Theocritus was the creator of bucolic poetry as a branch of Greek, and, through imitators, such as Virgil, of Roman literature. The germ of this species of poetry may be discovered, at a very early period, among the Dorians, both of Laconia and of Sicily, especially at Tyndaris and Syracuse, where the festivals of Artemis were enlivened by songs, in which two shepherds or herdsmen, or two parties of them, contended with one another, and which gradually grew into an art, practised by a class of performers called Lydiastae and Bucolistae, who flourished extensively in Sicily and the neighbouring districts of Italy. The subjects of their songs were popular mythical stories, and the scenes of country life; the beauty, love, and unhappy end of Daphnis, the ideal of the shepherd, who was introduced by Stesichorus into his poetry, and of Diomus, who was named by Epicharmus; the melancholy complaints of the coy huntsman Menalcas ; and other kindred subjects. These songs were still popular in the time of Diodorus; but the only fragment of them which has come down to us consists of the two following lines in the Priapeian metre, prefixed to the works of Theocritus : -- δέξαι τὰν ἀγαθὰν τύχαν, δέξαι τὰν ὑγίειαν,ἃν φέρομεν παρὰ τᾶς θεοῦ, ἃν ἐκαλέσσατο τήνα. (Welcker, über den Ursprung des Hirtenlieds, Kleine Schriften , vol. i. pp. 402-411.)

Theocritus, however, was the first who reduced this species of poetry to such a form as to constitute it a branch of regular literature; and, in so doing, he followed, not merely the impulse of his own genius, but, to a great extent, the examples of Epicharmus and of Sophron, especially the latter. His bucolic idyls are of an essentially dramatic and mimetic character. They are pictures of the ordinary life of the common people of Sicily; whence their name, εἴδη, εἰδύλλια. The pastoral poems and romances of later times are a totally different sort of composition from the bucolics of Theocritus, who knows nothing of the affected sentiment, the pure innocence, the primeval simplicity, or even the worship of nature, which have been ascribed to the imaginary shepherds of a fictitious Arcadia; nothing of the distinction between the country and the town, the description of which has been made a vehicle of bitter satire upon the vices of civilized communities. He merely exhibits simple and faithful pictures of the common life of the Sicilian people, in a thoroughly objective, although truly poetical spirit. He abstains from all the mere artifices of composition, such as fine imagery, high colouring, and pathetic sentiment. He deals but sparingly in descriptions, which he introduces only as episodes, and never attempts any of those allegorical applications of the sentiments and adventures of shepherds, which have made the of Virgil a signal failure. Dramatic simplicity and truth are impressed upon the pictures exhibited in his poems, into the colouring of which he has thrown much of the natural comedy which is always seen in the common life of a free people. His fifteenth idyl, the is a masterpiece of the mimetic exhibition of female character, rendered the more admirable by the skill with which he has introduced the praises of Arsinoe and Berenice, without sacriticing anything of its genuine dramatic spirit. The form of these poems is in perfect keeping with their object. The symmetrical arrangement and the rapid transitions of the lively dialogue, the varied language and the musical rhythms, the combination of the prevailing epic verse and diction with the forms of common speech, all contribute much to the general effect. In short, as Theocritus was the first who developed the powers of bucolic poetry, so he may also be said to have been the last who understood its true spirit, its proper objects, and its natural limits.

The poems of Theocritus, however, are by no means all bucolic. The collection, which has come down to us under his name, consists of thirty poems, called by the general title of a fragment of a few lines from a poem entitled and twenty-two epigrams in the Greek Anthology, besides that upon the poet himself, which, as above stated, is probably the production of Artemidorus. Several other works were ascribed to him by the ancient grammarians. Suidas (s. v.) tells us that he wrote the poems called Bucolics in the Doric dialect, and that some ascribed to him also the following : -- Προιτίδας, Ἐλπίδας, ὕμνους, Ἡρωίνας, ἐπικήδεια μέλη, ἐλεγείας, ἰάμβους, ἐπιγράμματα. The Greek author of a few sentences on the characteristics of the poetry of Theocritus, prefixed to his works, says that all poetry has three characters, the διηγηματικός, the δραματικός, and the μικτικός, and that bucolic poetry is a mixture of every form. Bergk has recently classed the poems of Theocritus under the heads of Carmina Bucolica, mimica, lyrica, epica, and cpigrammata (Rhein. Mus. 1838-1839, vol. vi. pp. 16, &c.)

