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Rh come when his eulogy would apply as truly to himself: “They that have their habitation in the most mighty city of Syracuse have set him up here, as became fellow-townsmen, in bronze in the stead of the ﬂesh, and thus have remembered to pay him his wages for the great heap of words he hath builded; for many are the things he hath told their children profitable unto life. He hath their hearty thanks.”

The evidence for the life of Moschus is contained in a notice in Suidas and a note appended to the Runaway Love in the Anthology. These tell us that he was of Syracuse, a grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus, and that he was accounted the second Bucolic poet after Theocritus. Aristarchus taught at Alexandria from 180 to about 144. The year 150 will then be about the middle of Moschus’ life. He is almost certainly to be identiﬁed with the Moschus who is mentioned by Athenaeus as the author of a work on the Rhodian dialect, in which he explained that λεσπατή was an earthenware vessel like those called πτωματίδες but wider in the mouth. None of Moschus’ extant works are really Bucolic; for the Lament for Bion is certainly by another hand.

All we know of Bion is gathered from references in Suidas and Diogenes Laertius, from the above-mentioned note in the Anthology, and from the poem xxii