THE ELEGY AND IDYLL: THEOCRITUS.--True and, at the same time, great poets belonged to this period. One was Philetas of Cos, founder of the Grecian elegy, celebrated and affectionately saluted centuries later by André Chénier. Of his works only a few terse fragments remain. Another was Asclepiades of Samos, both elegiac and lyric, of whose _epigrams_, (short elegies) those preserved to us are charming. Yet another was the sad and charming Leonidas of Tarentum. The two leaders of this choir were Theocritus and Callimachus. Theocritus, a Sicilian, passes as the founder of the idyll which he did not invent, but to which he gave the importance of a type by marking it with his imprint. The idyll of Theocritus was always a picture of popular customs and even a little drama of popular morals; but at times it had its scene set in the country, at others in a town, or again by the sea, and consequently there are rustic idylls (properly _bucolics_), maritime idylls, popular urban idylls. An astonishing sense of reality united to a personal poetic gift and a highly alert sensitiveness made his little poems alike beautiful for their truth and also for a certain ideal of ardent and profound passion. It is curious without being astonishing that the idyll of Theocritus often suggests the poetry of the Bible. PUPILS OF THEOCRITUS.--Moschus and Bion were the immediate pupils of Theocritus. He had more illustrious ones, commencing with Virgil in his _Eclogues_, continuing with the numerous idylls of the Renaissance in France and Italy, as well as with Segrais in the seventeenth century, and ending, if it be desired, with André Chénier, though others more modern can be traced. CALLIMACHUS.--Callimachus, more erudite, more scholastic, was what is termed a neoclassic, which is that he desired to treat in a new way the same subjects that had been dealt with by the great men of ancient Greece, and so far as possible to conceive them in the same spirit. Therefore he wrote tragedies, comedies, "satiric dramas" (a kind of farce in which secondary deities were characterised), lyric and elegiac poems after the manner of Alcaeus or Sappho, a familiar epopee, a romance in verse, which was perhaps a novel type, but more probably imitated from certain poems of ancient Greece which we no longer possess. To us his poetry seems cold and calculated, although clever and dexterous. It was held in high esteem not only in his own day but to the close of antiquity.