Chapter 12

οὐχ ἁμῖν τὸν Ἔρωτα μόνοις ἔτεχ', ὡς ἐδοκεῦμες,Νικία, ᾧτινι τοῦτο θεῶν ποκα τέκνον ἔγεντο·οὐχ ἁμῖν τὰ καλὰ πράτοις καλὰ φαίνεται ἦμες,οἳ θνατοὶ πελόμεσθα, τὸ δ' αὔριον οὐκ ἐσορῶμες[144]—

said Theocritus, looking back into the far past, and remembering that the gifts of love and beauty have belonged to men and gods from everlasting. With what redoubled force may we, after the lapse of twenty centuries, echo these words, when we tread the ground he knew and read the songs he sang! His hills stir our vague and yearning admiration, his sea laughs its old laugh of waywardness and glee, his flowers bloom yearly, and fade in the spring, his pine and olive branches overshadow us; we listen to the bleating of his goats, and taste the sweetness of the spring from which he drank; the milk and honey are as fresh upon our lips, the wine in winter by the wood fire, when the winds are loud is just as fragrant; youth is still youth, nor have the dark-eyed maidens lost their charm. Truly οὐχ ἁμῖν τὰ καλὰ πράτοις καλὰ φαίνεται ἦμες. In this consists the power ofTheocritean poetry. It strikes a note which echoes through our hearts by reason of its genuine simplicity and pathos. The thoughts which natural beauty stirs in our minds find their embodiment in his sweet, strong verse; and though since his time the world has grown old, though the gods of Greece have rent their veils and fled with shrieks from their sanctuaries, though in spite of ourselves we turn our faces skyward from the earth, though emaciated saints and martyrs have supplanted Adonis and the Graces, though the cold, damp shades of Calvinism have chilled our marrow and our blood, yet there remain deep down within our souls some primal sympathies with nature, some instincts of the faun or satyr or sylvan, which education has not quite eradicated. "The hand which hath long time held a violet doth not soon forego her perfume, nor the cup from which sweet wine had flowed his fragrance."

I have dwelt long upon the peculiar properties of classical landscape as described by the Greek idyllists, and as they still exist for travellers upon the more sheltered shores of the Mediterranean, because it is necessary to understand them before we can appreciate thetruthof Theocritus. Of late years much has been written about the difference between classical and modern ways of regarding landscape. Mr. Ruskin has tried to persuade us that the ancients only cared for the more cultivated parts of nature, for gardens or orchards, from which food or profit or luxurious pleasure might be derived. And in this view there is no doubt some truth. The Greeks and Romans paid far less attention to inanimate nature than we do, and were beyond all question repelled by the savage grandeur of marine and mountain scenery, preferring landscapes of smiling and cultivated beauty to rugged sublimity or the picturesqueness of decay. In this they resembled all Southern nations. An Italian of the present day avoids ruinous places and solitudes however splendid. Among the mountains he complains of thebrutto paesein which he has to live, and is always longing for town gayeties and the amenities of civilized society.[145]The ancients, again, despised all interests that pretended to rival the paramount interest of civic or military life. Seneca's figurative expressioncircum flosculos occupaturmight be translated literally as applied to a trifler to denote the scorn which thinkers, statesmen, patriots, and generals of Greece and Rome felt for mere rural prettiness; while Quintilian's verdict on Theocritus (whom, however, he allows to beadmirabilis in suo genere),musa illa rustica et pastoralis non forum modo verum ipsam etiam urbem reformidat, characterizes the insensibility of urban intellects to a branch of art which we consider of high importance. But it is very easy to overstrain this view, and Mr. Ruskin, perhaps, has laid an undue stress on Homer in his criticism of the classics, whereas it is among the later Greek and Roman poets that the analogy of modern literature would lead us to expect indications of a genuine taste for unadorned nature. These signs the idyllic poets amply supply; but in seeking for them we must be prepared to recognize a very different mode of expression from that which we are used to in the florid poets of the modern age. Conciseness, simplicity, and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing attributes of classical descriptive art. Moreover, humanity was always more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy from a Greek unless it appeared before him in a human shape, or in connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied in such poems as Shelley'sOde to the West Windgave birth in their imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest and conflict of passions. We who are apt to look for rhapsodies and brilliant outpourings of eloquent fancy can scarcely bring ourselves to recollect what a delicate sense of nature and what profound emotions are implied in the conceptions of Pan and Hyacinthus and Galatea. The misuse which has been made of mythology by modern writers has effaced half its vigor and charm. It is only by returning to the nature which inspired these myths that we can reconstruct their exquisite vitality. Different ages and nations express themselves by different forms of art. Music appears to be dominant in the present period; sculpture ruled among the Greeks, and struck the key-note for all other arts. Even those sentiments which in our mind are most vague, the admiration of sunset skies, or flowers or copsewoods in spring, were expressed by them in the language of definite human form. They sought to externalize and realize as far as possible, not to communicate the inmost feelings and spiritual suggestions arising out of natural objects. Never advancing beyond corporeal conditions, they confined themselves to form, and sacrificed the charm of mystery, which is incompatible with very definite conception. It was on this account that sculpture, the most exactly imitative of the arts, became literally architectonic among the Greeks. And for a precisely similar reason music, which is the most abstract and subjective of the arts, the most evanescent in its material, and the vaguest, assumes the chief rank among modern arts. Sculpture is the poetry of the body, music the language of the soul.

