Lycophron
The most obscure poet in Greek
b. fl. c. 3rd century BC
Lycophron was a Greek poet and scholar from Chalcis in Euboea, active in Alexandria in the first half of the third century BC. He was one of the Pleiad — the seven tragic poets of the age of Ptolemy II Philadelphus — and was assigned the task of cataloguing the comedies in the Library of Alexandria.
His surviving work, the Alexandra, is one of the most notoriously difficult poems in Greek literature. In 1,474 iambic trimeters, the Trojan princess Cassandra (here called Alexandra) delivers a prophecy covering the entire cycle of events from the fall of Troy to the rise of Rome. The prophecy is expressed in a style of such extreme obscurity — riddling periphrases, rare vocabulary, allusions to the most recondite versions of myths — that ancient commentators were needed to make it intelligible, and modern readers still struggle.
The poem's difficulty is not accidental; it is the point. Cassandra's curse was that no one believed her prophecies. Lycophron makes her speech nearly incomprehensible, so the reader experiences the curse directly. Whether the poem is a virtuoso literary experiment or an elaborate joke (or both) is still debated.