Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/164

142 142 HISTORY OF THE which found an utterance in the iambics or Archilochus, is ascribed to Hipponax. What the family of Lycambes was to Archilochus, Bupalus and Athenis (two sculptors of a family of Chios, which had produced several generations of artists) were to Hipponax. They had made his small, meagre, and ugly person the subject of a caricature ; an insult Hipponax avenged in the bitterest and most pungent iambics, of which some remains are extant. In this instance, also, the satirist is said to have caused his enemy to hang himself. The satire of Hipponax, however, was not concentrated so entirely on certain individuals ; from existing fragments it appears rather to have been founded on a general view of life, taken, however, on its ridiculous and grotesque side. The luxury of the Greeks of Lesser Asia, which had already risen to a high pitch, is a favourite object of his sarcasms. In one of the longest frag- ments he says*, " For one of you had very quietly swallowed a continued stream of thunny with dainty sauces, like a Lampsacenian eunuch, and had devoured the inheritance of his father ; therefore he must now break rocks with a mattock, and gnaw a few figs and a little black barley bread, the food of slaves." His language is filled with words taken from common life, such as the names of articles of food and clothing, and of ordinary utensils, current among the working people. He evidently strives to make his iambics local pictures full of freshness, nature, and homely truth. For this purpose, the change which Hipponax devised in the iambic metre was as felicitous as it was bold ; he crippled the rapid agile gait of the iambic by transforming the last foot from a pure iambus into a spondee, contrary to the fundamental principle of the whole mode of versification. The metre thus maimed and stripped of its beauty and regularityt, was a perfectly appropriate rhythmical form for the delineation of such pictures of intellectual deformity as Hip- ponax delighted in. Iambics of this kind (called choliambics or trimeter scazons) are still more cumbrous and halting when the fifth foot is also a spondee ; which, indeed, according io the original struc- ture, is not forbidden. These were called broken-backed iambics (ischior- rhogics), and a grammarian % settles the dispute (which, according to ancient testimony, was so hard to decide), how far the invention of this kind of verse ought to be ascribed to Hipponax, and how far to another iambographer, Ananius, by pronouncing that Ananius invented the ischiorrhogic variety, Hipponax the common scazon. It appears, how- ever, from the fragments attributed to him, that Hipponax sometimes used the spondee in the fifth foot. In the same manner and with the same effect these poets also changed the trochaic tetrameter by regu- £ la Tyrv.hitt, Disscrt.de Babrio, p. 17.
 * Ap. Athen. vii. p. 304. B. f ro clppvfaov.