Having once admitted their peculiarmodeof feeling Nature, no onecan deny that landscape occupies an important place in Greek literature. Every line of Theocritus is vital with a strong passion for natural beauty, incarnated in myths. But even in descriptive poetry he is not deficient. His list of trees and flowers is long, and the epithets with which they are characterized are very exquisite—not, indeed, brilliant with the inbreathed fancy of the North, but so perfectly appropriate as to define the special beauty of the flower or tree selected. In the same way, a whole scene is conveyed in a few words by mere conciseness of delineation, or by the artful introduction of some incident suggesting human emotion. Take for example this picture of the stillness of the night:

ἠνίδε σιγᾷ μὲν πόντος, σιγῶντι δ' ἀῆται·ἁ δ' ἐμὰ οὐ σιγᾷ στέρνων ἔντοσθεν ἀνία,ἀλλ' ἐπὶ τήνῳ πᾶσα καταίθομαι, ὅς με τάλαινανἀντὶ γυναικὸς ἔθηκε κακὰν καὶ ἀπάρθενον ἦμεν.[146]

Idylii. 38-41.

Or this:

ἀλλὰ τὺ μὲν χαίροισα ποτ' ὠκεανὸν τρέπε πώλουςπότνι', ἐγὼ δ' οἴσω τὸν ἐμὸν πόνον, ὥσπερ ὑπέσταν.χαῖρε, Σελαναία λιπαρόχροε· χαίρετε δ', ἄλλοιἀστέρες, εὐκήλοιο κατ' ἄντυγα Νυκτὸς ὀπαδοί.[147]

Idylii. 163et seq.

Or this of a falling star:

κατήριπε δ' ἐς μέλαν ὕδωρἀθρόος, ὡς ὅκα πυρσὸς ἀπ' οὐρανῶ ἤριπεν ἀστήρἀθρόος ἐν πόντῳ, ναύταις δέ τις εἶπεν ἑταίροις·κουφότερ', ὦ παῖδες, ποιεῖσθ' ὅπλα· πλευστικὸς οὖρος.[148]

Idylxiii. 49-52.

Or the sea-weeds on a rocky shore (vii. 58), or the summer bee (iii. 15), or the country party at harvest time (vii. 129 to the end). In all of these a peculiar simplicity will be noticed, a self-restraint and scrupulosity of definite delineation. To Theocritus the shadowy and iridescent fancies of modern poetry would have been unintelligible. The creations of a Keats or Shelley would have appeared to be monstrous births, like the Centaurs of Ixion, begotten by lawless imaginations upon cloud and mist. When the Greek poet wished to express the charm of summer waves he spoke of Galatea, more fickle and light than thistle-down, a maiden careless of her lover and as cruel as the sea. The same waves suggested to Shakespeare these lines, fromMidsummer-Night's Dream:

