This book is an anthology of Greek poetry written during the third to first centuries BC, the Hellenistic period. It is intended to make available to undergraduates and graduate students a selection of texts which are for the most part not easily accessible elsewhere. The volume contains a wide and representative range of poetry including hymns, didactic verse, pastoral poetry, epigrams and epic. An introduction provides cultural and historical background, and a full commentary elucidates problems of language and reference in the texts. In this second edition, many notes have been rewritten and the bibliography has been updated. The selection has also been augmented with three hundred more lines of Greek text (Theocritus poems 5 and 15), and is now more than 2000 lines in length.
