Theocritus, Idylls

Theocritus, Idylls from

THEOCRITUS, BION AND MOSCHUS RENDERED INTO ENGLISH PROSE WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY ANDREW LANG

LIFE OF THEOCRITUS
(From Suidas)



Theocritus, the Chian.  But there is another Theocritus, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna (see Epigram XXIII), or as some say of Simichus.  (This is plainly derived from the assumed name Simichidas in Idyl VII.)  He was a Syracusan, or, as others say, a Coan settled in Syracuse.  He wrote the so-called Bucolics in the Dorian dialect.  Some attribute to him the following works:- The Proetidae, The Pleasures of Hope (‘Ελπιδες), Hymns, The Heroines, Dirges, Ditties, Elegies, Iambics, Epigrams.  But it known that there are three Bucolic poets: this Theocritus, Moschus of Sicily, and Bion of Smyrna, from a village called Phlossa.



LIFE OF THEOCRITUS
ΘΕΟΚΡΙΤΟΥΓΕΝΟΣ
(Usually prefixed to the Idyls)



Theocritus the Bucolic poet was a Syracusan by extraction, and the son of Simichidas, as he says himself, Simichidas, pray whither through the noon dost thou dray thy feet? (Idyl VII).  Some say that this was an assumed name, for he seems to have been snub-nosed (σιμος), and that his father was Praxagoras, and his mother Philinna.  He became the pupil of Philetas and Asclepiades, of whom he speaks (Idyl VII), and flourished about the time of Ptolemy Lagus.  He gained much fame for his skill in bucolic poetry.  According to some his original name was Moschus, and Theocritus was a name he later assumed.



THEOCRITUS AND HIS AGE



At the beginning of the third century before Christ, in the years just preceding those in which Theocritus wrote, the genius of Greece seemed to have lost her productive force.  Nor would it have been strange if that force had really been exhausted.  Greek poetry had hitherto enjoyed a peculiarly free development, each form of art succeeding each without break or pause, because each - epic, lyric, dithyramb, the drama - had responded to some new need of the state and of religion.  Now in the years that followed the fall of Athens and the conquests of Macedonia, Greek religion and the Greek state had ceased to be themselves.  Religion and the state had been the patrons of poetry; on their decline poetry seemed dead.  There were no heroic kings, like those for whom epic minstrels had chanted.  The cities could no longer welcome an Olympian winner with Pindaric hymns.  There was no imperial Athens to fill the theatres with a crowd of citizens and strangers eager to listen to new tragic masterpieces.  There was no humorous democracy to laugh at all the world, and at itself, with Aristophanes.  The very religion of Sophocles and Aeschylus was debased.  A vulgar usurper had stripped the golden ornaments from Athene of the Parthenon.  The ancient faith in the protecting gods of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes, had become a lax readiness to bow down in the temple of any Oriental Rimmon, of Serapis or Adonis.  Greece had turned her face, with Alexander of Macedon, to the East; Alexander had fallen, and Greece had become little better than the western portion of a divided Oriental empire.  The centre of intellectual life had been removed from Athens to Alexandria (founded 332 B.C.)  The new Greek cities of Egypt and Asia, and above all Alexandria, seemed no cities at all to Greeks who retained the pure Hellenic traditions.  Alexandria was thirty times larger than the size assigned by Aristotle to a well-balanced state.  Austere spectators saw in Alexandria an Eastern capital and mart, a place of harems and bazaars, a home of tyrants, slaves, dreamers, and pleasure-seekers.  Thus a Greek of the old school must have despaired of Greek poetry.  There was nothing (he would have said) to evoke it; no dawn of liberty could flush this silent Memnon into song.  The collectors, critics, librarians of Alexandria could only produce literary imitations of the epic and the hymn, or could at best write epigrams or inscriptions for the statue of some alien and luxurious god.  Their critical activity in every field of literature was immense, their original genius sterile.  In them the intellect of the Hellenes still faintly glowed, like embers on an altar that shed no light on the way.  Yet over these embers the god poured once again the sacred oil, and from the dull mass leaped, like a many-coloured frame, the genius of THEOCRITUS.

