incidental to Callimachus' patronage. No king gave long-term support to the other masters as poets only. Their debt was to the wonders
of the city and the court society on which they touched. Two of the major poets came and went from Alexandria, while other good
epigrams were written away from kings altogether. They lacked, however, the tone of the big city.
From Tarentum in the Greek west came Leonidas, whose major gifts lay with the scenes and objects of rural life and verses on his own
simple, impoverished existence. In a similar style, we hear from two talented women, Nossis of Locri and her poems on female domestic
life, and Anyte from little Tegea, whose charming poetry conveys a strong sense of a pastoral setting. To Anyte we owe the first known
epitaphs for favourite animals, a genre which quickly extended to poems on the dogs of Ptolemaic 'top people' and on animals killed
more nobly in hunts in Egypt or Afghanistan. The tone of these 'western' epigrams is lost by translations which turn them into rhyme.
Generally, they die away, ending 'not with the thud of the hammer on the anvil, but the dying notes of a guitar'. This mood of a serene
and wistful still-life has to struggle with elaborate language and the lack of perfect metrical polish, but at times it wins the battle.
By the 240s, the first age of invention and rivalry was fading. The style was imitated sweetly, and its centre shifted from Alexandria to
the Syrian cities. The Syrian Meleager included the work of some fifty epigrammatists in his great anthology, the Garland (c. 100bc). In
its first flush the epigram takes us to the frontiers of the new poetry. Its poets drew the new contemporary interests into their polished
elegiacs: the mime and the pastoral, the enlarged iambic, and the taste for wit and pathos. Faced by a classic tradition, the early
Hellenistic masters did not rebel against form and rules. There were no Vorticists and Imagists. Instead, they perfected form and
multiplied metrical rules and archaism. Greek artists were particularly effective when particularly constrained by their own limits.
Dioscorides' epigrams honour the new dramatists, but nothing survives by which to judge them. At a lower level, however, there was a
sudden new interest in the mime. This coarse, popular sketch had flourished in Doric prose, and its Sicilian master, Sophron, had once
impressed Plato. Characteristically, it was given a literary twist and polish by the Hellenistic poets, Herodas and Theocritus. Herodas'
talent has been underestimated. His poetry only reappeared on a papyrus in 1891, and it was wrongly identified with the contemporary
style of 'realism'. Critics mistook his form and language. He revived the limping iambic metre and the old Ionic dialect of sixth-century-
BC poetry, and attached this learning to the lowly mime. His surviving sketches are lively and give a wicked glimpse of social history.
The best concern women, though seldom in a favourable light. One woman attempts to persuade another whose husband is away in
Egypt that she must follow her instincts and have an affair. A cross mother takes her dissolute son to his schoolmaster for a thrashing:
best of all, a woman who has been making love to her slave decides to have him flogged for his infidelities, then moderates her rage at
the plea of a fellow servant. There is no reason why a good actor could not have performed these sketches on the stage. Herodas had his
critics, and there is a strong case for connecting one of his sketches with the island of Cos, bringing him within the Ptolemies' inner
political orbit, and attaching him to high literary culture. Certainly he left one of the most mischievous Hellenistic jokes: when one of his
women sings the praises of a dildo which she has found in her friend's house, she is told that it once belonged to 'Nossis and Erinna'.
These two names refer to famous poetesses. Herodas is surely having fun with two staid ladies of the literary world.
Our other mime-poems, written by Theocritus, are equally learned in tone and language. He cast them in hexameters, a grand metre for a
low subject, producing a calculated incongruity. The best tells of the visit of two Syracusan ladies to a royal festival in Alexandria. The
dialect, the irony, and the sense of simple visitors' wonder as they struggle through the crowds, are a brilliant sketch of the big city. A
drama of magic and teenage first love is nearly as good, while a dialogue between two poor fishermen should be better known, whether
or not Theocritus wrote it. He is the one consistently fine poet of this period. He was born in Sicily, probably in Syracuse. In the 270s he
flattered Ptolemy II and then, or later, King Hiero in his own war-torn Sicily. Once he alludes to the Alexandrian masters, and two of his
best poems are set in Alexandria's orbit, one in the city, one on the island of Cos. There is a slight bias towards the flora of the east
Aegean, not Sicily, in the many plants he mentions. Otherwise, he is a mystery to us, although a good short epic-sketch in a hymn to
Pollux shows that he understood boxing. Here he excelled the contemporary librarian in Alexandria.
Theocritus' good poems are varied, but his fame rests on his invention of pastoral poetry. From his example began the tradition which
has given us Virgil's Eclogues, Spenser's shepherds, Handel's Ads and Galatea, and Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. He is the one
Hellenistic poet to have been translated internationally: he even left a direct influence on nineteenth-century Russian poetry. The
ancients themselves were puzzled where pastoral had come from. They guessed, probably wrongly, that it arose from choir-songs at
various festivals of Artemis. A better guess may be the shepherd-songs of herdsmen with time enough to while away. In many cultures
shepherds are associated with song.
Readers have long been bothered by widely differing aspects of his pastoral form: that point, said Sir Philip Sidney, 'where the hedge of
poetry is lowest'. Some have regretted his realism, others his artifice. How could shepherds talk like that? Equally, how could Theocritus
make his shepherds quite so coarse? Eighteenth-century pastoral preferred Virgil. 'I do not look on Theocritus as a romantic writer', Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu told Alexander Pope, himself a pastoral poet in his youth; 'he has only given a plain image of the way of life
among the peasants of his country ... I do not doubt, had he been a Briton, that his Idylliums had been filled with descriptions of