CHAPTER VII 



THEOCRITUS —THE GREEK EPIGRAMMATISTS 



But to return to our second locus classicus, ' The Fisherman's 

 Dream ' of Theocritus. ^ The whole Idyll (XXL), an exquisite 

 piece of word painting, deserves careful reading as a study of 

 the piscatory genre, but room can only be found for part of it 

 here. 2 



" 'Tis poverty alone, Diophantus, that awakens the arts ; 

 Poverty, the very teacher of labour. Nay, not even sleep is 

 permitted by weary cares to men that live by toil, and if, 

 for a little while, one closes his eyes in the night, cares throng 

 about him and suddenly disquiet his slumber. 



" Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay down 

 and slept — they had strown the dry sea-moss for a bed in their 

 wattled cabin, and there they lay against the leafy wall. Beside 

 them were strewn the instruments of their toilsome hands, the 

 fishing creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled 

 with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster pots woven of 

 rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old coble upon props. 

 Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their 

 sailor's caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. 



' Although the Papyrists have as yet unearthed only some six lines of a new 

 poem by Theocritus (discovered by Mr. M. Johnson, and as yet unpublished), 

 in Pap. Oxyrhynchus, XIII. No. i6i8, we find parts of Id., V., VII., and XV. 



' Translated by Andrew Lang, 1889. The question whether Leonidas of 

 Tarentum was, and Theocritus was not, the author of this Idyll is exhaustively 

 treated by R. J. Cholmeley, Theocritus, pp. 54, 55. Whatever conclusion be 

 reached, constant are the references in those Idylls whose authenticity is 

 undoubted to fish and fishing ; even in his familiar comparisons Theocritus 

 thinks of the sea. Mr. Lang writes, " There is nothing in Wordsworth more 

 real, more full of the incommunicable sense of Nature, rounding and softening 

 the toilsome days of the aged and poor, than the Theocritean poem of The 

 Fisherman's Dream. It is as true to Nature as the statue of the naked fisher- 

 man in the Vatican." 



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