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.
'This A Hellenistic Anthology - now issued as a second edition, with a greater contribution from Theocritus - is a welcome addition to the Green-and-Yellow series. The Introduction manages to convey a lot of information in a relatively short space ... We then have the Commentary. [Hopkinson] introduces each poet, at greater or lesser length with a terse bibliography. The notes are a model of their kind: relevant, concise, precise ... This is unequivocally excellent.' Colin Leach, Classics for All