when he raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the realm of art, he composed a masterpiece, and a model for all later poets, as for the authors of Lycidas, Thyrsis, and Adonais.

Theocritus did more than borrow a note from the country people.  He brought the gifts of his own spirit to the contemplation of the world.  He had the clearest vision, and he had the most ardent love of poetry, ‘of song may all my dwelling be full, for neither is sleep more sweet, nor sudden spring, nor are flowers more delicious to the bees, so dear to me are the Muses.’ . . .  ‘Never may we be sundered, the Muses of Pieria and I.’  Again, he had perhaps in greater measure than any other poet the gift of the undisturbed enjoyment of life.  The undertone of all his idyls is joy in the sunshine and in existence.  His favourite word, the word that opens the first idyl, and, as it were, strikes the keynote, is αδύ, sweet.  He finds all things delectable in the rural life:

‘Sweet are the voices of the calves, and sweet the heifers’ lowing; sweet plays the shepherd on the shepherd’s pipe, and sweet is the echo.’

Even in courtly poems, and in the artificial hymns of which we are to speak in their place, the memory of the joyful country life comes over him.  He praises Hiero, because Hiero is to restore peace to Syracuse, and when peace returns, then ‘thousands of sheep fattened in the meadows will bleat along the plain, and the kine, as they flock in crowds to the stalls, will make the belated traveller hasten on his way.’  The words evoke a memory of a narrow country lane in the summer evening, when light is dying out of the sky, and the fragrance of wild roses by the roadside is mingled with the perfumed breath of cattle that hurry past on their homeward road.  There was scarcely a form of the life he saw that did not seem to him worthy of song, though it might be but the gossip of two rude hinds, or the drinking bout of the Thessalian horse-jobber, and the false girl Cynisca and her wild lover Æschines.  But it is the sweet country that he loves best to behold and to remember.  In his youth Sicily and Syracuse were disturbed by civil and foreign wars, wars of citizens against citizens, of Greeks against Carthaginians, and against the fierce ‘men of Mars,’ the banded mercenaries who possessed themselves of Messana.  But this was not matter for his joyous Muse—

κείνος δ’ ού πολέμους, ού δάκρυα, Πανα δ’ έμελπε,
και βούτασ έλίγαινε και άείδων ενόμευε

‘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 ύδάτινα βράκη, 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 love-affairs, 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 delight.  We see Theocritus

κουπω ταν μεσάταν όδον ανυμες, ουδε το σαμα
άμιν το Βρασίλα κατεφαίνετο—