Europa And The Bull, Pompeian painting from the House of Jason, or of the Fatal Loves (first quarter of first century A.D.). This genteel
version of one of Zeus' best known zoomorphic seductions nicely catches the romantic spirit of Hellenistic poetry, as represented by
Moschus' Europa.
His epic was not, then, such an anachronism. It veered between the two extremes of Hellenistic culture, and it shone wherever it escaped
the one and approached the other. It almost avoided the dry learning of lesser authors in the 'didactic' style, poems like Aratus' on the
stars, whose 'Hesiodic' quality and 'sleepless' effort were admired by Callimachus. These poets wrote a mass of versified learning on
topics from cooking to farming. What survives is hard to admire: Nicander wrote a poem on Antidotes to the Bites of Wild Creatures
which is as deadly as the hazard he professed to cure.
Conversely, Apollonius came very close to the charming epic sketches which focused on a lesser figure, often a female, and an
unfamiliar incident in myth. These shorter poems were composed independently, as 'tiny epics' or epyllia. Court scholars such as
Callimachus and Eratosthenes wrote them too, and we have a splendid example from Moschus (a pupil of Aristarchus) on the topic of
Europa, crossing the sea on the back of Zeus as a bull. They are witty and often romantic, and their high colours conjure up a fine
Tiepolo fresco. It took Virgil to tease and transform the grimmer, didactic poets and pass on their genre, through his Georgics, to its
golden age among the Augustan poets of Georgian England. But the epyllion was transferred, not transformed. It passed first to Rome,
then to Elizabethan poets, its aptest heirs at a moment when learning competed once more with playfulness. Though directly inspired by
Ovid, Marlowe's sensuous Hero and Leander is in many ways a Hellenistic pearl.