Thou rememberestSince once I sat upon a promontory,And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's backUttering such dulcet and harmonious breathThat the rude sea grew civil at her song;And certain stars shot madly from their spheresTo hear the sea-maid's music;

and to Weber the ethereal "mermaid's song" inOberon. No one acquainted with Shakespeare and Weber can deny that both have expressed with marvellous subtlety the magic of the sea in its enchanting calm, whereas the Greek poet works only by indirect suggestion, and presents us with a human portrait more than a phantom of the glamour of the deep. What we have lost in definite projection we have gained in truth, variety, and freedom. The language of our art appeals immediately to the emotions, disclosing the spiritual reality of things, and caring less for their form than for the feelings they excite in us. Greek art remains upon the surface, and translates into marble the humanized aspects of the external world. The one is forever seeking to set free, the other to imprison, thought. The Greek tells with exquisite precision what he has observed, investing it perhaps with his own emotion. He says, for instance:

αἴθε γενοίμανἁ βομβεῦσα μέλισσα, καὶ ἐς τεὸν ἄντρον ἱκοίμαν,τὸν κισσὸν διαδὺς καὶ τὰν πτέριν, ᾇ τὺ πικάσδῃ.[149]

The modern poet, to use Shelley's words,

Will watch from dawn to gloomThe lake-reflected sun illumeThe yellow bees in the ivy bloom;Nor heed nor see what shapes they be,But from these create he canForms more real than living man,Nurslings of immortality,

endeavoring to look through and beyond the objects of the outer world, to use them as the starting-points for his creative fancy, and to embroider their materials with the dazzlingfioritureof his invention. Metamorphosis existed for the Greek poet as a simple fact. If the blood of Adonis turned to anemones, yet the actual drops of blood and the flowers remained distinct in the poet's mind; and even though he may have been sceptical about the miracle, he restrained his fancy to the reproduction of the one old fable. The modern poet believes in no metamorphosis but that which is produced by the alchemy of his own brain. He loves to confound the most dissimilar existences, and to form startling combinations of thoughts which have never before been brought into connection with each other. Uncontrolled by tradition or canons of propriety, he roams through the world, touching its various objects with the wand of his imagination. To the west wind he cries:

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,Angels of rain and lightning; there are spreadOn the blue surface of thine airy surge,Like the bright hair uplifted from the headOf some fierce Mænad, e'en from the dim vergeOf the horizon to the zenith's height,The locks of the approaching storm....

Imagine how astonished even Æschylus would have been at these violent transitions and audacious transformations. The Greeks had few conceits:[150]they did not call the waves "nodding hearse-plumes" like Calderon, or the birds "winged lyres" like Marini, or daisies "pearled Arcturi of the earth" like Shelley, or laburnums "dropping wells of fire" like Tennyson. If they ventured on such licenses in their more impassioned lyrics, they maintained the metaphor with strict propriety. One good instance of the difference in this respect between the two ages is afforded by Ben Jonson, who translates Sappho's

ἦρος ἱμερόφωνος ἄγγελος ἀηδών,

by "the dear glad angel of the spring, the nightingale." Between ἄγγελος andangelthere is the distance of nearly twenty centuries; for though Ben Jonson may have meant merely to Anglicize the Greek word, he could not but have been glad of the more modern meaning.

So much of this essay has already been devoted to the consideration of Theocritean poetry in general that I cannot here afford to enter into the details of his several idyls. A few, however, may be noticed of peculiar beauty and significance. None are more true to local scenery than those which relate to the story of Galatea. In this brief tale, the life of the mountains and the rivers and the sea is symbolized—the uncouth and gigantic hills rude in their rusticity; the clear and lovable stream; the merry sea, inconstant and treacherous, with shifting waves. The mountain stands forever unremoved; love as he will, he can but gaze upon the dancing sea, and woo it with gifts of hanging trees, and cool shadowy caverns, and still sleeping-places in sheltered bays. But the stream leaps down from crag to crag, and gathers strength and falls into the arms of the expectant nymph—a fresh lover fair and free, and full of smiles. Supposing this marriage of the sea and river to have been the earliest idea of the mythus, in course of time the persons of Acis and Galatea, and the rejected lover Polyphemus, became more and more humanized, until the old symbolism was lost in a pastoral romance. Polyphemus loves, but never wins: he may offer his tall bay-trees and slender cypresses and black ivy and sweet-fruited vines and cold water flowing straight—a drink divine—from the white snows of wooded Ætna; he may sit whole days above the sea, and gaze upon the smiling waves, and tell the nymph of all his flocks and herds, and lure her with promises of flowers and fawns and bear's whelps, to leave the sea to beat upon its shore and come and live with him, and feed his sheep. It is of no use. Galatea heeds him not, and Polyphemus has to shepherd his love as best he can. Poetry in this idyl is blended with the simplest country humor. The pathos of Polyphemus is really touching, and his allusions to the sweetness of a shepherd's life among the hills abound in unconscious poetry, side by side with which are placed the most ludicrous expressions of uncouth disappointment, together with shrewd observations on the value of property and other prosaic details. If I mistake not, this is true of the rustic character, in which, though stirred by sorrow into sympathy with nature, habitual caution and shrewdness survive. The meditations of the shepherd in the third idyl exhibit the same mixture of sentiments.

