Theognis of Megara

Elegiac Poet

(570 BCE – Unknown) · Southern Europe

Greek elegiac poet from Megara, active around 540–490 BCE. His surviving poems, collected in the Theognidea, address topics of aristocratic life, friendship, justice, and loss with a distinctive bitterness shaped by political exile and social upheaval. He is one of the earliest Greek poets whose work survives in substantial quantity.