To take delight in that genius, so human, so kindly, so musical in expression, requires, it may be said, no long preparation.  The art of Theocritus scarcely needs to be illustrated by any description of the conditions among which it came to perfection.  It is always impossible to analyse into its component parts the genius of a poet.  But it is not impossible to detect some of the influences that worked on Theocritus.  We can study his early ‘environment’; the country scenes he knew, and the songs of the neatherds which he elevated into art.  We can ascertain the nature of the demand for poetry in the chief cities and in the literary society of the time.  As a result, we can understand the broad twofold division of the poems of Theocritus into rural and epic idyls, and with this we must rest contented.

It is useless to attempt a regular biography of Theocritus.  Facts and dates are alike wanting, the ancient accounts (p. ix) are clearly based on his works, but it is by no means impossible to construct a ‘legend’ or romance of his life, by aid of his own verses, and of hints and fragments which reach us from the past and the present.  The genius of Theocritus was so steeped in the colours of human life, he bore such true and full witness as to the scenes and men he knew, that life (always essentially the same) becomes in turn a witness to his veracity.  He was born in the midst of nature that, through all the changes of things, has never lost its sunny charm.  The existence he loved best to contemplate, that of southern shepherds, fishermen, rural people, remains what it always has been in Sicily and in the isles of Greece.  The habits and the passions of his countryfolk have not altered, the echoes of their old love-songs still sound among the pines, or by the sea-banks, where Theocritus ‘watched the visionary flocks.’

Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century, or, according to Couat, about 315 B.C., and was a native of Syracuse, ‘the greatest of Greek cities, the fairest of all cities.’  So Cicero calls it, describing the four quarters that were encircled by its walls, - each quarter as large as a town, - the fountain Arethusa, the stately temples with their doors of ivory and gold.  On the fortunate dwellers in Syracuse, Cicero says, the sun shone every day, and there was never a morning so tempestuous but the sunlight conquered at last, and broke through the clouds.  That perennial sunlight still floods the poems of Theocritus with its joyous glow.  His birthplace was the proper home of an idyllic poet, of one who, with all his enjoyment of the city life of Greece, had yet been ‘breathed on by the rural Pan,’ and best loved the sights and sounds and fragrant air of the forests and the coast.  Thanks to the mountainous regions of Sicily, to Etna, with her volcanic cliffs and snow-fed streams, thanks also to the hills of the interior, the populous island never lost the charm of nature.  Sicily was not like the overcrowded and over-cultivated Attica; among the Sicilian heights and by the coast were few enclosed estates and narrow farms.  The character of the people, too, was attuned to poetry.  The Dorian settlers had kept alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and uplands haunted by Pan.  This popular poetry influenced the literary verse of Sicily.  The songs of Stesichorus, a minstrel of the early period, and the little rural ‘mimes’ or interludes of Sophron are lost, and we have only fragments of Epicharmus.  But it seems certain that these poets, predecessors of Theocritus, liked to mingle with their own composition strains of rustic melody, volks-lieder, ballads, love-songs, ditties, and dirges, such as are still chanted by the peasants of Greece and Italy.  Thus in Syracuse and the other towns of the coast, Theocritus would have always before his eyes the spectacle of refined and luxurious manners, and always in his ears the babble of the Dorian women, while he had only to pass the gates, and wander through the fens of Lysimeleia, by the brackish mere, or ride into the hills, to find himself in the golden world of pastoral.  Thinking of his early years, and of the education that nature gives the poet, we can imagine him, like Callicles in Mr. Arnold’s poem, singing at the banquet of a merchant or a general -


‘With his head full of wine, and his hair crown’d,
Touching his harp as the whim came on him,
And praised and spoil’d by master and by guests,
Almost as much as the new dancing girl.’


