Lygdamus (probably a pseudonym)[1] was a Roman poet who wrote six love poems in Classical Latin.
His elegies, five of them concerning a girl named Neaera, are preserved in the Appendix Tibulliana alongside the apocryphal works of Tibullus.
[6] Unlike Tibullus's Delia and Nemesis, Neaera appears not to have been a courtesan, but is described by the poet as his wife, who left him for another man.
It first occurs in Homer's Odyssey 12.111, and it is also found in Virgil's Eclogue 3.3, Horace's Epodes 15.11 and Odes 3.14.21, and Ovid's Amores 3.6.
In the last poem the poet chides Neaera for her perjury (6.47–50) and her unfaithfulness (55) but declares that, though he is now over his passion for her, he wishes her well (6.29–30) and she is still dear to him (56).
He ends by imagining his epitaph: "Lygdamus lies here: grief and the love of Neaera, his wife, who was taken away from him, were the cause of his death."
[13] Lygdamus describes an awful dream he had the night before in which Apollo appeared to him and told him that Neaera prefers to be another man's girlfriend.
The poet imagines his friends enjoying a holiday in a thermal spa in Etruria,[15] while he himself has been ill with a fever and close to death for two weeks.
He ends by asking his friends to remember him and to sacrifice some black sheep on his behalf to Dis, god of the Underworld.
At the end of the poem he asks the boy to pour more wine, refusing to spend any more nights sighing with anxiety.
[19][20] Voss, who took a poor view of the quality of the poems, suggested that they were written by a freedman born in the same year as Ovid.
[21][22] There are also features of style which are typical of Ovid but not of other poets; such as lines of the form "adjective, -que, noun, adjective, -que, noun", as in Castaliamque umbram Pieriosque lacus "the Castalian shade and the Pierian lakes",[23] or the placing of a monosyllable + -que (e.g. inque, isque) at the beginning of a pentameter.
He also noted certain items of vocabulary which are generally not found in the time of Tibullus, such as the adjective Erythraeus referring to the Indian Ocean.
"[28] The poems are written in elegiac couplets, the usual metre for Latin love poetry from the time of Cornelius Gallus (d. 26 BC) onwards, and which were also used by Propertius and Tibullus.
[32] Detailed metrical studies have shown that the Lygdamus poems were clearly written by a different poet than those of Tibullus.
[33] A technique common in Tibullus,[34] Ovid,[35] and other poets of the period[36] is also found in Lygdamus, namely the creation of a chiastic structure (also known as "ring composition") in a poem by the use of verbal and thematic echoes.
[39] Within the dream section lines 63–76 form a chiastic structure of their own, with the myth of Apollo and Admetus at the centre.