theocritean

Updated: June 12, 2025

When Shelley compared the poetry of the Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek poets to 'a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, he supplied us with critical images which may not unfairly be used to point the distinction between Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno.

John Addington Symonds - Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, First Series

The former was based on the Theocritean idyll, but does not seem to have been well adapted to Roman treatment; the latter was of two kinds; it was either a real communication on some subject of mutual interest, as that of Horace, or else an imaginary expression of feeling put into the mouth of a mythical hero or heroine, of which the most brilliant examples are those of Ovid.

Charles Thomas Cruttwell - The History of Roman Literature : From the earliest period to the death of Marcus Aurelius

There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of nature, rounding and softening the toilsome days of the aged and the poor, than the Theocritean poem of the Fisherman's Dream. It is as true to nature as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican.

of Phlossa near Smyrna Bion - Theocritus Bion and Moschus Rendered into English Prose

No one will deny that the Theocritean idyl had attained full and perfect development in its own kind; but from the dramatic point of view, and granted that it contained the germ of the later pastoral drama, it belonged to a period of infancy, or, to adopt a more strictly accurate metaphor, of gestation.

Walter W. Greg - Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration: Stage in England