Talk:Theocritus

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[edit] 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)