Moschus

Moschus (fl. c. 150 BCE) was a Greek bucolic poet and grammarian from Syracuse in Sicily, conventionally grouped with the Alexandrian pastoral poets alongside Theocritus and Bion. Ancient sources (the Suda and a note attached to one of his poems) describe him as a pupil of the grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace, placing his activity around the middle of the second century BCE; his birth and death dates are not attested. His surviving work, composed in dactylic hexameter and the Doric dialect, is largely mythological and erotic rather than strictly pastoral. It includes the epyllion Europa, on the abduction of Europa by Zeus, and the short poem Eros Drapeta ("Runaway Love"), in which Aphrodite advertises for her escaped son Eros. He is also credited with bucolic fragments and an elegiac epigram. His grammatical work does not survive.