'Not of wars, not of tears, but of Pan would he chant, and of the
neatherds he sweetly sang, and singing he shepherded his flocks.'


This was the training that Sicily, her hills, her seas, her lovers,
her poet-shepherds, gave to Theocritus. Sicily showed him subjects
which he imitated in truthful art. Unluckily the later pastoral
poets of northern lands have imitated HIM, and so have gone far
astray from northern nature. The pupil of nature had still to be
taught the 'rules' of the critics, to watch the temper and fashion of
his time, and to try his fortune among the courtly poets and
grammarians of the capital of civilisation. Between the years of
early youth in Sicily and the years of waiting for court patronage at
Alexandria, it seems probable that we must place a period of
education in the island of Cos. The testimonies of the Grammarians
who handed on to us the scanty traditions about Theocritus, agree in
making him the pupil of Philetas of Cos. This Philetas was a critic,
a commentator on Homer, and an elegiac poet whose love-songs were
greatly admired by the Romans of the Augustan age. He is said to
have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was himself born, as
Theocritus records, in the isle of Cos. It has been conjectured that
Ptolemy and Theocritus were fellow pupils, and that the poet may have
hoped to obtain court favour at Alexandria from this early
connection. About this point nothing is certainly known, nor can we
exactly understand the sort of education that was given in the school
of the poet Philetas. The ideas of that artificial age make it not
improbable that Philetas professed to teach the art of poetry. A
French critic and poet of our own time, M. Baudelaire, was willing to
do as much 'in thirty lessons.' Possibly Philetas may have imparted
technical rules then in vogue, and the fashionable knack of