With Homer, you can still appreciate the Iliad and the Odyssey in English -- indeed, the recent translations of Robert Fagles capture the movement and energy of Homeric verse quite well. With Theocritus, however, a translation is a wretched substitute for the Greek, since the exquisitely refined beauty and charm of his poems simply cannot be reproduced in English. What makes Theocritus such an enjoyable experience in Greek is the Doric dialectic in which he writes, his manipulation of the hexameter verse (the same 6 beat verse used by Homer), the echoes of Homer and other authors, and similar curiosities.

Theocritus wrote in the 3d century BC, during the so-called Hellenistic period which arose after the demise of the classical Greek city-state. This era was, in many respects, the first "modern" world. Theocritus was a Sicilian who wrote around 270 BC. He was highly original -- he invented pastoral or "bucolic" poetry, a genre which had a very long and distinguished run in subsequent Latin and European literature. Appearing in the works of this poet for the first time are the cowherds, goatherds, and shepherds playing the pan pipes under the shade of spreading trees, bantering with each other as they sing their rustic songs. If you wish to appreciate Vergil's Eclogues, Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar, or Milton's Lycidas, to name a few of the more well known examples of the form in later literature, you must at least have a taste of the master who invented this important genre.

In this Penguin paperback edition, Robert Wells offers up straightforward, readable translations of the 22 "Idylls" (meaning "short sketches") which are commonly attributed by scholars to Theocritus. Accompanying the translations is an excellent 52 page Introduction which provides the general reader with important background information about the poet, his art, his era, and his compositional techniques.

WARNING!!! The poems of Theocritus are not intended for poorly educated or unsophisticated readers. Do not attempt to read these poems if you lack imagination, curiosity, and an appreciation for the delicate craftsmanship of a sensitive and learned poet

In unskilled literary hands, a stolen Tibetan manuscript would be no more than a macguffin, the monk who seeks to recover it a stereotyped Oriental and the exotic background of lamaistic Buddhism a mere swatch of distracting "color". What makes this "fair play" detective novel exceptional - well worth reading six decades after its original publication - is its use of all of these elements as integral parts of an expertly constructed story.

Clason's detective, Prof. Theocritus Lucius Westborough, is perfectly matched to this case. A fussy, unworldly scholar - when we first meet him, he is correcting proofs of his new monograph and puzzling over the publisher's decision to title it "Heliogabalus: Rome's Most Degenerate Emperor" - he is believably capable of tackling the mystical teachings of an Eighth Century sage and discerning their role in a Twentieth Century murder. In a more mundane setting, he might be a bit of a caricature; here, he shines.

The central plot is strong enough to withstand weaknesses of a kind not unexpected in a genre novel of its era. Westborough's police detective friend is more than a bit of a caricature. An insipid romantic subplot serves no apparent purpose except to give the one young female among the dramatis personae something to do. The mechanism by which the foul deed is carried out makes Rube Goldberg look like a master of simplicity. And the ending comes abruptly as soon as the murderer is unmasked, leaving the reader to wonder (it is a tribute to the book's qualities that the reader does wonder) what afterwards befell the lama Tsongpun Bonbo and the alluring but dangerous writings of Padma Sambhava.

Clason wrote half a dozen other detective novels before abandoning the field to concentrate primarily on nonfiction. According to the publisher's afterword, he has continued to hold a high reputation among a very small segment of mystery readership. On the evidence of "The Man from Tibet", that segment deserves speedy enlargement.

Theocritus was a bucolic poet and native of Syracuse who has often been credited, by both ancient and modern critics, as being the inventor of the genre of pastoral poetry. However, there are also those who argue that while there are poets attributed to Theocritus the bucolic poems in question are from another ancient edition of dubious authorship. Today, Theocritus is primarily of interest to those looking for the historic antecedents of homoerotic poetry; the poet wrote the 14th, 15th, and 17th Idylls in honor of his patron, Ptolemy Soter. There is also a poem to a beautiful youth that is considered from that perspective. My interest in his "Idylls" stemmed from Theocritus being one of only two other classical writers to talk about the murder of Pentheus depicted in Euripides's tragedy "The Bacchae," the other being Ovid in the "Metamorphoses." This particular poem is neither pastoral nor part of the bucolic tradition, so it may well have been written by the actual Theocritus.

For those interested in pastoral poems about shepherds and their ilk, the most famous Bucolics are: I, where Thyrsis sings to a goatherd the story of Daphis, the herdsman who died rather than yield to the power of Aphrodite; VII, "The Harvest Feast," which features a gathering of poets on the island of Cos; and a set of Idylls, VI and XI, which has Polyphemus, the cyclops from the "Odyssey," in love with the sea-nymph Galatea. There is also a marriage song for Helen that will be of passing interest to teachers and students of mythology. The rest of the poems are of lesser interest both from the perspective of mythology and, I would think, of those who study ancient poetry, although several are interesting in that they were apparently commissioned by rather ordinary folk for loved ones. Such poems are of a dramatic or mimetic nature, offering poetic pictures of the ordinary life of the common folk of Sicily in the 3rd century B.C. Consequently, although a minor classical poet all things considered, there are several elements worthy of note in his work.

This is a two disc set; one for Greek authors, another for Latin. It contains selections from Homer, Sappho, Anacreon, Eurpides, Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, Anacreontea, Palatine Anthology, Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, and Petronius. This disc is NOT in Greek or Latin but in English, rendering quite useless to anyone wishing to use it to study the languages.

Les directions modernes des etudes surTheocrite 1-L'intertextualite 2-L'echo philosophique 3-Theocritus Botanist

No serious scholar of Hellenistic poetry will ignore Hunter's solid commentary..but as usual the academic presses tell a mistruth in claiming this new volume is the "first full-scale" whatever on the author under consideration since whenever..Dover's 1971 London commentary is just as solid as this one, and the saddest thing about Hunter's book is how he covers much of the same ground as Dover idyll-wise..better, it would seem, to have covered a different selection and allowed students to have both reasonably priced volumes on Theocritus than to repeat coverage of the same poems (a valuable thing for the seasoned Hellenist but less valuable for the beginner-if any young Hellenists are reading Theocritus anyway). Of course both books can be safely ignored if one is lucky enough to find the monumental 1952 Gow commentary..sadly, and scandalously, allowed to remain out-of-print. Those two volumes contain every poem with full commentary and translation. Without Gow, the best one can do book-wise is amass the Oxford Text (also by Gow) to at least have all of the poems and get this commentary and Dover's. The Loeb by Edmonds is way out of date text- and translation-wise. These poems are far too difficult for the unseasoned Hellenist to read without commentary, so every little aid helps.