Product Description

'Eucritus and I and pretty Amyntas turned aside To the farm of Phrasidamus, where we sank down With pleasure on deep-piled couches of sweet rushes, And vine leaves freshly stripped from the bush.' The Greek poet Theocritus of Syracuse (first half of the third century BC) was the inventor of 'bucolic' poetry. These vignettes of country life, centred on competitions in song and love, are the foundational poems of the western pastoral tradition. They were the principal model for Virgil in the Eclogues and their influence can be seen in the work of Petrarch and Milton. Although it is the pastoral poems for which he is chiefly famous, Theocritus also wrote hymns to the gods, brilliant mime depictions of everyday life, short narrative epics, epigrams, and encomia of the powerful. The great variety of his poems illustrates the rich and flourishing poetic culture of what was a golden age for Greek poetry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #516024 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Customer Reviews

There can be no remedy for love, except the Muses
These bucolic poems (bucolic = sung by a herdsman) constitute an important link in the history of literature, as Robert Wells notes in his excellent introduction. They influenced directly the pastoral tradition created in the Renaissance by poets like Ronsard.

Besides proper herdsman stories about song contests or love laments, Theocritus treats well-known subjects in his poems:

`The Bacchae': `no tears must fall for the transgressors, grown men or young boys.'

`The Cyclops': `Galatea, you are whiter than ricotta, gentler than a lamb, livelier than a calf, firmer than an unripe grape ... and when sleep lets me go, then you slip away as if you were a sheep and I the great grey wolf.'

`The Passion of Daphnis': `Let the stag hunt the hounds, let the nightingale attend to the screech-owl's cries.'

`The Graces': `Let the armoury be shrouded in cobwebs, the war-cry become a forgotten song.'

`Helen': `A race-bound filly, a cypress tree that rears its dark adornment over field and garden.'

`The Dioscuri' (Castor & Pollux): `rescuers of horses panicked in battle's bloody turmoil'.

`The Childhood of Heracles': `two monstrous snakes ... The steel-blue scales stood up as they rippled their coils.'

Theocritus's poems shine through their freshness and innocence, their alternation of elegiac and ecstatic tones, their evocation of street and pastoral noises, their images and comparisons and their candid (bi)sexuality.

Not to be missed by all lovers of classical texts.