a Grecian poet of antiquity, usually coupled with Bion, and both of them contemporaries with Theocritus. In later times, all the ancient idyllia were collected and attributed to Theocritus; but the claims of Moschus and Bion to some few little pieces have been admitted, and this is sufficient to make us inquisitive about their characters and story; yet all that can now be known about them must be collected from their own remains.

Moschus, by composing his delicate elegy on Bion, has given the best memorials of Bion's life. Moschus and Theocritus have by some critics been supposed to be the same person; but there are irrefragable evidences against such an hypothesis. Others, proceeding upon the authority of Suidas, maintain that he as well as Bion lived later than Theocritus, whilst others again suppose him to have been the scholar of Bion, and probably his successor in the government of the poetical school; which, from the elegy of Moschus, does not seem unlikely. Their remains are to be found in all the editions of the Poetae Minores. Of the separate editions, some are very valuable, particularly the rare and curious one of Mekerchus, printed at Bruges, 1565, in 4to; and those of Schwebelius, Venice, 1746, in 4to, of Heskin, Oxford, 1748, in 8vo, and of Gilbert Wakefield, 1795, in 8vo.