Unattributed Iambic Fragments in Diehl’s Anthology

Iambica Adespota are orphan iambic lines without a single poet’s name. The scraps are concrete: around the ankle; a thick, hated woman; a Priapic piece; before the city of the Bosporus; a “phoenix-licker and braggart of words”; taking a lifeless man as a fellow-traveller; a city blooming with every good; a verse the well-tempered would not speak; the agnus flowering and the grape ripening.

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

The slot is those lines, not a missing iambographer.