SOURCE: “Theocritus and His Age,” in Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1909, pp. xi-xlii.

In the following essay, Lang discusses the legend of Theocritus, the influence Sicily and its shepherds had upon his poetry, and the characteristics of art during the age in which he wrote.

At the beginning of the third century before Christ, in the years just preceding those in which Theocritus wrote, the genius of Greece seemed to have lost her productive force. Nor would it have been strange if that force had really been exhausted. Greek poetry had hitherto enjoyed a peculiarly free development, each form of art succeeding each without break or pause, because each—epic, lyric, dithyramb, the drama—had responded to some new need of the state and of religion. Now in the years that followed the fall of Athens and the conquests of Macedonia, Greek religion and the...