Laevius: Fragments

The fragments of Laevius, a Roman poet active around 100 BC, author of a collection called Erotopaegnia (‘love games’), preserved in quotations by grammarians and by Aulus Gellius. The surviving lines are in a remarkable variety of metres and deal with mythological and erotic subjects, such as Andromache playfully binding a garland on a lover’s head, and include an invocation of Venus as ‘nurse of love, mother of desire’.

Laevius is an important link between early Latin poetry and the neoteric poets of Catullus’s generation. His experiments with Greek lyric metres, his bold coinages and diminutives, and his learned, playful handling of myth anticipate the Alexandrian taste of the next generation, and he is said to have composed a poem in the shape of a phoenix’s wing. Although little survives, he holds a significant place in the history of Latin lyric.