song. The literary genius of Greece showed little aptitude for landscape,
and seldom treated inanimate nature except as a background for human
action and emotion, or it may be in the guise of mythological allegory.
Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Theocritus, so tenderly concerned
with the homely aspects of human life, was not likewise sensitive to the
beauties of nature. At least it is impossible to doubt his attachment to
the land of his childhood, and it is at worst a welcome dream when we
imagine him, as the evening of life drew on, leaving the formal gardens
and painted landscapes of Alexandria and returning to Syracuse and his
beloved Sicily once more.[5]

The verse of Theocritus was echoed by his younger contemporaries, Bion
and Moschus.[6] The former is best known through the oriental passion of
his 'Woe, woe for Adonis,' probably written to be sung at the annual
festival of Syrian origin commemorated by Theocritus in his fifteenth
idyl.[7] The most important extant work of Moschus is the 'Lament for
Bion,' characterized by a certain delicate sentimentality alien to the
spirit of either of his predecessors. It is perhaps significant that
Theocritus appears to have been of Syracusan, Bion of Smyrnian, and
Moschus of Ausonian origin.[8] With the exception of this poem, which is
modelled on Theocritus' 'Lament for Daphnis,' there is little in the work
of either of the younger poets of a pastoral nature. Certain fragments,
however, if genuine, suggest that poems of the kind may have perished.
Among the remains of Moschus occurs the following:

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;[9]

lines in which we already take leave of the genuine love of the pastoral