Nicander

This article is about the Greek poet. For the Swedish poet, see Karl August Nicander

Nicander (2nd century BC), Greek poet, physician and grammarian, was born at Claros, near Colophon, where his family held the hereditary priesthood of Apollo. He flourished under Attalus III of Pergamum.

He wrote a number of works both in prose and verse, of which two are preserved. The longest, Theriaca, is an hexameter poem (958 lines) on the nature of venomous animals and the wounds which they inflict. The other, Alexipharmaca, consists of 630 hexameters treating of poisons and their antidotes. In his facts Nicander followed the physician Apollodorus.

Among his lost works may be mentioned:
Aetolica, a prose history of Aetolia
Heteroeumena, a mythological epic, used by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and epitomized by Antoninus Liberalis
Georgica and Melissourgica, of which considerable fragments are preserved, said to have been imitated by Virgil (Quintilian x. I. 56).

The works of Nicander were praised by Cicero (De oratore, i. 16), imitated by Ovid and Lucan, and frequently quoted by Pliny and other writers.

Editions

JG Schneider (1792, 1816); O Schneider (1856) (with the Scholia); H Klauser, "De Dicendi Genere Nicandri" (Dissertationes Philologicae Vindobonenses, vi. 1898).

The Scholia (from the Göttingen manuscript) have been edited by G Wentzel in Abhandlungen der k. Gesellschaft der Wiss. zu Göttingen, xxxviii. (1892). See also W Voligraff, Nikander und Ovid (Groningen, 1909 foll.).

References