As a specimen of the idyls which illustrate town life I select the second, the humor of its rival, the fifteenth, being of that perfect sort which must be read and laughed over, but which cannot well be analyzed. The subject of thePharmaceutriais an incantation performed in the stillness of the night by a proud Syracusan lady who has been deserted by her lover. In delineating the fierceness of her passion and the indomitable resolution of her will Theocritus has produced a truly tragic picture. Simætha, maddened by vehement despair, resorts to magic arts. Love, she says, has sucked her life-blood like a leech, and parched her with the fever of desire. She cannot live without the lover for whose possession she has sacrificed her happiness and honor. If she cannot charm him back again, she will kill him. There are poisons ready to work her will in the last resort. Meanwhile wesee her standing at the magic wheel, turning it round before the fire, and charging it to draw false Delphis to her home. A hearth with coals upon it is at hand, on which her maid keeps sprinkling the meal that typifies the bones of Delphis, the wax by which his heart is to be consumed, and the laurel-bough that stands for his body. At the least sign of laziness Simætha scolds her with hard and haughty words. She stands like a Medea, seeking no sympathy, sparing no reproaches, tiger-like in her ferocity of thwarted passion. When the magic rites have been performed, and Thestylis has gone to smear an ointment on the doors of Delphis, Simætha leaves the wheel and addresses her soliloquy to the Moon, who has just risen, and who is journeying in calm and silver glory through the night. There is something sublime in the contrast between the moonlight on the sea of Syracuse and the fierce agony of the deserted lioness. To the Moon she confides the story of her love: "Take notice of my love, whence it arose, dread Queen." It is a vivid and tragic tale of Southern passion: sudden and consuming, recklessly gratified, and followed by desertion on the one side and by vengeance on the other.[151]Simætha has no doubt many living parallels among Sicilian women. The classical reader will find in her narration a description of the working of love hardly to be surpassed by Sappho's Ode or Plato'sPhædrus. The wildness of the scene, the magic rites, the august presence of the Moon, and the murderous determination of Simætha heighten the dramatic effect, and render the tale excessively interesting.

As a picture of classical sorcery this idyl is very curious. Nothing can be more erroneous than to imagine that witchcraft is a Northern invention of the Middle Ages, or that the Brocken is its headquarters. With the exception of a few inconsiderable circumstances, all the terrible or loathsome rites of magic were known to the ancients, and merely copied by the moderns. Circe in Homer, Simætha in Theocritus, Canidia in Horace, the Libyan sorceress of Virgil, the Saga of Tibullus, Medea in Ovid, Erichtho in Lucan, and Megæra in Claudian (to mention no more), make up a list of formidable witches to whom none of the hideous details of the black art were unknown. They sought for poisonous herbs at night; lived in ruinous places; ransacked charnel-houses for dead bodies; killed little children to obtain their fat for unguents; compelled the spirits of the dead to rise, and, after entering a fresh corpse, to reveal the mysteries of fate; devoured snakes; drank blood; raised storms at sea; diverted the moon from her course; muttered spells of fearful import; and loved above all things to "raise jars, jealousies, strifes, like a thick scurf o'er life." Even in the minutest details of sorcery they anticipated the witches of the Middle Ages. Hypsipyle in Ovid mentions a waxen portrait stuck full of needles, and so fashioned as to waste the life of its original. The witch in theGolden Assof Apuleius anoints herself, and flies about like a bird at night. Nor were were-wolves, those most ghastly creations of diseased imagination, unfamiliar to the Greeks and Romans, as may be proved from Herodotus, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, and Apuleius. Those who care to pursue this subject will find a vast amount of learning collected on the point by Ben Jonson in his annotations toThe Masque of Queens. One fact, however, must be always borne in mind: the ancients regarded witchcraft either as a hideous or a solemn exercise of supernatural power, not recognizing any Satanic agency or compact with Hell.Hecate triviis ululata per urbes, the "Queen of the Night and of the Tombs," assisted sorcerers; but this meant merely that they trafficked in the dark with the foul mysteries of death and corruption. The classical witches were either grave and awful women, like the Libyan priestess in theÆneid, or else loathsome pariahs, terrible for their malignity, like Lucan's Erichtho. Mediævalism added a deeper horror to this superstitious and ghoulish conception by the thoughts of spiritual responsibility and of league with God's enemies. Damnation was the price of magic power; witchcraft being not merely abominable in the eyes of men, but also unpardonable at the bar of divine justice.

