what, with trifling variation, it was to remain for eighteen centuries, a
form based upon artificiality and convention. I have already pointed out
that the literary conditions at Alexandria did not differ materially from
those of Rome; it follows that the change must have been due to the
character of Vergil himself. That intense love of beauty for its own sake
which characterized the Greek mind had little hold over the Roman. Nor did
the latter understand the charm of untaught simplicity. It is true that to
the Roman poets of the Augustan period we owe the conception of the golden
age, but it remained with them rather a philosophical mythus than the
dream of an idyllic poet. To writers of the stamp of Ovid, Lucretius, and
Vergil the Idyls of the Syracusan poet can have possessed but little
meaning, and in his own Bucolics the last named seems never to have
regarded the pastoral form as anything but a cloak for matters of more
pith and moment. Although he followed Theocritus in his use of the several
types of song and stamped them to all future ages in pastoral convention,
though he may have begun with fairly close imitation of his model and only
gradually diverged into a more independant style, he at no time showed
himself content with the earlier poet's simplicity of motive.[13] The
eclogue in which he followed Theocritus most closely, the eighth, is
equally, perhaps, the most pleasing of the series. It combines the motives
of the love-lament and incantation, and the closeness with which it
follows while playing variations on its models is striking. One instance
will suffice. Take the passage in the second Idyl thus rendered by
Symonds:[14]

Hail, Hecatë, dread dame! to the end be thou my assistant,
Making my medicines work no less than the philtre of Circë,
Or Medea's charms, or yellow-haired Perimedë's.
Wheel of the magic spells, draw thou that man to my dwelling.