  We study eigenfrequencies and propagator expansions for damped wave equations
on compact manifolds. Under the assumption of geometric control, the propagator
is shown to admit an expansion in terms of finitely many eigenmodes near the
real axis, with an error term exponentially decaying in time. In the presence
of a nondegenerate elliptic closed geodesic not meeting the support of the
damping coefficient, we show that there exists a sequence of eigenfrequencies
converging rapidly to the real axis. In the case of Zoll manifolds, we show
that the propagator can be expanded in terms of clusters of the
eigenfrequencies in the entire spectral band.
