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 Greek world. Though best known to literary historians as the initiator of the pastoral strain in poetry, that is, stylized representations of country folk, especially as they experience sexual desire, his Idylls go well beyond that subject matter to deal with city folk, fishermen, urban boy-love, heroes and demigods such as Herakles and the Diskouroui, Helen of Troy, mythical figures like the Cyklops Polyphmos, and his royal patrons, Heron II of Syracuse and Ptlemy II of Egypt. Also extant in the Greek Anthology are some epigrams attributed to hi