Moschus

Who is Moschus?

Moschus, ancient Greek bucolic poet and student of the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace, was born at Syracuse and flourished about 150 BC. Aside from his poetry, he was known for his grammatical work, nothing of which survives.

His few surviving works consist of an epyllion, the Europa, on the myth of Europa, three bucolic fragments and a whole short bucolic poem Runaway Love, and an epigram in elegiac couplets. His surviving bucolic material is short on pastoral themes and is largely erotic and mythological; although this impression may be distorted by the paucity of evidence, it is also seen in the surviving bucolic of the generations after Moschus, including the work of Bion of Smyrna. Moschus' poetry is typically edited along with other bucolic poets, as in the commonly used Oxford text by A. S. F. Gow, but the Europa has often received separate scholarly editions, as by Winfried Bühler and Malcolm Campbell. The epigram is also normally published with the edition by Maximos Planoudes of the Greek Anthology.

The Europa, along with Callimachus' Hecale and such Latin examples as Catullus 64, is a major example of the Hellenistic phenomenon of the epyllion.