A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

current iambic trimeter a vehicle of expression in some ways more flexible even than prose. When it first appears in literature, it has a satirical colour.

      ARCHILOCHUS of Paros (fl. 650 B.C.?) eclipsed all earlier writers of the iambus, and counts in tradition as the first. He was the 'Homer' of familiar personal poetry. This was partly due to a literary war in Alexandria, and partly to his having no rivals at his side. Still, even our scanty fragments justify Quintilian's criticism: "The sentences" really are "strong, terse, and quivering, full of blood and muscle; some people feel that if his work is ever inferior to the very highest, it must be the fault of his subject, not of his genius." This has, of course, another side to it. Archilochus is one of those masterful men who hate to feel humble. He will not see the greatness of things, and likes subjects to which he can feel himself superior. Yet, apart from the satires, which are blunt bludgeon work, his smallest scraps have a certain fierce enigmatic beauty. "Oh, hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon!"is a cry to bury his friends' shipwrecked corpses. "In my spear is kneaded bread, in my spear is wine of Ismarus; and I lie upon my spear as I drink!"That is the defiant boast of the outlaw turned freebooter. "There were seven dead men trampled under foot, and we were a thousand murderers." What does that mean? One can imagine many things. The few lines about love form a comment on Sappho. The burning, colourless passion that finds its expression almost entirely in physical language may be beautiful in a soul like hers; but what a fierce, impossible thing it is with this embittered soldier of fortune, whose intense sensitiveness and prodigious intellect seem sometimes only to mark him out as more consciously wicked than his fellows! We can make out something of his life. He had to leave Paros -- one can imagine other reasons besides or before his alleged poverty -- and settled on Thasos, "a wretched island, bare and rough as a hog's back in the sea,"in company with all the worst scoundrels in Greece. In a battle with the natives of the mainland he threw away his shield and ran, and made very good jokes about the incident afterwards. He was betrothed to Cleobûlê, the daughter of a respectable Parian citizen, Lycambes. Lycambes broke off the engagement; Archilochus raged blindly and indecently at father and daughter for the rest of his life. Late tradition says they hanged themselves. Archilochus could not stay in Paros; the settlement in Thasos had failed; so he was thrown on the world, sometimes supporting himself as a mercenary soldier, sometimes doubtless as a pirate, until he was killed in a battle against Naxos. "I am a servant of the lord god of war, and I know the lovely gift of the Muses."He could fight and he could make wonderful poetry. It does not appear that any further good can be said of him.

      Lower all round than Archilochus is HIPPÔNAX of Ephesus. Tradition makes him a beggar, lame and deformed himself, and inventor of the 'halting iambic' or 'scazon,' a deformed trimeter which upsets all one's expectations by having a spondee or trochee in the last foot. His works were all abusive. He inveighed especially against the artists Bupalos and Athênis, who had caricatured him; and of course against women -e.g., "A woman gives a man two days of pleasure: the day he marries her, and the day he carries out her corpse." Early satire does not imply much wit; it implies hard hitting, with words instead of sticks and stones. The other satirical writers of classical times, Ananius and Hermippus, Kerkidas and Aischrion, were apparently not much admired in Alexandria.

      One form of satire, the Beast Fable, was especially developed in collections of stories which went under the name of ÆSOP. He seems to be a mere storyfigure, like Kerkôps or Kreophŷlus, invented to provide an author for the fables. He was a foreign slave -- Thracian, Phrygian, or Ethiopian -- under the same master as Rhodôpis, the courtesan who ruined Sappho's brother. He was suitably deformed; he was murdered at Delphi. Delphi dealt much in the deaths or tombs of celebrities. It used the graves of Neoptolemus and Hesiod to attract the sight-seer; it extorted monetary atonement from the slaver of Apollo's inspired servant Archilochus. But in Æsop's case a descendant of his master Iadmon made his murder a ground for claiming money from the Delphians; so it is hard to see why they countenanced the story. Tradition gave Æsop interviews with Crœsus and the Wise Men; Aristophanes makes it a jocular reproach, not to have 'trodden well' your Æsop. He is in any case not a poet, but the legendary author of a particular type of story, which any one was at liberty to put into verse, as Socrates did, or to collect in prose, like Demetrius of Phalærum. Our oldest collections of fables are the iambics of Phaedrus and the elegiacs of Avianus in Latin, and the scazons of Babrius in Greek, all three post-Christian.

1 W. M. Herakles, i. 66 seq. (2nd edition).

2 Our Sillos-like fragment must be by another man, not a Samian.

3 Cf. the mixture á øιλοχρηματíη Σπáρταυ óλεî.