Theocritus
The inventor of pastoral poetry
c. 300 BC – c. 260 BC
Theocritus was born around 300 BC in Syracuse and spent time at the court of Ptolemy II in Alexandria. He invented pastoral poetry — or at least gave it the literary form that would endure for two millennia.
His Idylls (the word means 'little pictures') include poems in several genres, but the pastoral poems are his glory: shepherds and goatherds on the slopes of Sicily and Cos, singing, competing, falling in love, and mourning the dead in a landscape of extraordinary beauty. The pastoral world Theocritus created — idealised but not quite innocent, lyrical but grounded in the realities of rural life — became the model for Virgil's Eclogues and, through Virgil, for the entire tradition of pastoral literature in the West.
His Alexandrian poems — the urban mime of Idyll 15, the court encomia — are equally accomplished, revealing a poet of range and sophistication.