Several poems of Theocritus are written on the theme of Doric chivalry, and illustrate the heroic age of Greece. They may be compared to theIdyls of the King, for their excellence consists in the consummate art with which episodes from the legendary cycles of a bygone age are wrought into polished pictures by a cultivated poet. The thirteenth idyl is especially remarkable for the exquisite finish of its style and also for the light it throws on the mutual relations of knight and squire in early Greek warfare. Theocritus chooses for the subject of this poem an episode in the life of Herakles, the Dorian hero, when he and other foremost men of Hellas, θεῖος ἄωτος ἡρώων, followed Jason in the Argo to the Colchian shores, and he took young Hylas with him; "for even," says Theocritus, "the brazen-hearted son of Amphitryon, who withstood the fierceness of the lion, loved a youth, the charming Hylas, and taught him like a father everything by which he might become a good and famous man; nor would he leave the youth at dawn or noon or evening, but sought continually to fashion him after his own heart, and to make him a right yoke-fellow with him in mighty deeds." How he lost Hylas on the Cianian shore, and in the wildness of his sorrow let Argo sail without him, and endured the reproach of desertion, is well known. Theocritus has wrought the story with more than his accustomed elegance. But I wish to confine attention to the ideal of knighthood andknightly education presented in the passage quoted. Herakles was not merely the lover, but the guardian also and tutor, of Hylas. He regarded him not only as an object of tenderness, but also as a future friend and helper in the business of life. His constant aim was to form of him a brave and manly warrior, a Herculean hero. And in this respect Herakles was the eponym and patron of an order which existed throughout Doric Hellas. This order, protected by religious tradition and public favor, regulated by strict rules, and kept within the limits of honor, produced the Cretan lovers, the Lacedæmonian "hearers" and "inspirers," the Theban immortals who lay with faces turned so stanchly to their foes that vice seemed incompatible with so much valor. Achilles was another eponym of this order. In the twenty-ninth idyl, the phrase Ἀχιλλήϊοι φίλοι is used to describe the most perfect pair of manly friends. The twelfth idyl is written in a similar if a weaker and more wanton vein. The same longing retrospect is cast upon the old days "when men indeed were golden, when the love of comrades was mutual," and constancy is rewarded with the same promise of glorious immortality as that which Plato holds out in thePhædrus. Bion, we may remark in passing, celebrates with equal praise the friendships of Theseus, Orestes, and Achilles. Without taking some notice of this peculiar institution, in its origin military and austere, it is impossible to understand the chivalrous age of Greece among the Dorian tribes. In the midst of brute force and cunning, and an almost absolute disregard of what we are accustomed to understand by chivalry—gentleness, chastity, truth, regard for women and weak persons—this one anomalous sentiment emerges.

