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Home  »  library  »  BIOS  »  Theocritus (fl. Third Century B.C.)

C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Theocritus (fl. Third Century B.C.)

Theocritus (thē-ok’rē-tus). The greatest of Greek bucolic poets; a native of Syracuse he visited Cos and Alexandria; he lived in the first half of the third century B.C. He wrote in the Doric dialect pastorals and idyls of herdsmen and shepherds, which have ever since been regarded as the consummate models of that kind of poetry. Virgil imitated him in his ‘Bucolics.’ We have 31 of his idyls and pastorals, and a number of his epigrams. (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).