hospitality on his way to Marathon, and dwelt upon picturesque descriptive detail.
An early surviving example is Theocritus’ Idyll 13 featuring the story of Heracles and
Hylas, emphasizing the affection of the former for the latter and portraying the
muscular and heroic Heracles in a softer and more tender light.
The Idyllsof Theocritus (300–260), short poems of about 100 to 150 lines long
(idyll is a diminutive from eidosmeaning ‘little form’), featured several in which
shepherds with elegant names competed with one another in mellifluous song set in
the beautiful landscape of Sicily where Theocritus had grown up. The sophisticated
city poet living in Alexandria nostalgically recreating a romantic image of the simpler
rural world of his boyhood thereby created the pastoral genre. In the seventh Idyll,
‘Harvest Home’, is a sensuous evocation of a Mediterranean landscape, vivid in sight
and sound, with a rich pictorial appeal.
There, happy in our welcome, we flung ourselves down
On couches of fragrant reeds and freshcut vineleaves.
Above our heads a grove of elms and poplars
Stirred gently. We could hear the noise of water,
A lively stream running from the cave of the Nymphs.
Sunburnt cicadas, perched in the shadowy thickets,
Kept up their rasping chatter; a distant tree-frog
Muttered harshly as it picked its way among thorns;
Larks and linnets were singing, a dove made moan,
And brown bees loitered, flitting about the springs.
The tall air smelt of summer, it smelt of ripeness.
We lay stretched out in plenty, pears at our feet,
Apples at our sides and plumtrees reaching down,
Branches pulled earthward by the weight of fruit.
(Idyll7, 133–146 translated by Robert Wells)In such settings, presided over by Pan, the nature god, his attendant satyrs and the
indwelling nymphs, the singing shepherds and herdsmen engage in witty banter or
woo their beloved, as Daphnis attempts to persuade Chloris to yield to his charms in
the following extract from a poem in the Theocritean corpus but no longer attributed
to him, illustrated here because of the neat translation by John Dryden, published in
1685:
Daphnis The Shepherd Paris bore the Spartan bride
By force away, and then by force enjoyed;
But I by free consent can boast a bliss,
A fairer Helen, and a sweeter kiss.182 THE GREEKS