Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, Rendered into English Prose. Theocritus

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СКАЧАТЬ not believe in the delicacy of a Sicilian who wore a skin ‘stripped from the roughest of he-goats, with the smell of the rennet clinging to it still.’ Thus Fontenelle cries, ‘Can any one suppose that there ever was a shepherd who could say “Would I were the humming bee, Amaryllis, to flit to thy cave, and dip beneath the branches, and the ivy leaves that hide thee”?’ and then he quotes other graceful passages from the love-verses of Theocritean swains. Certainly no such fancies were to be expected from the French peasants of Fontenelle’s age, ‘creatures blackened with the sun, and bowed with labour and hunger.’ The imaginative grace of Battus is quite as remote from our own hinds. But we have the best reason to suppose that the peasants of Theocritus’s time expressed refined sentiment in language adorned with colour and music, because the modern love-songs of Greek shepherds sound like memories of Theocritus. The lover of Amaryllis might have sung this among his ditties—

      Χελιδονάκι θα γενω, σ’ τα χείλη σου να καττώ

       Να σε φιλήσω μια και δυό, και πάλε να πετάξω

      ‘To flit towards these lips of thine, I fain would be a swallow,

       To kiss thee once, to kiss thee twice, and then go flying homeward.’ [0d]

      In his despair, when Love ‘clung to him like a leech of the fen,’ he might have murmured—

      ’Ηθελα να εΐμαι σ’ τα βουνα, μ’ αλάφια να κοιμοΰμαι

       Και το δικον σου το κορμι να μη το συλλογιοΰμαι

      ‘Would that I were on the high hills, and lay where lie the stags, and no more was troubled with the thought of thee.’

      Here, again, is a love-complaint from modern Epirus, exactly in the tone of Battus’s song in the tenth idyl—

      ‘White thou art not, thou art not golden haired,

       Thou art brown, and gracious, and meet for love.’

      Here is a longer love-ditty—

      ‘I will begin by telling thee first of thy perfections: thy body is as fair as an angel’s; no painter could design it. And if any man be sad, he has but to look on thee, and despite himself he takes courage, the hapless one, and his heart is joyous. Upon thy brows are shining the constellated Pleiades, thy breast is full of the flowers of May, thy breasts are lilies. Thou hast the eyes of a princess, the glance of a queen, and but one fault hast thou, that thou deignest not to speak to me.’

      Battus might have cried thus, with a modern Greek singer, to the shade of the dead Amaryllis (Idyl IV), the ‘gracious Amaryllis, unforgotten even in death’—

      ‘Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee; what gift to the other world? The apple rots, and the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose! I send thee my tears bound in a napkin, and what though the napkin burns, if my tears reach thee at last!’

      The difficulty is to stop choosing, where all the verses of the modern Greek peasants are so rich in Theocritean memories, so ardent, so delicate, so full of flowers and birds and the music of fountains. Enough has been said, perhaps, to show what the popular poetry of Sicily could lend to the genius of Theocritus.

      From her shepherds he borrowed much,—their bucolic melody; their love-complaints; their rural superstitions; their system of answering couplets, in which each singer refines on the utterance of his rival. But he did not borrow their ‘pastoral melancholy.’ There is little of melancholy in Theocritus. When Battus is chilled by the thought of the death of Amaryllis, it is but as one is chilled when a thin cloud passes over the sun, on a bright day of early spring. And in an epigram the dead girl is spoken of as the kid that the wolf has seized, while the hounds bay all too late. Grief will not bring her back. The world must go its way, and we need not darken its sunlight by long regret. Yet when, for once, Theocritus adopted the accent of pastoral lament, when he raised the rural dirge for Daphnis into the realm of art, he composed a masterpiece, and a model for all later poets, as for the authors of Lycidas, Thyrsis, and Adonais.

      Theocritus did more than borrow a note from the country people. He brought the gifts of his own spirit to the contemplation of the world. He had the clearest vision, and he had the most ardent love of poetry, ‘of song may all my dwelling be full, for neither is sleep more sweet, nor sudden spring, nor are flowers more delicious to the bees, so dear to me are the Muses.’ . . . ‘Never may we be sundered, the Muses of Pieria and I.’ Again, he had perhaps in greater measure than any other poet the gift of the undisturbed enjoyment of life. The undertone of all his idyls is joy in the sunshine and in existence. His favourite word, the word that opens the first idyl, and, as it were, strikes the keynote, is αδύ, sweet. He finds all things delectable in the rural life:

      ‘Sweet are the voices of the calves, and sweet the heifers’ lowing; sweet plays the shepherd on the shepherd’s pipe, and sweet is the echo.’

      Even in courtly poems, and in the artificial hymns of which we are to speak in their place, the memory of the joyful country life comes over him. He praises Hiero, because Hiero is to restore peace to Syracuse, and when peace returns, then ‘thousands of sheep fattened in the meadows will bleat along the plain, and the kine, as they flock in crowds to the stalls, will make the belated traveller hasten on his way.’ The words evoke a memory of a narrow country lane in the summer evening, when light is dying out of the sky, and the fragrance of wild roses by the roadside is mingled with the perfumed breath of cattle that hurry past on their homeward road. There was scarcely a form of the life he saw that did not seem to him worthy of song, though it might be but the gossip of two rude hinds, or the drinking bout of the Thessalian horse-jobber, and the false girl Cynisca and her wild lover Æschines. But it is the sweet country that he loves best to behold and to remember. In his youth Sicily and Syracuse were disturbed by civil and foreign wars, wars of citizens against citizens, of Greeks against Carthaginians, and against the fierce ‘men of Mars,’ the banded mercenaries who possessed themselves of Messana. But this was not matter for his joyous Muse—

      κείνος δ’ ού πολέμους, ού δάκρυα, Πανα δ’ έμελπε,

       και βούτασ έλίγαινε και άείδων ενόμευε

      ‘Not of wars, not of tears, but of Pan would he chant, and of the neatherds he sweetly sang, and singing he shepherded his flocks.’

      This was the training that Sicily, her hills, her seas, her lovers, her poet-shepherds, gave to Theocritus. Sicily showed him subjects which he imitated in truthful art. Unluckily the later pastoral poets of northern lands have imitated him, and so have gone far astray from northern nature. The pupil of nature had still to be taught the ‘rules’ of the critics, to watch the temper and fashion of his time, and to try his fortune among the courtly poets and grammarians of the capital of civilisation. Between the years of early youth in Sicily and the years of waiting for court patronage at Alexandria, it seems probable that we must place a period of education in the island of Cos. The testimonies of the Grammarians who handed on to us the scanty traditions about Theocritus, agree in making him the pupil of Philetas of Cos. This Philetas was a critic, a commentator on Homer, and an elegiac poet whose love-songs were greatly admired by the Romans of the Augustan age. He is said to have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was himself born, as Theocritus records, in the isle of Cos. It has been conjectured that Ptolemy and Theocritus were fellow pupils, and that the poet may have hoped СКАЧАТЬ