[137] Those fragments are from the #Hypobolimaios#, pp. 48, 49.
[138] Compare #Boiôtia#, fr. 2, p. 9; #Misogynês#, fr. 1, p. 32; #Plokion#, fr. 8, p. 42.
[141] _Incert. Fab._ fr. 26, p. 122. Cf. ib. fr. 86.
Theocritus; his Life.--The Canon of his Poems.--The Meaning of the Word Idyl.--Bucolic Poetry in Greece, Rome, Modern Europe.--The Scenery of Theocritus.--Relation of Southern Nature to Greek Mythology and Greek Art.--Rustic Life and Superstitions.--Feeling for Pure Nature in Theocritus.--How Distinguished from the same Feeling in Modern Poets.--Galatea.--Pharmaceutria.--Hylas.--Greek Chivalry.--The Dioscuri.--Thalysia.--Bion.--The Lament for Adonis.--Moschus.--Europa.--Megara.--Lament for Bion.--The Debts of Modern Poets to the Idyllists.
Of the lives of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus there is very little known, and that little has been often repeated. Theocritus was a Syracusan, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna. Some confusion as to his parentage arose from the fact that in the seventh idyl Theocritus introduced himself under the artificial name of Simichidas, which led early critics to suppose he had a father called Simichus. It is, however, quite clear that the concurrent testimony of Suidas and of an epigram in the anthology, which distinctly asserts his descent from Praxagoras and Philinna, is to be accepted in preference to all conjectures founded on a _nom de plume_. Theocritus flourished between 283 and 263 B.C., but the dates and circumstances of his birth and death are alike unknown. We may gather, inferentially or directly from his poems, that he sought the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria, and lived for some time among the men of letters at his court. Indeed, Theocritus was the most brilliant ornament of that somewhat artificial period of literature; he above all the Alexandrian poets carried the old genius of Greece into new channels instead of imitating, annotating, and rehandling ancient masterpieces. The sixth and seventh idyls prove that Aratus, the astronomer, was a familiar friend of the Syracusan bard; probably the frequent allusions to meteorology and the science of the stars which we trace in the poems of Theocritus may be referred to this intimacy. From the idyls, again, we learn that the poet left Alexandria wearied with court life, and, like Spenser, unwilling