Archilochus

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Archilochus (Greek: Αρχιλοχος) (ca. 680 BC - ca. 645 BC) was a Greek poet and mercenary.

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[edit] Life and poetry

Archilochus was born on the island of Paros. His father, Telesicles, who was from a noble family, had conducted a colony to Thasos, in obedience to the command of the Delphic oracle. To this island Archilochus himself, hard pressed by poverty, afterwards removed. Another reason for leaving his native place was personal disappointment and indignation at the treatment he had received from Lycambes, a citizen of Paros, who had promised him his daughter Neobule in marriage, but had afterwards withdrawn his consent. Archilochus, taking advantage of the license allowed at the feasts of Demeter, poured out his wounded feelings in unmerciful satire. He accused Lycambes of perjury, and recited such verses against his daughters, that Lycambes and his daughters are said to have hanged themselves.

Along with the epics of Homer and Hesiod, the satires of Archilochus were one of the mainstays of itinerant rhapsodes, who made a living declaiming poetry at both religious festivals and private homes.

In the historical and poetic imagination, Archilochus represents the romantic intersection of the fighting and the poetic spirits; this dual aspect of his personality is captured with brevity in the following poetic fragment, wherein he describes himself as both a warrior and a poet:

Εἰμὶ δ' ἐγὼ θεράπων μὲν Ἐνυαλίοιο ἄνακτος,
καὶ Μουσέων ἐρατὸν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος.
Although I am a servant of Lord Enylaios [Ares, god of war],
I also know well the lovely gift of the Muses.

At Thasos the poet passed some unhappy years; his hopes of wealth were disappointed:

These golden matters
Of Gyges and his treasuries
Are no concern of mine.
Jealousy has no power over me,
Nor do I envy a god his work,
And I do not burn to rule.
Such things have no
Fascination for my eyes.

According to him, Thasos was the meeting-place of the calamities of all Hellas. The inhabitants were frequently involved in quarrels with their neighbors, and in a war against the Saians--a Thracian tribe--he threw away his shield and fled from the field of battle. He does not seem to have felt the disgrace very keenly, for, like Alcaeus, he commemorates the event in a fragment in which he congratulates himself on having saved his life, and says he can easily procure another shield:

Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.

After leaving Thasos, he is said to have visited Sparta, but to have been at once banished from that city on account of his cowardice and the licentious character of his works (Valerius Maximus vi. 3, externa 1). He next visited Magna Graecia, Hellenic southern Italy, of which he speaks very favorably. He then returned to his native home on Paros, and was slain in a battle against the Naxians by one Calondas or Corax, who was cursed by the oracle for having slain a servant of the Muses.

The writings of Archilochus consisted of elegies, hymns-- one of which used to be sung by the victors in the Olympic games-- and of poems in the iambic and trochaic measures. Greek rhetors credited him with the invention of iambic poetry and its application to satire. The only previous measures in Greek poetry had been the epic hexameter, and its offshoot the elegiac meter; but the slow measured structure of hexameter verse was utterly unsuited to express the quick, light motions of satire.

Archilochus made use of the iambus and the trochee, and organized them into the two forms of meter known as the iambic trimeter and the trochaic tetrameter. The trochaic meter he generally used for subjects of a vicarious nature; the iambic for satires. He was also the first to make use of the arrangement of verses called the epode. Horace in his meters to a great extent follows Archilochus. All ancient authorities unite in praising the poems of Archilochus, in terms that appear exaggerated. His verses seem certainly to have possessed strength, flexibility, nervous vigor, and, beyond everything else, impetuous vehemence and energy: Horace speaks of the "rage" of Archilochus, and Hadrian calls his verses "raging iambics." His countrymen reverenced him as the equal of Homer, and statues of these two poets were dedicated on the same day. His poems were written in the old Ionic dialect.

Only fragments of Archilochus' poems survive; these are collected in the Greek Anthology.

[edit] Recent discoveries

Thirty lines of a previously unknown poem in the elegiac meter by Archilochos describing events leading up to the Trojan War, in which Achaeans battled Telephus king of Mysia, have recently been identified among the unpublished manuscripts from Oxyrhynchus. [1]

[edit] References

Translation by Guy Davenport Archilochos Sappho Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age

[edit] Quotes

  • "For 'tis thy friends that make thee choke with rage". (1)
  • "The fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog one good one."
  • "Wretched I lie, dead with desire, pierced through my bones, with the bitter pains the Gods have given me."

[edit] References

  • as quoted in Politics, Aristotle, Book VII, vi 3; 1328a 5; Loeb pg 567.

[edit] External links

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