represented by the Ptolemy, the Dioscuri, the Berenice fragment, and perhaps the Charites. The Lyric Poems must have included the Distaff and XXIX and XXX, and perhaps also the Beloved and the Epithalamy. The books known as Elegies, Iambics, Funeral Laments, and The Heroines, and the single poem called The Daughters of Proetus—perhaps known to Vergil,—all these are lost without a trace. It is strange that Suidas’ list apparently omits all mention of the non-pastoral mimes, the Love of Cynisca, the Spell, and the Women at the Adonis Festival, and of the little epics Hylas and The Little Heracles. The Spell may have been included among the Lyric Poems, its claim to be so classed lying in the peculiar way in which, though it is a personal narrative, the refrain is used throughout as if it were a song. We may perhaps guess that the four other poems belonged to the remaining book of Suidas’ list, the Hopes,[1] and that this was a collection published by Theocritus soon after his arrival in Egypt, with the Love of Cynisca standing first as a sort of dedication to his friend Ptolemy and echoing the title’s veiled request for his patronage.
The name εἰδύλλια, idyls, as applied to the poems of Theocritus, is certainly as old as the commentaries which accompany the text, and some of these probably go back to the first century before Christ. It was known to Pliny the Younger as a collective
- ↑ A book of the same title is ascribed by Suidas to Callimachus.
