NICANDER (2nd cent. B.C.)  , Greek poet, physician and grammarian, was born at Claros, near Colophon, where his family held the hereditary priesthood of Apollo . He flourished under Attalus III. of Pergamum . He wrote a number of works both in prose and verse, of which two are preserved . The longest, Tkeriaca, is an hexameter poem (958 lines) on the nature of venomous animals and the wounds which they inflict . The other, Alexipharmaca, consists of 63o hexameters treating of poisons and their antidotes . In his facts Nicander followed the physician Apollodorus . Among his lost works may be mentioned: Aetolica, a prose history of Aetolia; Heteroeumena, a mythological epic, used by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and epitomized by Antoninus Liberalis; Georgica and Melissourgica, of which considerable fragments are preserved, said to have been imitated by Virgil (Quintilian x . 1 . 56) . The works of Nicander were praised by Cicero (De oratore, i . 16), imitated by Ovid, and frequently quoted by Pliny and other writers . His reputation does not seem justified; his works, as Plutarch says (De audiendis poetis, 16), have nothing poetical about them except the metre, and the style is bombastic and obscure; but they contain some interesting information as to ancient belief on the subjects treated .

Editions.—J . G . Schneider (1792, 1816); O . Schneider (1856) (with the Scholia) ; H . Klauser, " De Dicendi Genere Nicandri " (Dissertations Philologicae Vindobonenses, vi . 1898) . The Scholia (from the Gottingen MS.) have been edited by G . Wentzel in Abhandlungen der k . Gesellschaft der Wiss. zu Gottingen,' xxxviii . (1892) . See also W . Vollgraff, Nikander and Ovid (Groningen, 1909 foil.) .