Lycophron

For other uses of this term, see Lycophron (disambiguation).

Lycophron or Lycophron of Calcis was a Greek poet of the third century BC. C., born in Calcis, on the island of Euboea.

He lived in Egypt at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus and was librarian of the Library of Alexandria. He wrote a great number of tragedies, which have been lost and poems. He also produced a catalog of comic writers and a treatise On Comedy. It was part of the poetic Pleiade and the tragic Pleiade.

From it is preserved only a poem entitled Alejandra (another name of Cassandra, daughter of Priam) composed of 1474 Iambic verses. It is a long premonition of the misfortunes reserved for Troy, ending with to Alexander the Great, written in an enigmatic and unintelligible style because of abundant periphrasis, obscure erudite allusions, elaborate vocabulary, abundant intertextuality, syntax tortuous and the presence of mannerist artifices like enigmas, anagrams and palindromes. This poem was very commented from the Byzantine period by the learned Isaac and Juan Tzetzes, whose scolios have been preserved, and already a Roman like the great poet Estacio, at the end of century I d. of Christ, complained of "the subterfuges of the dark Lycophron" (Silvae V, 2, 157) Bibliography

wiki