Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/155

133 This raillery was so ancient and inveterate a custom that it had given rise to a peculiar word, which originally denoted nothing but the jests and banter used at the festivals of Demeter, namely, Iambus. This was soon converted into a mythological person, the maid Iambe, who by some jest first drew a smile from Demeter bewailing her lost daughter, and induced her to take the barley drink of the cyceon ; a legend native to Eleusis, which the Homerid who composed the hymn to Demeter has worked up into an epic form. If Ave consider that according to the testimony of the same hymn, the island of Paros, the birth-place of Archilochus, was regarded as, next to Eleusis, the peculiar seat of Demeter and Cora ; that the Parian colony Thasos, in the settlement of which Archilochus himself had a share, embraced the mystic rites of Demeter as the most important worship ; that Archilochus himself obtained the prize of victory over many competitors for a hymn to Demeter, and that one whole division of his songs, called the Io-bacchi, were consecrated to the service of Demeter and the allied worship of Bacchus ; we shall entertain no doubt that these festal customs afforded Archilochus an occasion of producing his unbridled iambics, for which the manners of the Greeks furnished no other time or place; and that with his wit and talent he created a new kind of poetry out of the raillery which had hitherto been uttered extempore. All the wanton extravagance which was elsewhere repressed and held in check by law and custom, here, under the protection of religion, burst forth with boundless license ; and these scurrilous effusions were at length reduced by Archilochus into the systematic form of iambic metre.

§ 6. The time at which this took place was the same with that in which the elegy arose, or but little later. Archilochss was a son of Telesicles, who, in obedience to a Delphic oracle, led a colony from Paros to Thasos. The establishment of this colony is fixed by the ancients at the 15th or 18th Olympiad (720 or 708 b.c.) ; with which it perfectly agrees, that the date at which Archilochus flourished is, according to the chronologists of antiquity, the 23rd Olympiad (688 n. c.) ; though it is often placed lower. According to this calcula- tion, Archilochus began his poetical career in the latter years of the