flocks.'

Theocritus was probably born in an early decade of the third century,
or, according to Couat, about 315 B.C., and was a native of Syracuse,
'the greatest of Greek cities, the fairest of all cities.' So Cicero
calls it, describing the four quarters that were encircled by its
walls,--each quarter as large as a town,--the fountain Arethusa, the
stately temples with their doors of ivory and gold. On the fortunate
dwellers in Syracuse, Cicero says, the sun shone every day, and there
was never a morning so tempestuous but the sunlight conquered at
last, and broke through the clouds. That perennial sunlight still
floods the poems of Theocritus with its joyous glow. His birthplace
was the proper home of an idyllic poet, of one who, with all his
enjoyment of the city life of Greece, had yet been 'breathed on by
the rural Pan,' and best loved the sights and sounds and fragrant air
of the forests and the coast. Thanks to the mountainous regions of
Sicily, to Etna, with her volcanic cliffs and snow-fed streams,
thanks also to the hills of the interior, the populous island never
lost the charm of nature. Sicily was not like the overcrowded and
over-cultivated Attica; among the Sicilian heights and by the coast
were few enclosed estates and narrow farms. The character of the
people, too, was attuned to poetry. The Dorian settlers had kept
alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and
uplands haunted by Pan. This popular poetry influenced the literary
verse of Sicily. The songs of Stesichorus, a minstrel of the early
period, and the little rural 'mimes' or interludes of Sophron are
lost, and we have only fragments of Epicharmus. But it seems certain
that these poets, predecessors of Theocritus, liked to mingle with
their own composition strains of rustic melody, volks-lieder,
ballads, love-songs, ditties, and dirges, such as are still chanted