CHAPTER VII 
THEOCRITUS—THE GREEK EPIGRAMMATISTS 
But to return to our second locus classicus, ‘The Fisherman’s 
Dream’ of Theocritus.!_ The whole Idyll (XXI.), 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. 
1 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 M. Johnson, and as yet unpublished), 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. 1618, we find parts of Id., V., VII., and XV. 
2 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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