Moschus

His surviving bucolic material (composed in the traditional dactylic hexameters and Doric dialect) 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 (1952), but the Europa has often received separate scholarly editions, as by Winfried Bühler (Wiesbaden 1960) and Malcolm Campbell (Hildesheim 1991).

Although it is hard to tell because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence, Moschus' influence on Greek bucolic poetry is likely to have been significant; the influence of Runaway Love is felt in Bion and other later bucolic poets.

In later European literature his work was imitated or translated by such authors as Torquato Tasso and Ben Jonson.

Two other poems, attributed to him at one time or another but no longer thought to be his, are also commonly edited with his work.