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Nicaenetus was a Hellenistic poet of the third century BC from Samos or Abdera. His works are lost and survive only in a few pieces quoted by later writers and in the Greek Anthology. They include hexameter lines on Caunus, who fell in love with his sister Byblis and fled to found a city, and elegiac epigrams: a dedication to the Libyan heroines, an epitaph, a clay Hermes, a country banquet at the Heraion of Samos, and lines on Cratinus' love of wine.
Nicaenetus is a characteristic Alexandrian-era poet, interested in local myths of foundation and in the refined short epigram. His Caunus lines, quoted by Parthenius, are an early witness to a story later told by Ovid, in which it is Byblis who loves her brother, and his epigrams show the variety of subjects that Hellenistic poets brought into the form.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina pp. 1–4 (frr. 1–7)). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).