Theocritus’ Hymns and “Epyllia”

Four genuinely Theocritean poems (13, 22, 24, and 26) include compressed narratives on the deeds of gods and other mythological figures in dactylic hexameter. These share a number of verbal and thematic connections and interact with one another in interesting ways. All of them focus on divine figures of symbolic importance for the Ptolemies, and there is a good reason to suppose that they implicitly participate in the construction and dissemination of a complex and multifaceted image of the court, one that includes both beneficence and the capacity for brutality. Equally important is the poems’ complex and nuanced engagement with earlier literature, and in particular with traditional representations of heroism

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