Passing to another point in which Greek differed from mediæval chivalry, we notice the semi-divine nature of the heroes: θεῖος ἄωτος is the name by which they are designated, and supernatural favor is always showered upon them. This indicates a primitive society, a national consciousness ignorant of any remote past. The heroes whom Theocritus celebrates are purely Dorian—Herakles, a Jack the Giant-Killer in his cradle, brawny, fearless, of huge appetite, a mighty trainer, with a scowl to frighten athletes from the field; Polydeuces, a notable bruiser; Castor, a skilled horseman and a man of blood. In one point the twin sons of Leda resembled mediæval knights. They combined the arts of song with martial prowess. Theocritus styles them ἱππῆες κιθαρισταί, ἀεθλητῆρες ἀοιδοί—harp-playing riders of horses, athlete poets. Their achievements, narrated in the twenty-second idyl, maybe compared with those of Tristram and Lancelot. The gigantic warrior whom they find by the well in the land of the Bebrycians, gorgeously armed, insolent, and as knotty as a brazen statue, who refuses access to the water and challenges them to combat, exactly resembles one of the lawless giants of theMort d'Arthur. The courtesy of the Greek hero contrasts well with the barbarian's violence; and when they come to blows, it is good to observe how address, agility, training, nerve, enable Polydeuces to overcome with ease the vast fury and brute strength of the Bebrycian bully. As the fight proceeds, the son of Leda improves in flesh and color, while Amycus gets out of breath, and sweats his thews away. Polydeuces pounds the giant's neck and face, reducing him to a hideous mass of bruises, and receiving the blows of Amycus upon his chest and loins. At the end of the fight he spares his prostrate foe, on the condition of his respecting the rites of hospitality and dealing courteously with strangers. Throughout it will be noticed how carefully Theocritus maintains the conception of the Hellenic as distinguished from the barbarian combatant. Christian and pagan are not more distinct in a legend of the San Graal. But Greek chivalry has no magic, no monstrous exaggeration. All is simple, natural, and human. Bellerophon, it is true, was sent after the Chimæra, and Perseus freed Andromeda like St. George from a dragon's mouth. But these fancies of Greek infancy formed no integral part of artistic mythology; instead of being multiplied, they were gradually winnowed out, and the poets laid but little stress upon them.

The achievement of Castor is not so favorable to the character of Hellenic chivalry. Having in concert with Polydeuces borne off by guile the daughters of Leucippus from their affianced husbands, Castor kills one of the injured lovers who pursues him and demands restitution. He slays him, though he is his own first cousin, ruthlessly; and while the other son of Aphareus is rushing forward to avenge his brother's death, Zeus hurls lightning and destroys him. Theocritus remarks that it is no light matter to engage in battle with the Tyndarids; but he makes no reflection on what we should call "the honor" of the whole transaction.

Of all the purely pastoral idyls by which Theocritus is most widely famous, perhaps the finest is the seventh, or Thalysia. It glows with the fresh and radiant splendor of Southern beauty. In this poem the idyllist describes the journey of three young men in summer from the city to the farm of their friend Phrasidamus, who has asked them to take part in the feast with which he proposes to honor Demeter at harvest-time. On their way they meet with a goatherd, Lycidas, who invites them, "with a smiling eye," to recline beneath the trees and while away the hours of noontide heat with song. "The very lizard," he says, "is sleeping by the wall; but on the hard stones of the footpath your heavy boots keep up a ceaseless ringing." Thus chided by the goatherd they resolve upon a singing-match between Simichidas, the teller of the tale, and Lycidas, who offers his crook as the prize of victory. Lycidas begins the contest with that exquisite song to Ageanax, which has proved the despair of all succeeding idyllists, and which furnished Virgil with one of the most sonorous lines in hisGeorgics. No translation can do justice to the smooth and liquid charm of its melodious verse, in which the tenderest feeling mingles gracefully with delicate humor and with homely descriptions of a shepherd's life. The following lines, forming a panegyric on Comatas, some famed singer of the rustic muse, may be quoted for their pure Greek feeling. Was ever an unlucky mortal envied more melodiously, and yet more quaintly, for his singular fortune?

αἰσεῖ δ', ὥς ποκ' ἔδεκτο τὸν αἰπόλον εὐρέα λάρναξζωὸν ἐόντα κακῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ἄνακτος·ὥς τέ νιν αἱ σιμαὶ λειμωνόθε φέρβον ἰοῖσαικέδρον ἐς ἁδεῖαν μαλακοῖς ἄνθεσσι μέλισσαι·οὕνεκά οἱ γλυκὺ Μοῖσα κατὰ στόματος χέε νέκταρ.ὦ μακαριστὲ Κομᾶτα, τὺ θὴν τάδε τερπνὰ πεπόνθης,καὶ τὺ κατεκλάσθης ἐς λάρνακα, καὶ τὺ, μελισσᾶνκηρία φερβόμενος, ἔτος ὥριον ἐξετέλεσσας.[152]

The song with which Simichidas contends against his rival is not of equal beauty; but the goatherd hands him the crook "as a gift of friendship from the Muses." Then he leaves the three friends, who resume their journey till they reach the house of Phrasidamus. There elms and poplar-trees and vines embower them with the pleasant verdure of rustling leaves and the perfumes of summer flowers and autumn fruits. The jar of wine as sweet as that which made the Cyclops dance among his sheepfold spreads its fragrance through the air; while the statue of Demeter, with her handfuls of corn and poppy-heads, stands smiling by.

