MUSJEUS is the name of three Greek poets. The first is an almost fabulous personage, who is said to have flourished in Attica, and to have been buried on the Museum Hill in Athens. The mystic and oracular verses and usages of Attica, and especially of Eleusis, attach themselves to his name, and when this representative character is deducted nothing of his individuality remains.

The second Musxus was an Ephesian who was attached to the court of the Pergamenian kings.

The third is of uncertain date, but probably belongs to the 5th century A.D., as the structure of his hexameters is evidently modelled after the canons of Nonnus. The poem in 340 lines which he wrote on the story of Hero and Leander is by far the most beautiful Greek poem of the age. He conveys the pathetic tale of love and death by selecting a few striking situations ; he describes each of them in a telling manner, with no attempt to represent ethical character or earnest thought, but with a good eye to the situation, the dramatic and rhetorical effect. The work shows the influence of the schools of rhetoric, and is evidently the forerunner of the love romances of the Byzantine period.