Of the thirty so-called Idyls, the last is a late Anacreontic, of scarcely any poetical merit, and has no claim to be regarded as a work of Theocritus. Of the others, only ten belong strictly to the class of poems which the ancients described by the specific names of βουκολικά, ποιμενικά, αἰπολικά, or by the first of these words used in a generic sense, Bucolics, or, as we say, pastoral poems; but, taking the term Idyl in the wider sense explained above, we must also include under it several of the poems which are not bucolic, but which are pictures of the life of the common people of Sicily. In this general sense, the properly so called, are the first eleven, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and twenty-first, the last of which has a special interest, a being the only representation we possess of the lif of Grecian fishermen : the second and fifteenth are evidently pretty close imitations of the mimes of Sophron. Several of them are erotic in their character, arid allied, in their form, to different species of poetry : thus, the twelfth and twenty-ninth have a decidedly lyrical complexion, while that of the nineteenth is epigrammatic, of the twentieth bucolic, and of the twenty-third tragic : the thirteenth and eighteenth, which are also erotic, have the epic character, both in their subjects and their form ; and the twenty-seventh is an erotic poem under the form of a mime. The sixteenth and seventeenth are imitations of another branch of the ancient lyric poetry, the encomium. The twenty-second is an epic hymn to the Dioscuri; the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth appear to be fragments of an epic poem on the adventures of Hercules, in the learned tone of the Alexandrian epos, but still distinguished by the free and simple style of Theocritus and the twenty-sixth is also epic, but of very inferior merit, being a fragment of the story of Pentheus, related in a dry rhetorical manner. Lastly, the twenty-eighth, entitled , is an occasional poem, written in a very pleasing style. This great intermixture of the different species of poetry is quite in accordance with the spirit of the age and of the Alexandrian school, in which the poet was brought up. But, in those of the idyls which are certainly genuine, all these varieties are harmonized by the true poetical genius of Theocritus.

But yet, if we carefully examine the collection as a whole, it will be found to contain incongruities of style and subject, and varieties of merit, too great to allow of the belief that all these twenty-nine idyls (for the thirtieth may be certainly excluded) are the genuine productions of Theocritus. The introduction of spurious poems into the collection can easily be accounted for. As early as B. C. 200 there existed a collection of the works of the bucolic poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, as we learn from the following epigram of Artemidorus, which is prefixed to the works of Theocritus, and is also contained in the Greek Anthology (Brunck, Anal. vol. i. p. 293; Jacobs, Anth. Graec. vol. i. p. 194) : -- βουκολικαὶ Μοῖσαι σποράδες ποκά, νῦν δʼ ἅμα πᾶσαιἐντὶ μιᾶς μάνδρας, ἐντὶ μιᾶς ἀγέλας.

Into such a collection, made at a time when critical science was in its infancy, every thing would naturally be swept together that had the least traditional or other claim to be regarded as the production of one of these three poets; and, moreover, whatever was of doubtful authority would naturally be ascribed to Theocritus, as the most celebrated of the three. Of this large collection the idyls that have come down to us are merely samples, selected by the grammarians (whence the name of Eclogac, which was afterwards applied to bucolic poetry in general); and thus it has happened that, while much of the genuine poetry of Theocritus has been lost, there must be much that is not his in the collection we now possess. To distinguish the genuine from the spurious, we have scarcely any other test than internal evidence; and here the danger arises, into which some critics appear to have fallen, of making the comparative excellence of the poems the sole test of their genuineness. It is impossible here to enter upon the detailed critical arguments for and against the genuineness of the several poems. The whole subject has been discussed by Eichstädt (de Carm. Theocr. ad sua Genera revocat. &c., Lips. 1794, 4to.), by E. Reinhold (de Genuinis Theocr. Carm. et Supposititiis, Jen. 1819), by A. Wissowa (Theocritus Theocritcus, Vratislav. 1828, 8vo.), and by Warton. Meineke, and Wüstemann, in their editions of Theocritus. Those idyls, of which the genuineness is the most doubtful, are the 12th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 26th, 27th, 29th, and 30th.

Of the other poems which have come down to us, the of which we only possess five lines and a word, preserved by Athenaeus (vii. p. 284), was an encomium of the celebrated queen, the wife of Ptolemy the son of Lagus, and the mother of Ptolemy Philadelphus. The poem entitled contained in the Greek Anthology, is an exercise of ingenuity, consisting in the composition of twenty verses in such a manner that the length of each pair of verses is less than that of the pair before, and thus the whole resembles the ten pipes of the mouth-organ or Pan-pipes (σύριγξ). Of the epigrams, two (Nos. 17, 18, Brunck) are supposed by Jacobs to be the productions of Leonidas of Tarentum, while, on the other hand, the Palatine MS. assigns the 10th epigram of Erycius to Theocritus. (Brunck, Anal. vol. i. p. 376; Jacobs, Anth. Graec. vol. i. p. 194, vol. xiii. p. 958.)