Unattributed Iambic Fragments in Diehl’s Anthology

Anonymous Iambic Poems are orphan iambic lines without a single poet's name. The surviving scraps are concrete: something bound around the ankle; a thick, hated woman; a Priapic piece; the city of the Bosporus; a "phoenix-licker and braggart of words"; a lifeless man taken as a fellow-traveller; a city blooming with every good; a verse the well-tempered would not speak; the agnus in flower and the grape ripening.

West and others print them among the iambic adespota. They are the leftover lines of a genre — Hipponax-adjacent abuse, festival, and city verse — that never travelled as a single book.

No single iambographer's name attaches to these lines.