The Suda says he was at first a slave and overseer of a palaestra, but obtained a good education later in life and devoted himself to grammatical studies, probably in Alexandria.
[1] He prepared a new recension of the Iliad and Odyssey, characterized by sound judgment and poetical taste.
He also wrote epigrams, eleven of which, preserved in the Greek Anthology and Athenaeus, show elegance and vivacity.
The Heracleia was a long mythological epic, probably an imitation of the poem of the same name by Panyasis, containing the same number of books (fourteen).
Rhianos also wrote a number of homoerotic epigrams, and was also mentioned in one of Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy's poems ("Young Men of Sidon (A.D.