Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose | Page 9

such a festival as Theocritus
describes, while a crowd of foreigners gossiped among the flowers and
embroideries, the strangely-shaped sacred cakes, the ebony, the gold,
and the ivory. Not so much Oriental as barbarous was the impulse
which made Ptolemy Philadelphus choose his own sister, Arsinoe, for
wife, as if absolute dominion had already filled the mind of the
Macedonian royal race with the incestuous pride of the Incas, or of
Queen Hatasu, in an elder Egyptian dynasty. This nascent barbarism
has touched a few of the Alexandrian poems even of Theocritus, and

his panegyric of Ptolemy, of his divine ancestors, and his sister-bride is
not much more Greek in sentiment than are those old native hymns of
Pentaur to 'the strong Bull,' or the 'Risen Sun,' to Rameses or
Thothmes.
Again, the early Alexandrian was what we call a 'literary' age.
Literature was not an affair of religion and of the state, but ministered
to the pleasure of individuals, and at their pleasure was composed. {0f}
The temper of the time was crudely critical. The Museum and the
Libraries, with their hundreds of thousands of volumes, were
hot-houses of grammarians and of learned poets. Callimachus, the head
librarian, was also the most eminent man of letters. Unable, himself, to
compose a poem of epic length and copiousness, he discouraged all
long poems. He shone in epigrams, pedantic hymns, and didactic verses.
He toyed with anagrams, and won court favour by discovering that the
letters of 'Arsinoe,' the name of Ptolemy's wife, made the words
[Greek], the violet of Hera. In another masterpiece the genius of
Callimachus followed the stolen tress of Queen Berenice to the skies,
where the locks became a constellation. A contemporary of
Callimachus was Zenodotus, the critic, who was for improving the Iliad
and Odyssey by cutting out all the epic commonplaces which seemed
to him to be needless repetitions. It is pretty plain that, in literary
society, Homer was thought out of date and rococo. The favourite
topics of poets were now, not the tales of Troy and Thebes, but the
amorous adventures of the gods. When Apollonius Rhodius attempted
to revive the epic, it is said that the influence of Callimachus quite
discomfited the young poet. A war of epigrams began, and while
Apollonius called Callimachus a 'blockhead' (so finished was his
invective), the veteran compared his rival to the Ibis, the scavenger-bird.
Other singers satirised each others' legs, and one, the Aretino of the
time, mocked at king Ptolemy and scourged his failings in verse. The
literary quarrels (to which Theocritus seems to allude in Idyl VII,
where Lycidas says he 'hates the birds of the Muses that cackle in vain
rivalry with Homer') were as stupid as such affairs usually are. The
taste for artificial epic was to return; although many people already
declared that Homer was the world's poet, and that the world needed no
other. This epic reaction brought into favour Apollonius Rhodius,

author of the Argonautica. Theocritus has been supposed to aim at him
as a vain rival of Homer, but M. Couat points out that Theocritus was
seventy when Apollonius began to write. The literary fashions of
Alexandria are only of moment to us so far as they directly affected
Theocritus. They could not make him obscure, affected, tedious, but his
nature probably inclined him to obey fashion so far as only to write
short poems. His rural poems are [Greek], 'little pictures.' His
fragments of epic, or imitations of the epic hymns are not
[Greek]
0. not full and sonorous as the songs of Homer and the sea. 'Ce poete est
le moins naif qui se puisse rencontrer, et il se degage de son
oeuvre un parfum de naivete rustique.' {0g} They are, what a
German critic has called them, mythologischen genre-bilder,
cabinet pictures in the manner called genre, full of pretty detail
and domestic feeling. And this brings us to the third characteristic
of the age,- -its art was elaborately pictorial. Poetry seems to
have sought inspiration from painting, while painting, as we have
said, inclined to genre, to luxurious representations of the amours
of the gods or the adventures of heroes, with backgrounds of
pastoral landscape. Shepherds fluted while Perseus slew Medusa.
The old order of things in Greece had been precisely the opposite of
this Alexandrian manner. Homer and the later Homeric legends, with
the tragedians, inspired the sculptors, and even the artisans who
decorated vases. When a new order of subjects became fashionable,
and when every rich Alexandrian had pictures or frescoes on his walls,
it appears that the painters took the lead, that the initiative in art was
theirs. The Alexandrian pictures perished long ago, but the relics of
Alexandrian style which remain in the buried cities of Campania, in
Pompeii especially, bear testimony