Library of the world's best literature, ancient and modern . had spread ina broad shallow tide over the whole of the countries fringing the Eastern Mediterranean. The wealth of theEast flowed into Europe through Egypt and Syria. At the otherend of the Greek world, the States of the larger Greece across theseas were in fierce competition with Carthage for the control of theimmense commerce of Sicily. The guidance of public affairs had. inthe new epoch of trained professional armies, passed into the handsof a small hierarchy of military administrators. Politics, for solong the single absorbing p
Library of the world's best literature, ancient and modern . had spread ina broad shallow tide over the whole of the countries fringing the Eastern Mediterranean. The wealth of theEast flowed into Europe through Egypt and Syria. At the otherend of the Greek world, the States of the larger Greece across theseas were in fierce competition with Carthage for the control of theimmense commerce of Sicily. The guidance of public affairs had. inthe new epoch of trained professional armies, passed into the handsof a small hierarchy of military administrators. Politics, for solong the single absorbing passion of the Greek cities, were ceasing toexist. Relieved from the long strain of political excitement, mensminds fell back on Nature and Art as the two great springs of had hardly realized till then what treasures each had to offer;nor perhaps is it easy for us to realize how entirely the life of an-cient Greece is colored, to our eyes, by a sentiment which only arosewhen that life was becoming absorbed in other forms. To see the XXV—(>24. J4770 THEOCRITUS beauty of nature afresh through a medium of enriched artistic tradi-tion was the last task achieved by the Alexandrian poets; when, witha pathetic insincerity, they turned back to the simple life they hadleft so long behind, sought a new refinement in rusticity, and lavishedall their ornament on the portraiture of the plowmen, shepherds, orfishermen, who were already well on their way towards becoming theserf-population of the Roman Empire. As to the life of Theocritus, the first and by far the most emi-nent of the Greek pastoral poets, nothing is known beyond what maybe gathered from the allusions in his poems. He was a Syracusan bybirth. The idyls show intimate knowledge not only of Eastern Sicily,but of the fringe of Greek States on the coast of southern Italy. Buthis literary education was acquired, and a considerable part of hislife spent, at the court of Alexandria, which then, under the enlight-ened de
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectliterature, bookyear1
