This study investigates the reception of contemporary religion in Hellenistic poetry and analyses the treatment of the cult of Artemis--taken as paradigmatic--in Theocritus' second Idyll and Callimachus' Hymns. Both Theocritus and Callimachus display a lively interest in contemporary religion in all its facets and each dwells upon an aspect of the cult of Artemis absent in earlier poetry: Theocritus depicts her as a goddess of magic, and Callimachus as a city-goddess. These are precisely the features of her cult that gained prominence in the Hellenistic period. The monograph...