MOSCHUS  ,

Greek bucolic poet and friend of the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus,was born at Syracuse and flourished about 150 B.C . He was the author of a short epic poem, Europa, and a pretty little epigram, Love, the Runaway, imitated by Torquato Tasso and Ben Jonson . The epitaph on Bion of Smyrna, wrongly supposed to have been his tutor, was in all probability written about the time of Sulla (see F . Bticheler in Rheinisches Museum, XXX., 1875) . The poem on Megara (the wife of Heracles) is probably not his, but a few other pieces, undoubtedly genuine, have been preserved . His poems are nearly all in hexameters . They are usually printed in editions of Bion and Theocritus, and have been translated into many European languages . The text has been edited by U. von Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, in the Oxford Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca (1905); there are English translations by J . Banks in Bohn's Classical Library (1853), and by Andrew Lang (1889), together with Bion and Theocritus . See F . Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexandrinerzeit. i . 231 (1891), and article BION .