time when he wrote the sixteenth idyl, and that he lived in the
enjoyment of the friendship and the domestic happiness and honour
which he sang so well, through the golden age of Hiero (264 B.C.) No
happier fortune could befall him who wrote the epigram of the lady of
heavenly love, who worshipped with the noble wife of Nicias under the
green roof of Milesian Aphrodite, and who prophesied of the return of
peace and of song to Sicily and Syracuse.




THEOCRITUS




IDYL I



The shepherd Thyrsis meets a goatherd, in a shady place beside a
spring, and at his invitation sings the Song of Daphnis. This ideal
hero of Greek pastoral song had won for his bride the fairest of the
Nymphs. Confident in the strength of his passion, he boasted that
Love could never subdue him to a new question. Love avenged himself
by making Daphnis desire a strange maiden, but to this temptation he
never yielded, and so died a constant lover. The song tells how the
cattle and the wild things of the wood bewailed him, how Hermes and
Priapus gave him counsel in vain, and how with his last breath he
retorted the taunts of the implacable Aphrodite.