Theocritus

Theocritus was a Greek poet of the third century BC, born in Syracuse in Sicily and later at work in the Hellenistic courts of Cos and Alexandria. He is regarded as the founder of pastoral poetry, and his short hexameter poems, the Idylls, set the speech of herdsmen and the songs of love and loss against the Sicilian countryside.

The Idylls also include mythological narratives, a town mime and a panegyric for Ptolemy, and Virgil's Eclogues later took up his pastoral manner. This selection prints the verse translations of C. S. Calverley (1869), John Dryden (1684–85), W. R. Paton (1916–18) and J. M. Edmonds (1912, the Loeb Greek Bucolic Poets), together with the epigrams and epitaphs attributed to Theocritus.