threshing and churning ...'
In fact, the charm of Theocritus is that he keeps a foot in both camps. His shepherds still abuse each other with coarse jokes and hiss at
their flocks. The feel of the Greek seasons and insects is still there, along with an eye for plants so precise that one critic has argued he
studied botany with the doctors on Cos. At the same time he teases us with his urbanity and his uses of the set themes of early lyric
poetry. Theocritus' shepherds meet, then challenge each other to sing.
Painting Of Polyphemus And Galatea from the villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotre-case, near Pompeii (c. 10 B.C.). The whimsical
tale of the brutish Cyclops who fell in love with a sea-nymph inspired two of Theocritus' Idylls and appealed to the educated taste of the
Roman nobility of the early Empire.
Their songs enchant us with their refrains and repetitions, a style which may derive from real songs in the hills. But they also weave
together the themes of excluded lovers and revellers, poems for departing and returning travellers, which we find so often in past elegy
and lyric. There is wit in the ugliness of the characters who love, the 'urban' laments of a Cyclops by the seaside, and the playfulness of
the girl whom he woos among barking dogs and armfuls of apples. In one of its forms, the elegy, pastoral poetry has pleased almost
every taste. In Theocritus' hands it gained form and pathos. All nature joined in the lament for a dying shepherd-poet, echoed by a
polished use of the refrain. The pastoral elegy for the shepherd Daphnis developed into elegies for a dead poetic friend or master. In the
touching lament for Bion it gave us the finest Greek poem to survive from the years around too B.C. Writing in Italy, its unknown author
contrasted the yearly renewal of nature and the death of man for ever. Directly from these elegies we derive three great poems, Milton's