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What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the night? The Captain gazed gloomily at his sword that hung upon the wall. In the closet near by was stored his faded uniform, stained and worn by weather and service.
When, then, the Hebrew poet placed his shepherd and his flocks among the lilies, he was not trying to conciliate the courtly aristocrats of Jerusalem, or reconcile them to his Theocritan conventions; he was simply drawing his picture from life.
But, as though to excuse himself for taking a Judean shepherd as a representative of the higher virtues, he made his shepherd one who feeds among the lilies. It is not the rude neat-herds of Gilead or the Judean desert that hold such noble dialogues, but shepherds of delicate refinement. In a word, the whole eclogic character of Canticles appears to be copied from the Theocritan model,"
After that period his works are nearly all French in subject, many of them painted in the environs of Paris; though, with his Theocritan spirit, he could see the fountain of Jouvence in the woods of Sèvres, and for him the classic nymph dwelt by the pond at Ville d'Avray. His life was long he died February 22, 1875 and completely filled with his work.
To his mind the ideal woman could not but be surrounded by a luxurious atmosphere of her own. To enter the charmed precincts of those surroundings seemed to John equivalent to being transported from the regions of the Theocritan to the level of the Anacreontic ode, from the pastoral, of which he had had too much, to the aristocratic, of which he felt that he could not have enough.
It is indeed difficult to escape the very old persuasion that a sorrow so sympathetically expressed must be more than a mere Theocritan reminiscence.
Her dark eyes were hollow, her small mouth had lost its colour, and she showed that touch of something wasting and withering that Theocritan shepherds knew in old Sicilian days. It was as though she had defied a god and the god had avenged himself. Suddenly he appeared the teasing divinity in human shape. There was a rustling among the brushwood fringing the river.
"What ? Ashamed of your bucolic hobby! No wonder since after all it's only a goat. I dare you, brother mine, to produce me a Theocritan fragment." "Take the consequences of your rash levity; though I have a dawning suspicion some 'Imp of the Perverse' has coached you for the occasion."
It follows that there is no essential likeness between Canticles and either of the other two. In his later books, Maspero has tacitly withdrawn his assertion of close Egyptian similarity, and it would be well if an equally frank withdrawal were made by the advocates of a close Theocritan parallel.
He suggests that the vagaries of the Theocritan dialect are due to the fact that the Idyllist was a foreigner, whose native language was "probably Hebrew or Syriac." Or perhaps Theocritus used the Greek translation of the Song, "unless Theocritus himself was the translator."
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