A late epic bridge between Homeric masterpieces.

Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, the only long mythological epic to survive in Greek from the period between Apollonius’ Argonautica (3rd century BC) and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th century AD), fills in the whole story of the Trojan expedition between the end of Homer’s Iliad and the beginning of the Odyssey, which had been treated only episodically by earlier epic and dramatic poets. Composing sometime between the late second and mid-fourth centuries AD, Quintus boldly adapts Homeric diction and style to suit the literary, moral, religious, rhetorical, and philosophical culture of the high Roman Empire, and does not hesitate to diverge from the usual versions of the story in order to craft his own narrative vision.

This edition of the Posthomerica replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition by A. S. Way (1913) with an updated text based on that of F. Vian, and fresh translation, introduction, and bibliography that take account of more than a century of intervening scholarship.

The father of pastoral poetry and his Hellenistic heirs.

Theocritus (early third century BC), born in Syracuse and also active on Cos and at Alexandria, was the inventor of the bucolic genre. Like his contemporary Callimachus, Theocritus was a learned poet who followed the aesthetic, developed a generation earlier by Philitas of Cos (LCL 508), of refashioning traditional literary forms in original ways through tightly organized and highly polished work on a small scale (thus the traditional generic title Idylls: “little forms”). Although Theocritus composed in a variety of genres or generic combinations, including encomium, epigram, hymn, mime, and epyllion, he is best known for the poems set in the countryside, mostly dialogues or song-contests, that combine lyric tone with epic meter and the Doric dialect of his native Sicily to create an idealized and evocatively described pastoral landscape, whose lovelorn inhabitants, presided over by the Nymphs, Pan, and Priapus, use song as a natural mode of expression.

The bucolic/pastoral genre was developed by the second and third members of the Greek bucolic canon, Moschus (fl. mid second century BC, also from Syracuse) and Bion (fl. some fifty years later, from Phlossa near Smyrna), and remained vital through Greco-Roman antiquity and into the modern era.

This edition of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion, together with the so-called “pattern poems” included in the bucolic tradition, replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition by J. M. Edmonds (1912), using the critical texts of Gow (1952) and Gallavotti (1993) as a base and providing a fresh translation with ample annotation.