"Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies, entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, a collegemate of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637. The poem is 193 lines in length, and is irregularly rhymed. While many of the other poems in the compilation are in Greek and Latin, "Lycidas" is one of the poems written in English. Milton republished the poem in 1645.

The name "Lycidas" comes from Theocritus' Idylls, where Lycidas (Λυκίδας) is most prominently a poet-goatherd encountered on the trip of Idyll vii. A century or more earlier than Theocritus, Herodotus in his Book IX mentions an Athenian councillor in Salamis, " a man named Lycidas" who, in proposing to the much put upon Greeks as a whole (put upon by the Persian king Xerxes), that they should entertain a compromise of their freedoms as suggested by the king and his ambassadors, who at that time had all Hellas in grip, or so they thought, that the king's proposals should be 'submitted for approval to the general assembly of the people'. Suspected of collusion with the enemy for even suggesting such a thing, "those in the council and those outside, were so enraged when they heard it that they surrounded Lycidas and stoned him to death...with all the uproar in Salamis over Lycidas, the Athenian women soon found out what had happened; whereupon, without a word from the men, they got together, and, each one urging on her neighbor and taking her along with the crowd, flocked to Lycidas' house and stoned his wife and children." John Marincola, Penguin Classics - "The story became famous and is told by later writers, where the man's name, however, is Cyrsilus, not Lycidas." The name later occurs in Virgil and is a typically Doric shepherd's name, appropriate for the Pastoral mode.