Biography Daphnis

Daphnis – handsome young man, the hero of the Sicilian bucolic poetry. The son of Hermes and the local nymph, beloved of the gods, and especially the Muses, he was tending his flock on the slopes of Mount Etna and elsewhere in Sicily, amused at the play of syringes and the singing of them invented bucolic songs. In the color of youth suffered D. sudden death.

He died, mourned by shepherds, flocks, and their whole nature. Around his suffering and death revolve all the major stories and songs of D. In older versions, the source of which was Stesichorus, D. died due to revenge his beloved nymph Naidu or Nomiya. He promised her not to converge with another woman, but was once drunk and carried away to a breach of a vow, the king's daughter. Nymph, in revenge for it, blinded him. D. wandered, seeking relief in music and singing, until it finally fell from a cliff into the sea (or he has not been turned into a rock). Hermes took him to heaven, and to place its downfall brought from the land of the source from which the Sicilians annually sacrificed. In a later version, which is representative of Theocritus (1 and 7 idyll), D. dies of hopeless love for a certain Xenia. This hopeless strast suggested to him by Aphrodite, seeking revenge for the fact that D. did not want to fall in love with the girl assigned to him a goddess. Virgil celebrates the 5 th eclogue, under the name D., Julius Caesar.