Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/112

 I ^S LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 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 Cleobule, the daughter of a respectable Parian citizen, Lycambes. Lycambes broke off the engagement ; Archi- lochus 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 Hipp6nax 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 Athenis, 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