Theocritus lived in the age called Hellenistic, following the conquests of Alexander the Great, which greatly increased the ascendancy of Greek culture. Both his poetry and what we can infer from it about his life display the cosmopolitanism that the widespread empire and its successors encouraged: he appears to have been familiar with at least Sicily, Miletus, Cos (an island near Anatolia), Athens and Alexandria, the two cultural capitals of the...