This seventh idyl, of which no adequate idea can be conveyed by mere description, may serve as the type of those purely rustic poems which since the days of Theocritus have from age to agebeen imitated by versifiers emulous of his gracefulness. If space allowed, it would not be uninteresting to analyze the idyl of the two old fishermen, who gossip together so wisely and contentedly in their hut by the sea-shore, mending their nets the while, and discoursing gravely of their dreams. In this idyl, which is, however, possibly the work of one of Theocritus's imitators, and in the second, which consists of a singing-match between two harvest-men, the native homeliness of the idyllic muse appears to best advantage.

With this brief and insufficient notice I must leave Theocritus in order to say a few words about his successors. Bion's poetry, when compared with that of Theocritus, declines considerably from the bucolic type. His idyls are for the most part fragments of delicately finished love-songs, remarkable for elegance and sweetness more than for masculine vigor or terse expression. In Bion the artificial style of pastoral begins. Theocritus had made cows and pipes and shepherds fashionable. His imitators followed him, without the humor and natural taste which rendered his pictures so attractive. We already trace the frigid affectation of bucolic interest in the elegy on Bion: "He sang no song of wars or tears, but piped of Pan and cowherds, and fed flocks, singing as he went; pipes he fashioned, and milked the sweet-breathed heifer, and taught kisses, and cherished in his bosom love, and stole the heart of Aphrodite." As it happens, the mostoriginal and powerful of Bion's remaining poems is a "Song of Tears," of passionate lamentation, of pathetic grief, composed, not as a pastoral ditty, but on the occasion of one of those splendid festivals in which the Syrian rites of slain Adonis were celebrated by Greek women. The ἐπιτάφιος Ἀδώνιδος is written with a fiery passion and a warmth of coloring peculiar to Bion. The verse bounds with tiger leaps, its full-breathed dactyls panting with the energy of rapid flight. The tender and reflective beauty of Theocritus, the concentrated passion of his Simætha, and the flowing numbers of his song to Adonis are quite lost and swallowed up in the Asiatic fury of Bion's lament. The poem begins with the cry Αἰάζω τὸν Ἄδωνιν, which is variously repeated in idyllic fashion as a refrain throughout the lamentation.[153]After the prelude, having, as it were, struck the key-note to the music, the singer cries:

μηκέτι πορφυρέοις ἐνὶ φάρεσι Κύπρι κάθευδε·ἔγρεο δειλαία κυανόστολε καὶ πλατάγησονστάθεα, καὶ λέγε πᾶσιν, ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις.[154]

Notice how the long words follow one another with quick pulses and flashes of sound. The same peculiar rhythm recurs when, after describing the beautiful dead body of Adonis, the poet returns to Aphrodite:

ἁ δ' Ἀφροδίταλυσαμένα πλοκαμῖδας ἀνὰ δρυμὼς ἀλάληταιπενθαλέα, νήπλεκτος, ἀσάνδαλος· αἱ δὲ βάτοι νινἐρχομέναν κείροντι καὶ ἱερὸν αἷμα δρέπονταιὀξὺ δὲ κωκύοισα δι' ἄγκεα μακρὰ φορεῖται,Ἀσσύριον βοόωσα πόσιν, καὶ παῖδα καλεῦσα.[155]

There are few passages of poetical imagery more striking than this picture of the queen of beauty tearing through the forest, heedless of her tender limbs and useless charms, and calling on her Syrian lover. What follows is even more passionate; after some lines of mere description, the ecstasy again descends upon the poet, and he bursts into the wildest of most beautiful laments:

ὡς ἴδεν, ὡς ἐνόησεν Ἀδώνιδος ἄσχετον ἕλκος,ὡς ἴδε φοίνιον αἷμα μαραινομένῳ περὶ μηρῷ,πάχεας ἀμπετάσασα κινύρετο· μεῖνον Ἄδωνι,δύσποτμε μεῖνον Ἄδωνι, κ.τ.λ.[156]

