Nicander of Colophon (Νίκανδρος ὁ Κολοφώνιος, 2nd century BC), Greekpoet, physician and grammarian, was born at Claros, (Ahmetbeyli, Izmir in modern Turkey), 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 survive complete. The longest, Theriaca, is a hexameter poem (958 lines) on the nature of venomous animals and the wounds which they inflict. The other, Alexipharmaca, consists of 630 hexameters treating of poisons and their antidotes. Nicander's main source for medical information was the physician Apollodorus. Among his lost works, Heteroeumena was a mythological epic, used by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and epitomized by Antoninus Liberalis; Georgica, of which considerable fragments survive, was perhaps imitated by Virgil.
The works of Nicander were praised by Cicero (De oratore, i. 16), imitated by Ovid and Lucan, and frequently quoted by Pliny and other writers.
Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (3 September 1757 – 14 June 1828) was a Duke of Saxe-Weimar and of Saxe-Eisenach (personal union) from 1758, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach from its creation in 1809, and Grand Duke from 1815 until his death. He is noted for the intellectual brilliance of his court.
His father died when he was only nine months old (28 May 1758), and the boy was brought up under the regency and supervision of his mother, a woman of enlightened but masterful temperament. His governor was the Count Johann Eustach von Görtz, a German nobleman of the old strait-laced school; but a more humane element was introduced into his training when, in 1771, Christoph Martin Wieland was appointed his tutor. In 1774 the poet Karl Ludwig von Knebel came to Weimar as tutor to his brother, the young Prince Frederick Ferdinand Konstantin, and in the same year the two princes set out, with Count Görtz and Knebel, for Paris. At Frankfurt Knebel introduced Karl August to the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe and this would mark the beginning of a momentous friendship.
