aim at him as a vain rival of Homer, but M. Couat points out that
Theocritus was seventy when Apollonius began to write. The literary
fashions of Alexandria are only of moment to us so far as they
directly affected Theocritus. They could not make him obscure,
affected, tedious, but his nature probably inclined him to obey
fashion so far as only to write short poems. His rural poems are
[Greek], 'little pictures.' His fragments of epic, or imitations of
the epic hymns are not


[Greek]


- not full and sonorous as the songs of Homer and the sea. 'Ce poete
est le moins naif qui se puisse rencontrer, et il se degage de son
oeuvre un parfum de naivete rustique.' {0g} They are, what a German
critic has called them, mythologischen genre-bilder, cabinet pictures
in the manner called genre, full of pretty detail and domestic
feeling. And this brings us to the third characteristic of the age,-
-its art was elaborately pictorial. Poetry seems to have sought
inspiration from painting, while painting, as we have said, inclined
to genre, to luxurious representations of the amours of the gods or
the adventures of heroes, with backgrounds of pastoral landscape.
Shepherds fluted while Perseus slew Medusa.

The old order of things in Greece had been precisely the opposite of
this Alexandrian manner. Homer and the later Homeric legends, with
the tragedians, inspired the sculptors, and even the artisans who
decorated vases. When a new order of subjects became fashionable,
and when every rich Alexandrian had pictures or frescoes on his