flowers rather than to men and women, who have become too selfish to lament much over any of their short-lived fellows. The sad contrast of man's being with the life of Nature, the contrast of Homer, Simonides, Mimnermus, is thus repeated by Moschus:—
"Raise, ye muses of Sicily, raise ye the wail of the mourner!
Ah! when the mallows have withered, have withered away in the garden,
Or the green parsley dies, or dies the soft bloom of anêthum,
Yet will they rise in life and spring for the season returning;
But we, the great and the wise and the strong among men, when we perish,
Silently sleep in the earth the sleep that knows no waking."
sentiment.
§ 67. Theocritus is the true spokesman of this new sentiment. Like other Alexandrian poets (Philetas of Cos, Callimachus of Cyrene, who has been called "the type of an Alexandrian man of letters," Lycophron of Chalkis), Theocritus was not an Alexandrian, but either, as seems most probable, a native of Syracuse, or of Cos. His use of Sicilian Doric and the Sicilian tone of his poems would seem to confirm the general opinion that he was a Syracusan. In any case bucolic or pastoral poetry finds its home in Sicily; and, when we remember the slave-gangs of Italy and the vast estates (latifundia) which ruined her free yeomanry, we shall see that the home of bucolic poetry is not so secondary a matter as might at first appear. There can be little doubt that the rise of a true poetry of Nature, besides being checked by the municipal organisations of Greece and Italy, was partly prevented by the ugly associations of slavery with country life. Just as the presence of serfdom in medieval Europe would appear to have diverted the feudal singers from Nature herself to Nature seen through the medium of the seigneur's life of war and the chase, so the singers of Greece and Italy could not take that intense interest in Nature which largely arises from the personal freedom of
