Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/110

 S6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE distinguish him from his more ilhistrious namesake, Simonides of Keos. His elegies, a history of Samos among them, are lost ; but Stobaeus has preserved in his Anthology an iambic poem on women — a counter-satire, apparently, on the waggon-songs in which the village women at certain festivals were licensed to mock their male acquaintances. The good woman in Semonides is like a bee, the attractive and extravagant like a mare, and so on. The pig-woman comes comparatively high in the scale, though she is lazy and fond of food. There were three iambic poets regarded as ' classical ' by the Alexandrian canon — Semonides, Archilochus, and Hipponax. But, except possibly the last-named, no poet wrote iambics exclusively ; and the intimate literary con- nection between, for instance, Theognis, Archilochus, and Hesiod, shows that the metrical division is unimportant. Much of Solon's work might, as far as the subject or the spirit is concerned, have been in elegiacs or iambics in- differently. The iambic metres appear to have been con- nected with the popular and homely gods Dionysus and Demeter, as the stately dactylic hexameters were with Zeus and Apollo. The iambic is the metre nearest to common speech ; a Greek orator or an English news- paper gives a fair number of iambic verses to a column. Its service to Greek literature was to provide poetry with a verse for dialogue, and for the ever-widening range of subjects to which it gradually condescended. A Euri- pides, who saw poetry and meaning in every stone of a street, found in the 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 (7^.650 B.C.?) eclipsed all earlier