"I will set my verses to the tune of a Sicilian shepherd."
Buc. x. 51.
The historian Diodorus, himself a Sicilian, who lived about the commencement of the Christian æra, supposes bucolic poetry and music to be the peculiar invention and exercise of his own country, and says, that it continued in use at his time and was held in the same estimation as formerly[1]. In less than 200 years from this period the art lost much of its original simplicity. Maximus Tyrius (Diss. xxi.) says, that "the Dorians of Sicily became, to use the mildest term, more weak in understanding," (more dissolute) "when instead of the simple Alpine music, which they used to employ in the presence of their flocks and herds, they began to love the tunes of the Sybarites, and a style of dancing adapted to them, such as was required by the Ionic pipe."
But, although the rustic Dorians of Sicily had the full credit of this invention and were never surpassed in the practice of it by any other people, yet the imitation of it was attempted in various instances by the pastoral inhabitants of other countries. More especially, it appears to have been adopted in the neighboring district of Magna Græcia; for it is near Sybaris that Theocritus has placed the scene of his Fifth Idyll, in which, a shepherd having staked a lamb and a goatherd a kid, they contend in alternate verses, whilst a wood-cutter, whom they have called from his labor, listens as judge, and awards the prize to the goatherd, who hereupon joyfully sacrifices his newly acquired lamb to the Nymphs.
In the Seventh Idyll (v. 12, 27, 40.) Theocritus mentions the goatherd, Lycidas of Crete, who was his contemporary, and also his predecessors and supposed instructors, Asclepiades of Samos, and Philetas of Cos, as distinguished for skill in pastoral music.
The bucolic poems of Theocritus prove, that the Arcadian belief in the attributes of Pan had extended itself into Sicily and the South of Italy, so that the rustics of those countries not only invoked him by name, but even sometimes offered
- ↑ L. iv. c. 84, p. 283.
