Abstract

The Hellenistic poet Lycophron, who wrote tragedies and assembled the texts of comedy under Ptolemy Philadelphus for the Library at Alexandria, was probably also the author of the long poem Alexandra, which deals mainly with the theme of Troy. Recent studies by Stephanie West have appreciably advanced our understanding of this rather difficult poet. For the passages where Lycophron surprisingly presents phases of Roman history she cogently adduces a later poet, a ‘Deutero-Lycophron, …to be sought among the artists of Dionysus in southern Italy’. A theme in Graeco-Egyptian mythology is the subject of the present paper; and one of my main points is that recent Egyptological research has a clear bearing on one of the problems.