Theocritus (early third century BCE), born in Syracuse and also
active on Cos and at Alexandria, was the inventor of the bucolic
genre. Like his contemporary Callimachus, Theocritus was a learned
poet who followed the aesthetic, developed a generation earlier by
Philitas of Cos (LCL 508), of refashioning traditional literary
forms in original ways through tightly organized and highly
polished work on a small scale (thus the traditional generic title
Idylls: "little forms"). Although Theocritus composed in a variety
of genres or generic combinations, including encomium, epigram,
hymn, mime, and epyllion, he is best known for the poems set in the
countryside, mostly dialogues or song-contests, that combine lyric
tone with epic meter and the Doric dialect of his native Sicily to
create an idealized and evocatively described pastoral landscape,
whose lovelorn inhabitants, presided over by the Nymphs, Pan, and
Priapus, use song as a natural mode of expression. The
bucolic/pastoral genre was developed by the second and third
members of the Greek bucolic canon, Moschus (fl. mid second century
BCE, also from Syracuse) and Bion (fl. some fifty years later, from
Phlossa near Smyrna), and remained vital through Greco-Roman
antiquity and into the modern era. This edition of Theocritus,
Moschus, and Bion, together with the so-called "pattern poems"
included in the bucolic tradition, replaces the earlier Loeb
Classical Library edition by J. M. Edmonds (1912), using the
critical texts of Gow (1952) and Gallavotti (1993) as a base and
providing a fresh translation with ample annotation.
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