The last few lines of her soliloquy are exquisitely touching, especially those in which Aphrodite deplores her immortality, and acknowledges the supremacy of the queen of the grave over Love and Beauty. What follows is pitched at a lower key. There is too much of merely Anacreontic prettiness about the description of the bridal bed and the lamenting Loves. Aphrodite's passion reminds us of a NeapolitanStabat Mater, in which the frenzy of love and love-like piety are strangely blended. But the concluding picture suggests nothing nobler than a painting of Albano, in whichamorettiare plentiful, and there is much elegance of composition. This remark applies to the rest of Bion's poetry. If Theocritus deserves to be illustrated by the finest of Greek bass-reliefs, Bion cannot claim more than an exquisitely chiselled gem. Certainly the second and third fragments are very charming; and the lines to Hesper (fragment 16) have so much beauty that I attempt a version of them:

Hesper, thou golden light of happy love,Hesper, thou holy pride of purple eve,Moon among stars, but star beside the moon,Hail, friend! and since the young moon sets to-nightToo soon below the mountains, lend thy lampAnd guide me to the shepherd whom I love.No theft I purpose; no wayfaring man'Belated would I watch and make my prey;Love is my goal, and Love how fair it is,When friend meets friend sole in the silent night,Thou knowest, Hesper!

In Moschus we find less originality and power than belong to Bion. HisEuropais an imitation of the style in which Theocritus wroteHylas; but the copy is frigid and affected by the size of its model. Five-and-twenty lines for instance are devoted to an elaborate description of a basket, which leaves no very definite impression on the mind;[157]whereas every leaf and tendril on the cup which Theocritus introduces into the first idyl stands out vividly before us. Nothing, moreover, could be more unnatural and tedious than the long speech which Europa makes when she is being carried out to sea upon the bull's back. Yet we must allow that there is spirit and beauty in the triumph of sea monsters who attend Poseidon and do honor to the chosen bride of Zeus; Nereids riding on dolphins, and Tritons, "the deep-voiced minstrels of the sea, sounding a marriage-song on their long-winding conchs."[158]The whole of this piece is worthy of Ovid'sMetamorphoses. Moschus is remarkable for occasional felicities of language. In this line, for example,

εὖτε καὶ ἀτρεκέων ποιμαίνεται ἔθνος ὀνείρων,

an old thought receives new and subtle beauty by its expression. IfMegara(Idyl iv.) be really the work of Moschus, which is doubtful, it reflects more honor on him. The dialogue between the wife and mother of the maddened Herakles, after he has murdered his children and gone forth to execute fresh labors, is worthy of their tragic situation. Ἔρως δραπέτης (Runaway Love), again, is an exquisite little poem in the Anacreontic style of Bion, fully equal to any of its models. The fame of Moschus will, however, depend upon the elegy on Bion. I have already hinted that its authorship is questioned. In my opinion it far surpasses any of his compositions in respect of definite thought and original imagination. Though the bucolic commonplaces are used with obvious artificiality, and much is borrowed from Theocritus'sLament for Daphnis, yet so true and delicate a spirit is inbreathed into the old forms as to render them quite fresh. The passage which begins αἰ αἰ ταὶ μαλάχαι every dabbler in Greek literature knows by heart. And what can be more ingeniously pathetic than thenuancesof feeling expressed in these lines?

φάρμακον ἦλθε, Βίων, ποτὶ σὸν στόμα· φάρμακον εἶδες.πῶς τευ τοῖς χείλεσσι ποτέδραμε κοὐκ ἐγλυκάνθη;τίς δὲ βροτὸς τοσσοῦτον ἀνάμερος ἢ κεράσαι τοιἢ δοῦναι λαλέοντι τὸ φάρμακον;[159]

And:

τίς ποτε σᾷ σύριγγι μελίξεται, ὦ τριπόθητε;τίς δ' ἐπὶ σοῖς καλάμοις θήσει στόμα; τίς θρασὺς οὕτως;εἰσέτι γὰρ πνείει τὰ σὰ χείλεα καὶ τὸ σὸν ἆσθμα·ἀχὼ δ' ἐν δονάκεσσι τεᾶς ἐπιβόσκετ' ἀοιδᾶς.[160]

Or again:

ἀχὼ δ' ἐν πέτρῃσιν ὀδύρεται ὅττι σιωπῇ,κοὐκέτι μιμεῖται τὰ σὰ χείλεα.[161]

There is also something very touching in the third line of this strophe:

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