
imaginary shepherds of a fictitious Arcadia. He merely exhibits simple and faithful pictures
of the common life of the Sicilian people, in a thoroughly objective, although truly
poetical, spirit. Dramatic simplicity and truth are impressed upon the scenes exhibited in his
poems, into the colouring of which he has thrown much of the natural comedy which is always
seen in the common life of a free people. In his dramatic dialogue he is influenced by the
mimes of
Sophron (q.v.), as may be seen especially
in the fifteenth Idyl (
Adoniazusae). The poems of Theocritus of this class may
be compared with those of Herondas, who belonged, like Theocritus, to the literary school of
Philetas of Cos. In genius, however, Theocritus was greatly the superior. The collection which
has come down to us under the name of Theocritus consists of thirty poems, called by the
general title of
Idyls, a fragment of a few lines from a poem entitled
Berenicé, and twentytwo epigrams in the Greek Anthology. But these
Idyls are not all bucolic, and were not all written by Theocritus. Those of which the
genuineness is the most doubtful are the twelfth, twenty-third, twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh,
and twenty-ninth; and Idyls xiii., xvi., xvii., xxii., xxiv., and xxvi. are in Epic style, and
have more of Epic dialect, especially Idyl xvi. It is likely that these poems on Epic subjects
were written early in the poet's life, and, as court poems, had some of the artificial and
imitative character of the Alexandrians. In general the dialect of Theocritus is Doric, but
two of the Idyls (xxviii. and xxix.) are in the Aeolic.
There are numerous manuscripts of Theocritus, especially in the Laurentian Library at
Florence, in the Vatican, and at Paris; but none antedate the thirteenth century. Theocritus
is edited by Valckenaer
(1810); Wüstemann
(Gotha, 1830);
Meineke
(1856); Fritzsche
(Leipzig, 1869); Paley
(London,
1863); Wordsworth
(1877), and Kynaston
(1873). There are
translations into English verse by Chapman
(1866) and Calverley
(1869); and into English prose by Lang
(1889), the last with an
introduction. See
Knapp, Theokrit und die Idyllen-Dichtung (1882);
Bachelin,
Interprétation Littéraire et Philologique de la
Première Idylle de Théocrite (Paris, 1886); and
Fritzsche, Zu Theokrit und Virgil (1860). There is a lexicon to
Theocritus by Rumpel
(1879).