We can recover the world that met his eyes and inspired his poems, though the dates of the composition of these poems are unknown.  We can follow him, in fancy, as he breaks from the revellers and wanders out into the night.  Wherever he turned his feet, he could find such scenes as he has painted in the idyls.  If the moon rode high in heaven, as he passed through the outlying gardens he might catch a glimpse of some deserted girl shredding the magical herbs into the burning brazier, and sending upward to the ‘lady Selene’ the song which was to charm her lover home.  The magical image melted in the burning, the herbs smouldered, the tale of love was told, and slowly the singer ‘drew the quiet night into her blood.’  Her lay ended with a passage of softened melancholy -

‘Do thou farewell, and turn thy steeds to Ocean, lady, and my pain I will endure, even as I have declared.  Farewell, Selene beautiful; farewell, ye other stars that follow the wheels of Night.’

A grammarian says that Theocritus borrowed this second idyl, the story of Simaetha, from a piece by Sophron.  But he had no need to borrow from anything but the nature before his eyes.  Ideas change so little among the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition is so strong, that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their prayer for pity and help.  Theocritus himself could have added little passion to this incantation, still chanted in the moonlit nights of Greece: {208}  But when the hoary deep is roaring, and the sea is broken up in foam, and the waves rage high, then lift I mine eyes unto the earth and trees, and fly the sea, and the land is welcome, and the shady wood well pleasing in my sight, where even if the wind blow high the pine-tree sings her song.  Surely an evil life lives the fisherman, whose home is his ship, and his labours are in the sea, and fishes thereof are his wandering spoil.  Nay, sweet to me is sleep beneath the broad-leaved plane-tree; let me love to listen to the murmur of the brook hard by, soothing, not troubling the husbandman with its sound.



IDYL VI



Pan loved his neighbour Echo; Echo loved
A gamesome Satyr; he, by her unmoved,
Loved only Lyde; thus through Echo, Pan,
Lyde, and Satyr, Love his circle ran.
Thus all, while their true lovers’ hearts they grieved,
Were scorned in turn, and what they gave received.
O all Love’s scorners, learn this lesson true;
Be kind to Love, that he be kind to you.



IDYL VII



Alpheus, when he leaves Pisa and makes his way through beneath the deep, travels on to Arethusa with his waters that the wild olives drank, bearing her bridal gifts, fair leaves and flowers and sacred soil.  Deep in the waves he plunges, and runs beneath the sea, and the salt water mingles not with the sweet.  Nought knows the sea as the river journeys through.  Thus hath the knavish boy, the maker of mischief, the teacher of strange ways - thus hath Love by his spell taught even a river to dive.



IDYL VIII



Leaving his torch and his arrows, a wallet strung on his back,
One day came the mischievous Love-god to follow the plough-share’s track:
And he chose him a staff for his driving, and yoked him a sturdy steer,
And sowed in the furrows the grain to the Mother of Earth most dear.
Then he said, looking up to the sky: ‘Father Zeus, to my harvest be good,
Lest I yoke that bull to my plough that Europa once rode through the flood!’



IDYL IX



Would that my father had taught me the craft of a keeper of sheep,
For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks on the steep,
Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to sleep. {210}



Footnotes

{0a}  This fragment is from the collection of M. Fauriel; Chants Populaires de le Grèce.

{0b}  Empedocles on Etna.

{0c}  Ballet des Arts, dansé par sa Majesté; le 8 janvier, 1663.  A Paris, par Robert Ballard, MDCLXIII.

{0d}  These and the following ditties are from the modern Greek ballads collected by MM. Fauriel and Legrand.

{0e}  See Couat, La Poesie Alexandrine, p. 68 et seq., Paris 1882.

{0f}  See Couat, op. cit. p. 395.

{0g}  Couat, p. 434.

{0h}  See Helbig, Campenische Wandmalerie, and Brunn, Die griechischen Bukoliker und die Bildende Kunst.

{0i}  The Hecale of Callimachus, or Theseus and the Marathonian Bull, seems to have been rather a heroic idyl than an epic.

{6}  Or reading Αιολικον=Aeolian, cf. Thucyd. iii. 102.

{9}  These are places famous in the oldest legends of Arcadia.

{11}  Reading, καταδησομαι.  Cf.  Fritzsche’s note and Harpocration, s.v.

{13}  On the word ραμβος, see Lobeck, Aglaoph. p. 700; and ‘The Bull Roarer,’ in the translator’s Custom and Myth.

{19}  Reading καταδησομαι.  Cf. line 3, and note.

