Lygdamus (probably a pseudonym)^[1] was a Roman poet who wrote love poems in Classical Latin. Six of his elegies, addressed to a girl named Neaera, are preserved in the Appendix Tibulliana alongside the apocryphal works of Tibullus. In poem 5, line 6, he describes himself as young and in 5.18 gives his birth year as the year "when both consuls died by equal fate" (that is, 43 BC).^[2] This line, however, is identical to one in Ovid's Tristia from AD 11,^[3] and it has been much debated by scholars. One suggestion, supported by the numerous commonalities between Lygdamus and Ovid, is that "Lygdamus" is merely a pen name used by the young Ovid;^[4] other scholars have suggested that Lygdamus was a separate poet from Ovid and was imitated by him; they assume that the line quoted above is an interpolation. Some more recent scholars have argued that Lygdamus lived much later than Ovid and imitated his style.^[5] No other author mentions Lygdamus, making the mystery of his real identity all the more difficult.^[6]

The name "Lygdamus" was a common slave-name in Rome,^[7] and it has been conjectured that the author may have chosen this pen name to indicate that he is a "slave of love".^[8] The name "Neaera" is common in Greek mythology and is also thought to be a pseudonym.^[9]

The six poems are of different lengths: 28, 30, 38, 96, 34, and 64 lines respectively. The lengths of the poems can be arranged as follows:

1 + 2 + 3 = 96 lines

4 = 96 lines

5 + 6 = 98 lines

Thus the 4th poem, as well as being the longest, is the centre of the series.

They are written in elegiac couplets, the usual metre for Latin love poetry from the time of Cornelius Gallus (d. 26 BC) onwards.

Metrically, the poems can be divided into two groups. Poems 1, 2, 3, and 6 are more dactylic: in these the proportion of dactylic feet (not counting the ending of each line, which doesn't vary) is 45%,^[10] whereas in poems 4 and 5 it is only 37%.^[11][12] The reason for this is not known, unless it might be the rather sombre subject matter of these poems.^[13]

Detailed metrical studies have shown that the Lygdamus poems were clearly written by a different poet than those of Tibullus. One of the more obvious differences is that in Lygdamus the caesura of the hexameter is almost always a masculine caesura in the 3rd foot, whereas in Tibullus it varies between the 3rd foot and the 4th.^[14]

Neaera is a very different kind of woman than Tibullus's Delia and Nemesis. The latter two are apparently courtesans, who keep their lovers waiting outside the door while they entertain other lovers inside. Both girls, especially Nemesis, demand expensive gifts.

Neaera is clearly not a courtesan. She comes from a cultured family (4.92) and the author knows her "very kind" mother and "most amiable" father (4.93–94). The author considers her to be his wife (2.30) and her mother to be his mother-in-law (2.14). The author prays not only to Venus but also to Juno, the goddess of marriage, to help him (3.33–34); similarly Neaera swears by both goddesses that she loves him (6.48).^[15] She appears to have left him and he prays for her return (3.27). The awful news he hears in a dream from Apollo is that she is planning to marry someone else (4.58, 4.80). The opening couplet of poem 2 indicates that the two loved each other, but a third person caused them to separate. In the last poem the poet chides Neaera for her perjury (6.47–50) but declares that, though he is now over his passion for her, he wishes her well (6.29–30).

Though it is possible to take the view that the author was originally married to Neaera, other possibilities exist and have been adopted by various scholars.^[16] One view is that they were merely lovers but that the author wished Neaera to eventually become his wife. Another hypothesis is that they were betrothed, but that Neaera broke off the engagement.

Apart from a mention of Catullus^[23] (who died in the 50s BC), no historical person or event is mentioned in Lygdamus's poems, making them difficult to date except on literary grounds. Early commentators on the Lygdamus poems assumed that the author was Tibullus, the couplet mentioning the poet's birth in the year 43 BC being assumed to be an interpolation, not part of the original text.^[24] J. H. Voss (1786) was the first to question the Tibullan authorship of the poems. Other scholars also noted metrical, stylistic, and linguistic differences between Lygdamus and the genuine poems of Tibullus, making it clear that Tibullus could not be the author.^[25][26] 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.

Gruppe (1839), however, was the first to suggest that Lygdamus was a pseudonym for Ovid himself. This idea was taken up by Radford (1926) and others, who noted in detail the large number of words and phrases which are common to Lygdamus and Ovid but not found or rarely found in other authors.^[27][28] 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",^[29] or the placing of a monosyllable + -que (e.g. inque, isque) at the beginning of a pentameter. Another argument supporting this view is that the circumstances described in the poems seem to fit Ovid's biographical details very well, as described in his autobiographical poem Tristia 4.10 (he was born in 43 BC; the poet seems fairly wealthy; Neaera is described as his wife, whose parents he knows; Ovid states that his marriage to his second wife lasted only a short time before she married another man). The reasons for Ovid writing anonymously are plausibly explained by Radford by the fact that his father wished him to follow a career in politics and apparently repeatedly discouraged him from writing poetry.^[30]

If the poems were written by Ovid, according to Radford, since they contain echoes of Horace's Odes and Ars Poetica as well as various parts of Virgil's Aeneid, it would seem that they date from 19 BC or 18 BC, when Ovid was about 24 or 25 years old. ^[31]

Despite the strength of these arguments, some more recent scholars have argued that Lygdamus was not Ovid, but someone who imitated him. A. G. Lee (1958) argued that in places where similar phrases occur in both Lygdamus and Ovid, in each case the phrase is more appropriate in the Ovidian context. He also noted certain items of vocabulary which are generally not found in the time of Tibullus, on the basis of which he conjectured that the date of Lygdamus may have been in the late 1st century AD.^[32] Navarro Antolín (1996) and Maltby (2021) take a similar view.

A third possibility, that Lygdamus was an earlier poet who was imitated by Ovid, though held by some scholars,^[33] is thought to be less probable. Peter White (2002) writes: "the coincidences between (Ovid and Lygdamus) make it much likelier that Lygdamus is either the youthful Ovid or a later writer impersonating the young Ovid."^[34]

• Maltby, R. (2021). Book Three of the Corpus Tibullianum: Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary. Cambridge Scholars Publisher.
• Navarro Antolín, F. (translated by Zoltowski, J. J.) (1996). Lygdamus (Corpus Tibullianum III.1-6 Lygdami Elegiarum Liber). Mnemosyne, Supplements, Volume 154. Brill.