Meleager’s to show how modern in tone and subject these dainty lyrics had become in the first century B.C.:

“Poor foolish heart, I cried ‘Beware,’
I vowed thou wouldst be captured,
So fondly hovering round the snare,
With thy false love enraptured.

“I cried, and thou art caught at last,
All vainly flutterest in the toils.
Lord Love himself hath bound thee fast
And meshed thy pinions in his coils.

“And he hath set thee on his fire,
In drugs thy swooning soul immersed,
In stifling perfumes of desire,
With scalding tears to quench thy thirst.”

So far it is mainly a record of revivals, but in Theocritus, who, though Sicilian by birth, passed most of his active career at Alexandria, we have the inventor of a new and most important branch of literature. With