{21}  He refers to a piece of folk-lore.

{24}  The shovel was used for tossing the sand of the lists; the sheep were food for Aegon’s great appetite.

{26}  Reading ερισδεις.

{34}  Melanthius was the treacherous goatherd put to a cruel death by Odysseus.

{36}  Ameis and Fritzsche take νιν (as here) to be the dog, not Galatea.  The sex of the Cyclops’s sheep-dog makes the meaning obscure.

{40}  Or, δομον Ωρομεδοντος.  Hermann renders this domum Oromedonteam a gigantic house.’  Oromedon or Eurymedon was the king of the Gigantes, mentioned in Odyssey vii. 58.

{41}  εσχατα.  This is taken by some to mean algam infimam, ‘the bottom weeds of the deepest seas’, by others, the sea-weed highest on the shore, at high watermark.

{42}  Comatas was a goatherd who devoutly served the Muses, and sacrificed to them his masters goats.  His master therefore shut him up in a cedar chest, opening which at the year’s end he found Comatas alive, by miracle, the bees having fed him with honey.  Thus, in a mediaeval legend, the Blessed Virgin took the place, for a year, of the frail nun who had devoutly served her.

{43}  Sneezing in Sicily, as in most countries, was a happy omen.

{50}  A superfluous and apocryphal line is here omitted.

{53}  An allusion to the common superstition (cf. Idyl xii. 24) that perjurers and liars were punished by pimples and blotches.  The old Irish held that blotches showed themselves on the faces of Brehons who gave unjust judgments.

{54}  Spring in the south, like Night in the tropics, comes ‘at one stride’; but Wordsworth finds the rendering distasteful ‘neque sic redditum valde placet.’

{57}  ‘Quant à ta manière, je ne puis la rendre.’ - SAINTE-BEUVE.

{61}  Reading μηνοφορως.

{70}  Cf. Wordsworth’s proposed conjecture -

μεταρσι', ετων παρεοντων.

Meineke observes ‘tota haec carminis pars luxata et foedissime depravata est’.  There seems to be a rude early pun in lines 73, 74.

{72}  The reading -

ου φθεγξη; λυκον ειδες; επαιξε τις, ως σοφος, ειπε, - makes good sense.  ως σοφος is put in the mouth of the girl, and would mean ‘a good guess’!  The allusion of a guest to the superstition that the wolf struck people dumb is taken by Cynisca for a reference to young Wolf, her secret lover.

{73}  Or, as Wordsworth suggests, reading δακρυσι, ‘for him your cheeks are wet with tears.’

{74a}  Shaving in the bronze, and still more, of course, in the stone age, was an uncomfortable and difficult process.  The backward and barbarous Thracians were therefore trimmed in the roughest way, like Aeschines, with his long gnawed moustache.

{74b}  The Megarians having inquired of the Delphic oracle as to their rank among Greek cities, were told that they were absolute last, and not in the reckoning at all.

{77}  Our Lady, here, is Persephone.  The ejaculation served for the old as well as for the new religion of Sicily.  The dialogue is here arranged as in Fritzsche’s text, and in line 8 his punctuation is followed.

{78a}  If cats are meant, the proverb is probably Alexandrian.  Common as cats were in Egypt, they were late comers in Greece.

{78b}  Most of the dialogue has been distributed as in the text of Fritzsche.

{82}  Reading περυσιν.

{89}  I.e. Syracuse, a colony of the Ephyraeans or Corinthians.  The Maiden is Persephone, the Mother Demeter.

{93}  Deipyle, daughter of Adrastus.

{98}  Reading - πιειρα ατε λαον ανεδραμε κοσμος αρουρα.  See also Wordsworth’s note on line 26.

{104}  For αδεα Wordsworth and Hermann conjecture ‘Αρεα.  The sense would be that Eunica, who thinks herself another Cypris, or Aphrodite is, in turn, to be rejected by her Ares, her soldier-lover, as she has rejected the herdsman.

{105}  Reading επιμυσσησι.

{106a}  Reading τα φυκιοεντα τε λαιφη.

{106b}  κωπα.

