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It is not easy to trace any direct influence, unless, as perhaps we should, we credit to Calpurnius the suggestion of those poems in which a 'wise' shepherd describes to his less-travelled hearers the manners of the town. A few pieces from the Idyllia of Ausonius appear in some of the bucolic collections, but they cannot strictly be regarded as coming within the range of pastoral poetry.
In the latter volume, The Hellenics, which included some translations of his earlier Latin poems, called Idyllia Heroica, one has only to read "The Hamadryad," and compare it with the lyrics of the first volume, in order to realize the astonishing literary vigor of a man who published two volumes, a half century apart, without any appreciable diminution of poetical feeling.
As THEOCRITUS is famoused for his Idyllia in Greek, and VIRGIL for his Eclogues in Latin: so SPENSER their imitator in his Shepherds Calendar is renowned for the like argument; and honoured for fine poetical invention, and most exquisite wit. As PARTHENIUS Nicaeus excellently sang the praises of ARETE: so DANIEL hath divinely sonnetted the matchless beauty of DELIA.
The first production of Virgil was his Bucolics, consisting of ten eclogues, written in imitation of the Idyllia or pastoral poems of Theocritus. It may be questioned whether any language which has its provincial dialects, but is brought to perfection, can ever be well adapted, in that state, to the use of pastoral poetry.
Among them the volume of Idyllia constitutes his chief claim to eminence, and gives him a high rank among the later Latin poets. The gem of this collection is the famous Mosella, written at Treves about the year 370.
Immo sunt qui maximam similitudinem inter Canticum Canticorum et Theocriti Idyllia esse statuant ... quod iisdem fere videtur esse verbis, loquendi formulis, similibus, transitu, figuris. If these resemblances were so very striking, then, as argued in the text of this essay, the Idylls of Theocritus ought to resemble the Egyptian poems. This, however, they utterly fail to do.
The Idylls may probably be best considered in their final shape: they are not an epic, but a series of heroic idyllia of the same genre as the heroic idyllia of Theocritus. He wrote long after the natural age of national epic, the age of Homer.
Tennyson, too, from the first believed that his pieces ought to be short. Therefore, though he had a conception of his work as a whole, a conception long mused on, and sketched in various lights, he produced no epic, only a series of epic idyllia. He had a spiritual conception, "an allegory in the distance," an allegory not to be insisted upon, though its presence was to be felt.
In like manner his Hellenics, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin Idyllia Heroica, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have something chill and artificial.
He saw the later literary epic rise in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a poem with many beauties, if rather an archaistic and elaborate revival as a whole. The time for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to have thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic idyllia of Heracles, and certain adventures of the Argonauts.
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