Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/99

 ARCHILOCHUS. 81 festivals (especially of the festivals of Demeter as well in Attica as in Paros, the native country of the poet), is only one amongst many new paths struck out by his inventive genius ; whose exuberance astonishes us, when we consider that he takes hia start from little more than the simple hexameter, 1 in which, too, he was a distinguished composer, for even of the elegiac verse he is as likely to have been the inventor as Kallinus, just as he was the earliest popular and successful composer of table-songs, or Skolia, though Terpander may have originated some such before him. The entire loss of his poems, excepting some few fragments, enables us to recognize little more than one character- istic, the intense personality which pervaded them, as well as that coarse, direct, and out-spoken license, which afterwards lent, such terrible effect to the old comedy at Athens. His lampoons are said to have driven Lykambes, the father of Neobule, to hang himself: the latter had been promised to Archilochus in marriage, but that promise was broken, and the poet assailed both father and daughter with every species of calumny. 2 In addi- tion to this disappointment, he was poor, the son of a slave- mother, and an exile from his country, Paros, to the unpromising colony of Thasos. The desultory notices respecting him betray a state of suffering combined with loose conduct which vented itself sometimes in complaint, sometimes in libellous assault ; and he was at last slain by some whom his muse had thus exasper- ated. His extraordinary poetical genius finds but one voice of encomium throughout antiquity. His triumphal song to Hera- 1 The chief evidence for the rhythmical and metrical changes introduced by Archilochus is to be found in the 28th chapter of Plutarch, De Musica, pp. 1140-1141, in words very difficult to understand completely. See Ulrici, Geschichte der Hellenisch. Poesie, vol. ii, p. 381. The epigram ascribed to Theokritus (No. 18 in Gaisford's Poet* Mino- rcs) sKows that the poet had before him hexameter compositions of Archil- ochus, as well as lyric : tic e/i./iE^jjr r' eyevro KuiuJt'.jiOf K~EU TE TTOiei.v, ~pbf fa'pav r* ueldeiv. See the article on Archilochus in "Welcker's Kleine Schriften, pp. 71-82, which has the merit of show ing that iambic bitterness is far from being th only marked feature in his character and genius. with the Scholiast; JEliin, V H. x, 13. TOL. IV 4* 60C.
 * See Meleager, Epigram, cxix, 3; Horat. Epist. 10. 2.1, and Epod, vi, 13