A scholiast on Ovid’s Ibis l. 549
Utve Syracosio praestricta fauce poetae,
Sic animae laqueo sit via clausa tuae,
tells us that this is “the Syracusan poet Theocritus, who was arrested by king Hiero for making an attack upon his son, the king's object being merely to make him think that he was going to be put to death. But when Hiero asked him if he would avoid abusing his son in future, he began to abuse him all the more, and not only the son but the father too. Whereat the king in indignation ordered him to be put to death in real earnest, and according to some authorities he was strangled and according to others beheaded.” There is nothing improbable in this story. When Theocritus was sixty-five Hiero’s son Gelo would be nineteen; we know of no other Syracusan poet who met such a fate; and Antigonus’ treatment of Theocritus of Chios and Ptolemy’s of Sotades show how the most enlightened rulers of the day could deal with adverse criticism. But whether we believe it or no, the story is evidence for a tradition that Theocritus’ last days were spent in Sicily; and we may well imagine that he died at Syracuse, that birthplace, as he calls it, of good men and true, where his fellow-citizens long afterwards pointed out to the collector of inscriptions the statue of his great forerunner Epicharmus, and the words which he once wrote for its base, little thinking perhaps that the time would
