between the rustic idyls of Theocritus and the epic idyls of himself
and his followers Moschus and Bion. In the rural idyls, Theocritus
was himself and wrote to please himself. In the epic idyls, as in
the Hymn to the Dioscuri, and in the two poems on Heracles, he was
writing to please the taste of Alexandria. He had to choose epic
topics, but he was warned by the famous saying of Callimachus ('a
great book is a great evil') not to imitate the length of the epic.
{0i} He was also to shun close imitation of what are so easily
imitated, the regular recurring formulae, the commonplace of Homer.
He was to add minute pictorial touches, as in the description of
Alcmena's waking when the serpents attacked her child,--a passage
rich in domestic pathos and incident which contrast strongly with
Pindar's bare narrative of the same events. We have noted the same
pictorial quality in the Europa of Moschus. Our own age has often
been compared to the Alexandrian epoch, to that era of large cities,
wealth, refinement, criticism, and science; and the pictorial Idylls
of the King very closely resemble the epico-idyllic manner of
Alexandria. We have tried to examine the society in which Theocritus
lived. But our impressions about the poet are more distinct. In him
we find the most genial character; pious as Greece counted piety;
tender as became the poet of love; glad as the singer of a happy
southern world should be; gifted, above all, with humour, and with
dramatic power. 'His lyre has all the chords'; his is the last of
all the perfect voices of Hellas; after him no man saw life with eyes
so steady and so mirthful.

About the lives of the three idyllic poets literary history says
little. About their deaths she only tells us through the dirge by
Moschus, that Bion was poisoned. The lovers of Theocritus would
willingly hope that he returned from Alexandria to Sicily, about the