'Do thou farewell, and turn thy steeds to Ocean, lady, and my pain I
will endure, even as I have declared. Farewell, Selene beautiful;
farewell, ye other stars that follow the wheels of Night.'

A grammarian says that Theocritus borrowed this second idyl, the
story of Simaetha, from a piece by Sophron. But he had no need to
borrow from anything but the nature before his eyes. Ideas change so
little among the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition
is so strong, that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their
prayer for pity and help. Theocritus himself could have added little
passion to this incantation, still chanted in the moonlit nights of
Greece: {0a}

'Bright golden Moon, that now art near to thy setting, go thou and
salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, and said,
"Never will I leave thee." And, lo, he has left me, like a field
reaped and gleaned, like a church where no man comes to pray, like a
city desolate. Therefore I would curse him, and yet again my heart
fails me for tenderness, my heart is vexed within me, my spirit is
moved with anguish. Nay, even so I will lay my curse on him, and let
God do even as He will, with my pain and with my crying, with my
flame, and mine imprecations.'

It is thus that the women of the islands, like the girl of Syracuse
two thousand years ago, hope to lure back love or avenged love
betrayed, and thus they 'win more ease from song than could be bought
with gold.'

In whatever direction the path of the Syracusan wanderer lay, he
would find then, as he would find now in Sicily, some scene of the