Petrus Lotichius Secundus was considered by his Renaissance contemporaries to be one of the greatest Latin poets of his time, and he remains an important figure in literary studies in Germany. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries he was routinely ranked among the leading European poets, with his accomplishment as a love poet often compared to those of such luminaries as Janus Secundus and Pierre Ronsard. Martin Opitz, in Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (Book of German Poetry, 1624), called Lotichius "unser Lotichius, der Fürst aller Deutschen Poeten" (our Lotichius, the prince of all German poets), translated one of his poems into German, and named him one of the masters of elegy along with Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, Jacopo Sannazzaro, and Janus Secundus. Lotichius owes his reputation to the simplicity and elegance of his style and to the sympathy and humanity with which he writes about everyday life...