Talk:Theocritus

Needs updating and broader context
This seems to be mainly from a hundred-year-old article with a rather narrow philological focus. It needs updating, and placing his poems in a broader context of what they meant to readers/listeners at the time, and what influence they've had over the centuries. I once read that some of the poems of Theocritus celebrated a prosperous independent Sicilian peasantry who in his time were sometimes even able to take tourist trips to Egypt (disguised as religious pilgrimages, of course). Subsequent to his time, the Romans changed the basis of Sicilian agriculture to huge slave-worked plantations, but the "pastoral" genre of poems about idealized shepherds etc. (now divorced from any connection to the real world) lived on for many centuries... AnonMoos (talk) 19:48, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
 * He's a charming poet and rather more accessible for modern readers than are the archaic or classical Greek poets, I think. Anyway he deserves more attention from WP contributors. I hope to get around to this sometime this year, if nobody else does. McCnut (talk) 12:10, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

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This article is dedicated to one the finest presences that ever graced the 20th century biosphere. Sir Gawain McGarson (talk) 10:33, 5 August 2012 (UTC)