Idyll XV

Idyll XV, also called "The Women at the Adonis-Festival" in English, is a mime by the 3rd-century BC Greek poet Theocritus.

[1] This idyll describes the visit paid by two Syracusan women residing in Alexandria, to the festival of the resurrection of Adonis.

Gorgo, paying a morning call, finds Praxinoa, with her two-year-old child, superintending the spinning of her maids, and asks her to come with her to the Festival of Adonis at the palace of Ptolemy II.

[3] After sundry encounters in the crowded streets, they enter the palace, and soon after, the prima donna begins the Dirge—which is really a wedding-song containing a forecast of a dirge—with an address to the bride Aphrodite and a reference to the deification of the queen of Ptolemy I.

[3] The festival is given by Arsinoë, wife and sister of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and according to Andrew Lang the poem cannot have been written earlier than his marriage, in c. 266 BC.