{106c}  ουδος δ' ουχι θυραν ειχ', and in the next line α γαρ πενια σφας ετηρει.

{106d}  αυδαν.

{107}  Reading, with Fritzsche -

αλλ' ονος εν ραμνω, το τε λυχνιονενπρυτανειω
φαντι γαρ αγρυπνιαν τοδ'εχειν

The lines seem to contain two popular saws, of which it is difficult to guess the meaning.  The first saw appears to express helplessness; the second, to hint that such comforts as lamps lit all night long exist in towns, but are out of the reach of poor fishermen.

{108a}  Reading ηρεμ' ενυξα και νυξας εχαλαξα.  Asphalion first hooked his fish, which ran gamely, and nearly doubled up the rod.  Then the fish sulked, and the angler half despaired of landing him.  To stir the sullen fish, he reminded him of his wound, probably, as we do now, by keeping a tight line, and tapping the butt of the rod.  Then he slackened, giving the fish line in case of a sudden rush; but as there was no such rush, he took in line, or perhaps only showed his fish the butt (for it is not probable that Asphalion had a reel), and so landed him.  The Mediterranean fishers generally toss the fish to land with no display of science, but Asphalion’s imaginary capture was a monster.

{108b}  It is difficult to understand this proceeding.  Perhaps Asphalion had some small net fastened with strings to his boat, in which he towed fish to shore, that the contact with the water might keep them fresher than they were likely to be in the bottom of the coble.  On the other hand, Asphalion was fishing from a rock.  His dream may have been confused.

{111}  πυρεια appear to have been ‘fire sticks,’ by rubbing which together the heroes struck a light.

{118}  Or εγχεα λουσαι, ‘wash the spears,’ as in the Zulu idiom.

{124}  In line 57 for τηλε read Wordsworth’s conjecture τηδε = ενταυθα.

{127}  Odyssey. xix. 36 seq.  (Reading απερ not ατερ.)  ‘Father, surely a great marvel is this that I behold with mine eyes meseems, at least, that the walls of the hall . . . are bright as it were with flaming fire’ . . . ‘Lo! this is the wont of the gods that hold Olympus.’

{128}  ξηρον, prae timore non lacrymantem (Paley).

{129}  Reading, after Fritzsche, ρωγαδος εκ πετρας.  We should have expected the accursed ashes (like those of Wyclif) to be thrown into the river; cf. Virgil, Ecl. viii. 101, ‘Fer cineres, Amarylli, foras, rivoque fluenti transque caput lace nec respexeris.’  Virgil’s knowledge of these observances was not inferior to that of Theocritus.

{130}  Reading εστεμμενω.  If εστεμμνον is read, the phrase will mean ‘pure brimming water.’

{135}  Reading οσσον.

{143}  Reading αλλη, as in Wordsworth’s conjecture, instead of υλη.

{144}  Reading ποπανευματα.

{145}  Πενθημα και ου πενθηα, a play on words difficult to retain in English.  Compare Idyl xiii. line 74.

{147}  The conjecture εμα δ' gives a good sense, mea vero Helena me potius ultra petit.

{148}  Reading, as in Wordsworth’s conjecture, μη 'πιβαλης ταν χειρα, και ει γ' ετι χειλος, αμυξω.

{150a}  Reading οιδ', ακρατιμιη εσσι, with Fritzsche.  Compare the conjecture of Wordsworth, ‘Ουδ' ακρα τι μη εσσι.

{150b}  See Wordsworth’s explanation.

{153}  Syracuse.

{165}  Reading, πεδοικισται (that is, the Corinthian founders of Syracuse), and following Wordsworth’s other conjectures.

{167}  This epigram may have been added by the first editor of Theocritus, Artemidorus the Grammarian.

{176}  This conjecture of Meineke’s offers, at least, a meaning.

{181}  Les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort, avec des sursis indéfinis. - VICTOR HUGO.

{205}  Alcmena bore Iphicles to Amphictyon, Hercules to Zeus.

{208}  Reading, with Weise, ποταγει δε πολυ πλεον αμμε γαλανα.

{210}  For the translations into verse I have to thank Mr. Ernest Myers.