Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose | Page 3

Thus in Syracuse and the other towns of the coast, Theocritus
would have always before his eyes the spectacle of refined and
luxurious manners, and always in his ears the babble of the Dorian
women, while he had only to pass the gates, and wander through the
fens of Lysimeleia, by the brackish mere, or ride into the hills, to find
himself in the golden world of pastoral. Thinking of his early years, and
of the education that nature gives the poet, we can imagine him, like
Callicles in Mr. Arnold's poem, singing at the banquet of a merchant or
a general -
'With his head full of wine, and his hair crown'd,
Touching his harp
as the whim came on him,
And praised and spoil'd by master and by
guests,
Almost as much as the new dancing girl.'

We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems,
though the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown. We
can follow him, in fancy, as he breaks from the revellers and wanders
out into the night. Wherever he turned his feet, he could find such
scenes as he has painted in the idyls. If the moon rode high in heaven,
as he passed through the outlying gardens he might catch a glimpse of
some deserted girl shredding the magical herbs into the burning brazier,
and sending upward to the 'lady Selene' the song which was to charm
her lover home. The magical image melted in the burning, the herbs
smouldered, the tale of love was told, and slowly the singer 'drew the
quiet night into her blood.' Her lay ended with a passage of softened
melancholy -
'Do thou farewell, and turn thy steeds to Ocean, lady, and my pain I
will endure, even as I have declared. Farewell, Selene beautiful;
farewell, ye other stars that follow the wheels of Night.'
A grammarian says that Theocritus borrowed this second idyl, the story
of Simaetha, from a piece by Sophron. But he had no need to borrow
from anything but the nature before his eyes. Ideas change so little
among the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition is so
strong, that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their prayer for
pity and help. Theocritus himself could have added little passion to this
incantation, still chanted in the moonlit nights of Greece: {0a}
'Bright golden Moon, that now art near to thy setting, go thou and
salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, and said,
"Never will I leave thee." And, lo, he has left me, like a field reaped
and gleaned, like a church where no man comes to pray, like a city
desolate. Therefore I would curse him, and yet again my heart fails me
for tenderness, my heart is vexed within me, my spirit is moved with
anguish. Nay, even so I will lay my curse on him, and let God do even
as He will, with my pain and with my crying, with my flame, and mine
imprecations.'
It is thus that the women of the islands, like the girl of Syracuse two
thousand years ago, hope to lure back love or avenged love betrayed,
and thus they 'win more ease from song than could be bought with

gold.'
In whatever direction the path of the Syracusan wanderer lay, he would
find then, as he would find now in Sicily, some scene of the idyllic life,
framed between the distant Etna and the sea. If he strayed in the faint
blue of the summer dawn, through the fens to the shore, he might reach
the wattled cabin of the two old fishermen in the twenty-first idyl.
There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the
incommunicable sense of nature, rounding and softening the toilsome
days of the aged and the poor, than the Theocritean poem of the
Fisherman's Dream. It is as true to nature as the statue of the naked
fisherman in the Vatican. One cannot read these verses but the vision
returns to one, of sandhills by the sea, of a low cabin roofed with grass,
where fishing-rods of reed are leaning against the door, while the
Mediterranean floats up her waves that fill the waste with sound. This
nature, grey and still, seems in harmony with the wise content of old
men whose days are waning on the limit of life, as they have all been
spent by the desolate margin of the sea.
The twenty-first idyl is one of the rare poems of Theocritus that are not
filled with the sunlight of Sicily, or of Egypt. The landscapes he prefers
are often seen under the noonday heat, when shade is most pleasant to
men. His shepherds invite each other to the shelter of