"[Virgil's] Eclogues are anything but a successful imitation of the idyls of Theocritus; they could not, in fact, be otherwise than unsuccessful: their object is to create something which could not prosper in a Roman soil. The shepherds of Theocritus are characters of ancient Sicilian poetry; I do not believe that they were taken from Greek poems. Daphnis, for example, is a Sicilian not a Greek hero. The idyls of Theocritus grew out of popular songs, and hence his poems have a genuineness, truth, and nationality. Now Virgil, in transplanting that kind of poetry to the plains of Lombardy, peoples that country with Greek shepherds, with their Greek names and Greek peculiarities,—in short, with beings that never could exist there."