Archilochus of Paros

flourished c. 650 bc, Paros [Cyclades,
Greece]
poet and soldier, the earliest Greek
writer of iambic, elegiac, and personal
lyric poetry whose works have survived
to any considerable extent. The
surviving fragments of his work show him
to have been a metrical innovator of the
highest ability.
Archilochus’s father was Telesicles,
a wealthy Parian who founded a colony on
the island of Thasos. Archilochus lived
on both Paros and Thasos. Fragments of
his poetry mention the solar eclipse of
April 6, 648 bc, and the wealth of the
Lydian king Gyges (c. 680–645 bc). The
details of Archilochus’s life, in the
ancient biographical tradition, are
derived for the most part from his
poems—an unreliable source because the
events he described may have been
fictitious, or they may have involved
imaginary personae or ritual situations.
Modern discoveries, however, have
supported the picture given in the
poetry. Two inscriptions dedicated to
Archilochus were discovered in a sacred
area on Paros; they are named, after the
men who dedicated them, the Mnesiepes
inscription (3rd century bc) and the
Sosthenes inscription (1st century bc).
Archilochus’s self-presentation was
taken seriously as early as the late 5th
century bc by the Athenian politician
and intellectual Critias, who denounced
him for presenting himself as an
impoverished, quarrelsome, foul-mouthed,
lascivious lower-class bastard. Some
scholars feel that the Archilochus
portrayed in his poems is too scurrilous
to be real.
Archilochus probably served as a
soldier. According to ancient tradition,
he fought against Thracians on the
mainland near Thasos and died when the
Thasians were fighting against soldiers
from the island of Naxos. In one famous
poem, Archilochus tells, without
embarrassment or regret, of throwing his
shield away in battle. (“I saved my
life. What do I care about my shield?
The hell with it! I’ll buy another just
as good.”) The motif of the abandoned
shield appears again in the lyric poems
of Alcaeus and Anacreon, in a parody by
Aristophanes (Peace), and in a learned
variation by the Latin poet Horace (Carmina).
Although the truth is difficult to
discern with certainty from the poems
and other evidence, Archilochus may have
been disreputable. He was particularly
famous in antiquity for his sharp satire
and ferocious invective. It was said
that a man named Lycambes betrothed his
daughter Neobule to the poet and then
later withdrew the plan. In a papyrus
fragment published in 1974 (the “Cologne
Epode”)—the longest surviving piece of
Archilochus’s poetry—a man, who is
apparently the poet himself, tells in
alternately explicit and hinting
language how he seduced the sister of
Neobule after having crudely rejected
Neobule herself. According to the
ancient accounts, Lycambes and his
daughters committed suicide, shamed by
the poet’s fierce mocking.
Archilochus was the first known Greek
poet to employ the elegiac couplet and
various iambic and trochaic metres,
ranging from dimeter to tetrameter, as
well as epodes, lyric metres, and
asinarteta (a mixture of different
metres). He was a master of the Greek
language, moving from Homeric formulas
to the language of daily life in a few
lines. He was the first European author
to make personal experiences and
feelings the main subject of his poems:
the controlled use of the personal voice
in his verse marks a distinct departure
from other surviving Greek verse, which
is typically more formulaic and heroic.
For his technical accomplishments
Archilochus was much admired by later
poets, such as Horace, but there was
also severe criticism, especially of a
moralistic character, by writers such as
the poets Pindar and Critias (both 5th
century bc).